Something i noticed on a Sonic 3 Ad

It's called skipping frames. The other frames are there, but not visible due to lack of quality.

 

Sonic's spinning animation in Sonic 3 is composed of 5 frames which play in the order "1, 5, 2, 5, 3, 5, 4, 5". Now, while Sonic is spinning at maximum speed, each of the frames only appears for a 60th of a second, being 60fps the fastest speed the Genesis plays. Now, if you were to record it in 30fps, then either every odd frame or every even frame would be cut out. The resulting animations would be either "1, 2, 3, 4" or "5, 5, 5, 5".

Understand what went on now?

 

Nice explanation. I never knew that.

 

You can observe something similar in some Sonic 2 videos (I believe there's a section on them on this site), where the shield appears to be static because of frame-skip.

 

That explains quite alot, for me anyway.

So if I wanted to make an animated gif of Sonic, I should have the frames transparent, right?

 

Out of curiosity, does this apply to the PAL version of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as well or would that one be at 1/50th of a second (50fps)? Not that it really matters.

 

50fps. The concept still applies - if you have a PAL video encoded at 25fps, then it's lost half the frames (unless it's 576 lines and is interlaced).