Fooey
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While the vast majority of most movies and TV shows use video footage, certain times and certain movies have found it useful to incorporate still frames. A still frame is like a photograph. It is a static image that does not move. Still frames can be incorporated into a video in several ways. Many TV shows use still frames in the opening credits or for an opening theme. Some movies do this too. The still frames are often of the characters, the house or apartment the characters live in or their city.
Another common use of still frames is in animation, but this has largely been replaced by computer-generated images (CGI). An old form of animation that used a series of still images was stop-motion animation. This consisted of movable or posable objects that were photographed, moved or posed, then photographed again hundreds or thousands of times. The still frame images were then cut into a video reel to produce animation.
Still frames are also used in modern movies and TV shows through compositing. Compositing is more commonly known as blue-screen or green-screen technology. This is when a subject or object is standing in front of a blue or green flat surface. A still frame image can then be superimposed over the surface to give the appearance of the subject being in a certain environment.
Now, if you are referring to how many frames make up a movie or TV show, that is an entirely different question. Before the advent of video tape and digital video, movies and TV shows were recorded on long reels of photographic film. The movie and TV show consisted of thousands of photographs captured and played back at a speed that appears lifelike. Each photograph in the reel is called a frame or a cell.
The speed at which the frames are played is called the frame rate. Different technologies use different frame rates, and the faster the rate, the better quality the video. Frame rate is expressed as frames per second (fps). In North America, video made for viewing on a television uses the NTSC standard, which is 23.976 fps. The rest of the world uses the PAL standard, which is 25 fps. That would make a 30-minute TV show (without commercials) in the U.S. a total of 43,156 frames, rounding down (30 minutes x 60 seconds x 23.976 frames).
Movies also use different frame rates, depending on the technology. The common rate of movies is 24 fps. This means a 2-hour movie consists of 172,800 frames at this speed. A push is now occurring in the movie industry for movies to be filmed at 48 fps.
 Posted 4710 day ago
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