I have heard alot of PAL format movies,etc... ARE SPED UP and dont play @ the right speed.... (VHS,etc) -- Is this ALL PAL stuff??

If so,WHY????? -- Its stupid as all hell..... WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT SOMETHING THAT DOESNT PLAY AT THE RIGHT SPEED?? (I sure wouldnt)

I'm not sure it's worth responding to the OP's shouty rant but for the sake of putting the relevant history on the record here goes.

In 50Hz countries film (24fps) has nearly always been shown on TV at 25fps. Nice simple solution whose only side effects are a 4% shortened runnng time (eg a 100 minute feature would last 96 minutes) and sound pitch raised by 4%. That's just over half a semitone, inaudible to most. Sometimes the pitch shift was corrected using pitch shifting techniques. Unlike 3:2 pulldown used in 60Hz countries there are no problems with juddery motion.

Until framestore and interpolation technology became advanced enough to accurately convert 24Hz to 25 or 30 it wasn't really possible to do any better. For the purists I'll mention the Mechau variable speed system which did a sort of optical interpolation but was never very satisfactory. You could also run film at the correct speed on a vidicon telecine, relying on the laggy tubes to get reduce the beat between film and TV frame rates. Again less than satisfactory.

They have multi system VCR's out there that will play tapes from around the world. I have a broken Hitachi here that would play these tapes.I like to fix it someday.


Sony SLV-ED7FS - Hi-Fi Multisystem VCR

Panasonic CE MULTI-SYSTEM VHS VCR ( AGW3 )
http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-MULT.../dp/B0002K6XRM


Aiwa HV-MX100 Hi-Fi Multi-System VCR
http://www.amazon.com/Aiwa-HV-MX100-.../dp/B00001QGUQ

Now thank goodness for the internet and the computer I can download TV programs from around the world and watch them on my computer or trans-code them with software to NTSC to put them on DVD and enjoy them on TV.

Years ago the world should of standardize TV systems with one format.I guess everybody wants to be different.

Im sorry but its a legit concern....

That half a semitone is noticeable in the timbre of voices if you have heard them before. I saw a Startrek rerun in Switzerland, and in the intro where Captain Kirk says "...where no man has gone before," it sounded like he was going back to puberty.

Yes its stupid....... WHY DONT THEY MAKE IT RIGHT?? (Or dont do it at all)

Why produce garbage??

Content is king. Technical quality is not.

It is likely almost impossible to 'make it right'.
Take NTSC video tape time code for instance. It is based on video frame rate which is 59.9---Hz. The only economically feasible way to implement the time code is to count 60 frames and call it 1 second when it is actually 1.00167 seconds this may not seem to matter, but over the run time of long program it can be maddening for the crew of a TV station that may be required to run x minutes of commercials at an exact time, or make sure that a movie that time code says is 120 minutes actually takes exactly that long and does not interrupt the news afterwards or run short and leave a worrying blank between it and the next show.

There is no hard and fast way to fix that as there is also no hard and fast way to fix the problem that film runs at a different speed than later TV systems. IT IS A BIG OLD WORLD, AND DIFFERENT PLACES CREATED A WIDE VARIETY OF DIFFERENT WAYS TO RECORD AND PLAYBACK IMAGES USUALLY (sometimes intentionally) WITHOUT REGARD TO COMPATIBILITY WITH OTHER SYSTEMS MADE BEFORE OR LIKELY TO COME IN THE FUTURE.
WE COULD MAKE A UNIVERSAL FORMAT THAT ALL NEW MATERIAL WOULD BE CREATED IN, BUT IT WOULD NOT HELP! SINCE THERE IS NO WAY TO MAKE ALL THE OLD FORMATS PLAY EXACTLY AS ORIGINALLY INTENDED ON A SINGLE DEVICE WITHOUT SOME TRADEOFFS IN QUALITY, PERFORMANCE, SPEED AND ASPECT RATIO....UNLESS SOMEONE GOES BACK IN TIME AND RE-FILMS/RE-RECORDS EVERY RECORDING EVER MADE IN A MODERN UNIVERSAL FORMAT.

Since people want to see as much content (of various formats) as they can, as cheaply as they can, and in the best quality (the last two are in direct conflict with each other) engineers work hard TRYING TO MAKE THE BEST TRADEOFFS AVAILABLE (for all concerns) to make it so people CAN EVEN GET the content AT ALL.
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE TRADE OFFS ENGINEERS HAVE TO MAKE TO GET YOU YOUR SHOWS THEN GO TO COLLEGE, BECOME AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER, AND TRY TO FIND A BETTER WAY TO DO WHAT WE HAVE DONE (there is money in it for you if you do)! AND DON'T BLAME ME IF PEOPLE THAT HAVE NO IDEA OF WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING INSIDE THE DEVICE YOU MADE COMPLAIN ABOUT IT NOT BEING SOME MAGICAL IDEAL DEVICE. If you KNEW the full complexity of the requirements for just the processes you deem unsatisfactory, and were asked to create that process from scratch could you honestly do better without introducing new problems that others would not find worse than what you are complaining about?

PERFECTION IS IMPOSSIBLE! NOTHING IS PERFECT, NOT EVEN ANALOG! IT HAS AT LEAST AS MANY ISSUES AS DIGITAL...The APPLICATION, and COST determines the merit of either process.

Please do not assume any anger in the above post, because there was none...Just me making a point emphatically.

Yeah, I'm tired of watching old shows that I can tell are sped up, just so they can cram more commercials in. Not to mention cutting a few seconds off episodes for the same.

Exactly! Its the Deliberate vandalism of movies/shows just to enable more commercial time that the O/P should be complaining about, and not some (pretty minor) errors of standards conversions.....

Dude111, I agree with your love of analog, but some of these rants have gotten WAYYY too far out there for me. Standards in video are what they are; it isn't a conspiracy...

The horrors with timecode in the US date back to the introduction of NTSC colour in 1954. To minimise patterning the relationship between the colour subcarrier and sound carrier frequencies was critical. At the time they decided to shift the whole monochorme signal frequency by 0.1% rather than change the sound carrier frequency by the same amount. Saved re-aligning a load of B&W sets that might have suffered from distorted sound. 15 years or so later when timecode arrived there was a horrible mess. Besides the usual dropframe there need to be longer term corrections to stop timecode drifting away from clock time. We're still paying the price.

With all systems there is no such thing as perfection. With the technology of the day there were significant compromises for showing 24fps film on TV. In 60Hz countries this was either judddery 3:2 pulldown or smeary vidicon effects. In 50Hz countries it was 4% fast, sometime with audio pitch corrected. It's now possible to do good quality frame rate conversion 24>25 and 24>30(29.97). I don't know how much film is thus converted for TV.

If you want real comedy look at how silent film was often shown on TV. Typically shot at 16-18fps, it was often shown at 25fps in 50Hz countries. The Keystone Cops sure looked comical when that happened.

Incidentally the reason why sound film was shot at 24fps wasn't for improved appearance of motion. It was to get adequate sound quality on an optical track. 16-18fps was just too slow to get even mediocre quality. It's not as if "Academy" sound at 24fps was particularly good.

Or far, FAR worse is the mutilation of movies by making "full-screen" (pan-and-scan) versions that chop off up to half of what was shown on movie-theater screens just to fill up the whole TV screen. THERE is your ultimate "production of garbage".

Im not saying it is.....No one is understanding my thread....


:(

This is like people complaining about pillarboxing on 4:3 content on a 16:9 TV.