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Addendum Issue 032
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Addendum Issue# 32 - 9th April 2002
URL: http://www.adden.tr.cx/
Author : Steak, always the same colour
============================= He's not my PAL ==============================
Do you like movies? You do? Who doesn't, there great. It's real nice to sit
down after a long hard day, chuck a DVD on and just mellow out to your
favorite flick and not be disturbed. To loose yourself in the action, or
to think about a particularly thought provoking movie.
But there is one little think I bet you didn't know, something that, at first
could get you a little annoyed...
Have a look at a video or DVD that you own. Tell you what, to save you the
trouble, I will do it for you. I recently purchased The Jurassic park DVD
from EZYDVD.com.au for $30, they are a good shop by the way, I have to stick
in a plug for them here, they deserve it.
When I look on the back of the box, just under where it says what region the
disk is encoded to it states that the movie is 122 minuets long, Thats not
including the adverts at the start of the film, because DVD's simply don't
have them, that is the actual feature length
I then go on the web to the internet movie database at www.imdb.com where they
have all the information you could need about any movie you care to mention and
it reckons the movie is 127 minutes long. If you check out any movie you want
you will see that this is the same for every movie that you buy in Australia.
If you are remotely any good at maths you can work out the percentage of the
movie that you are missing out on. Again being the nice guy that I am I will
save you the trouble. It goes something like this
127 - 122 / 122 X 100 = 4.10%
That means that the American versions of our movies are actually four percent
longer than there Australian counterparts. Thats a whole four percent that
works out at 5.2 minuets of Jurassic park that we are missing out on.
So Whats the deal? Are we missing something, are we becoming a slave to the
censors, and letting them cut out bits of the movie 'they' deem 'appropriate'?
Or is this an x file? are aliens coming down in there little silver space
ships and taking away many minutes of our movies to run tests on them and
study our culture based on five minuets of cinematography?
Neigh, sadly its nothing that interesting.
If you look again at the case of your movie you may find the term PAL somewhere,
(go on, check it, it's there somewhere) that is the format that our (and some
other countries like Englands) TV's display here. The format in America is
different it is called NTSC, or Never Twice the Same Colour as someone put it
PAL usually has a better resolution than NTSC and it provides a sharper, more
distinct image, yet there is the time difference.
Because they both run at different speeds i.e. the frames per second is slightly
lower on an NTSC recording (4% lower surprise, surprise). This means that
anything converted from NTSC to PAL runs at 4% faster than the original NTSC
version. This applies for all American shows and movies shown on an Australian,
or more precisely a PAL TV.
And the 4% speed up works on the audio as well not just the video. Which means?
that American actors voices are actually sped up by four percent and are hence
four percent higher in pitch. So they actually sound different from what we hear.
Most of us will not even notice this speed up, a good point of the speed up
means that our action is four percent faster than the American version.
Resulting in a slightly faster paced and hence more fun action film.
yet there is still the bad point that all the actors and the music have a
higher pitch than they should do. Take the music in the movie 'hackers', the
actual music sounds a little different on prodigy's album "Music for the
jilted generation" and the soundtrack than it does in the film.
As I have said before this means that we really do not know what celebrities
voices sound like, We think that they sound like TV's and Films tell us they
do, however they don't sound like that, the pitch of there voice is 4% lower.
I Have actually experienced this first hand you see there was this one time
that I met Dean Haglud in England. Dean Haglund plays Ringo Langley in the
x files, if you don't know who he is, he is one of the lone gunmen, those
hackers that mulder visits for information from time to time, they had there
own show which I would love to have seen but it got cancelled =[
I met him in a pub and had a one on one chat with him about networks
and internet connections and had a drink with him, at this time I noticed
that his voice sounded much different to how it did on the x files. I was
intrigued as to why this was and on the way back I actually bought one
of the original X files episodes with him in it and listened, sure enough
I could actually notice the higher pitch in his voice on the film than I
had heard earlier that day at the pub. I was rather off putted.
It seems strange, you think you know how someone sounds, but you don't
All this is really just food for thought though...
Sorry to waste your time again..
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Addendum Issue# 32 - 9th April 2002
(C) Steak April 2002
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