[MPlayer-users] converting 25 fps to 24 fps

[Alexander Roalter]

Phil Rhodes wrote:
>> How do you come to this conclusion?
> 
> Only because it is certainly current practice to pitch correct PAL DVDs; 
> that's how current releases are invariably done and it has been this way 
> since at least the mid-90s.

At least the Disney's Enchanted DVD - here I know for sure - none of the
audio tracks: English, German, Turkish - have pitch correction applied.
If I play the O.S.T. alongside, the voices are too high. If I play with
-speed 0.96, the height matches. Enchanted is from 2007 (or '06).

I'm not quite sure if it is limited to dvd: When last year a Battlestar
Galactica Episode aired one week earlier in Britain (due to Labour Day
or President's Day or whatever), I got a 25fps version of BSG, running ~
2 minutes shorter, and with slightly higher voices (up to a degree, once
you are familiar with the voices, to be quite annoying). Edward James
Olmos's commanding voice sounded a lot different then I was used to...

> 
> Are your uncorrected discs from what might be called the early days of DVD? 
> At that point, people were making DVDs from Betacam SP tapes, which were 
> generally transferred from internegatives or even show prints of films, and 
> commonly have the issue we're discussing. More recent DVD releases, even of 
> older films, tend to be retransferred from a film element, possibly to an HD 
> master, or the DVDs are derived from digital intermediate data - these will 
> invariably have the audio correction done. The old SP masters, which were 
> intended for making VHS tapes, never made very good DVDs anyway, and now are 
> used only for the lowest of low-rent stuff. I'm talking about mainstream 
> live-action films here; I don't know what the guys in Japan get up to with 
> anime releases. Presuming they master the animation at 24p (given that it's 
> now mainly done digitally and not by shooting cels) the same considerations 
> apply. It's a sad fact that a lot of western anime releases are very budget, 
> especially in 25-frame markets which are presumably even smaller than the 
> NTSC ones.
> 
> This isn't a problem that only hits "small" films, either - notoriously, 
> Blade Runner didn't get a fresh transfer until quite recently, because of 
> disagreement over rights issues.
Would have to check on Blade Runner (I'm not at home right now), but
with well over 700 DVDs (most of them to my knowledge from film
elements, no retransferred Beta masters with interlacing and
non-anamorphic and what not), there are a lot of audio commentaries to
check against the original sound... and lots of different versions of
the film, where some also might have different pitch correction. And
Edward James Olmos also is in Blade Runner, too... hehe.

> Yes, I completely understand that the supplementary tracks don't get 
> corrected.


-- 
cheers,
Alex