Originally Posted by Ed Sizzers:
“Presumably, US DVD's of UK show's also suffer the reverse of pal-speedup (NTSC slowdown?) and so blu-ray would the first opportunity many US fans would have to own series 1-4 at their proper broadcast speed.”
“Presumably, US DVD's of UK show's also suffer the reverse of pal-speedup (NTSC slowdown?) and so blu-ray would the first opportunity many US fans would have to own series 1-4 at their proper broadcast speed.”
I think you're confusing what happened when material that was originally shot on film at 24fps was shown on PAL TV at 25fps. It used to just be run at 25fps. The difference was considered too small to be noticeable.
30fps NTSC -> 25fps PAL is too big a speed change not to be noticed so the trick was to drop every 6th frame, so keeping the average speed correct while running at 50fps. Going from 25fps to 30fps involved inserting a repeat frame every 5th frame.
Many modern UK TVs and DVD and BD players are capable of 24, 25 and 30fps and - as long as the source is correctly encoded - can deal with different frame rates natively without loss of fidelity. I believe many modern US TVs are still not capable of 25/50fps HD video such as Doctor Who, so frame rate conversion still has to be done at some point. I guess the US market is big enough to sustain a pure US standards policy.
