JimT -- An interesting question, isn't it -- the extent to which our tastes and expectations get formed, and the role that the technology can play in forming those tastes. If you grow up drinking Tang, maybe real o.j. tastes weird to you. I spent my first night in years at a dance club last week, and was struck by how much more ... well, effective sound systems are now than they were when I was a kid. A consequence is that kids today seem to expect to get Dolby-slammed around. And thanks for reminding us of Kalmus, who I'd read about, though years ago. She must have been quite a woman; apparently she had the entire industry by the short hairs. It sounds like color quality suffered quite a lot due to her domination.

JesseM -- Thanks for links. I confess I don't by a long shot understand the science of color. I'll semi-feel I grasp, oh, the diff between CMYK and RGB "color space" ... but it'll only last for a few seconds, and then it slips away again. So I walk around with a dim sense that it's complicated, and that I'm all for improvement, whatever that may mean. Thanks heavens my eyes aren't terrible at registering and responding to the results! I'm like a person with a not-bad palate but who knows nothing about cooking. So I appreciate all tips and hints about how these things actually come about.

Michael -- I haven't seen much Euro color-TV, but aeons ago, when I spent a high school year in France, and before I was a serious film buff, I was knocked out by how much better the b&w Euro TV image was than the American: tighter, denser, deeper, with lots more continuity between the values -- blacker blacks, silvery grays, whites that didn't just burn out ... Watching movies on French TV, you had a much more movie-like experience. Interesting to learn that the same holds for color, tks. The American TV image is incredibly crass, which is a tragedy, as it seems to help promote a taste for crassness and garishness, or at least a resignation to it. I guess there's hope, though: people seem to love DVDs for numerous reasons, and one of them may be the tighter, less washy image that they deliver. So maybe tastes (or demands, anyway) will go up a bit. Here's hoping this new tech contributes a bit to that. I didn't realize that transfers to PAL resulted in speed-ups. How weird.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on August 28, 2004 10:51 AM

I didn't realize that transfers to PAL resulted in speed-ups. How weird.

In practice, unless you have perfect pitch and a very good memory, you're unlikely to notice anything unusual, though I remember a review in Gramophone of a VHS release of Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni that complained about the pitch shift. Unfortunately, the critic decided to blame the conductor rather than the film-to-PAL transfer, but that's understandable.

A tiny number of films are electronically pitch-corrected during the PAL transfer, but this process has been controversial - sometimes electronic glitches are introduced as a by-product (the PAL version of one of the Lord of the Rings films is apparently affected by this).

Of course, another side-effect to all this is that 100-minute films run at 96 minutes in PAL, which creates the impression that four minutes have been cut. This has led to a great many people to jump to the conclusion that certain videos have been censored quite severely - I remember a hysterical denunciation of Warner Home Video in Time Out for their "butchery" of Michael Mann's Heat, which apparently lost some seven minutes, though in actual fact the film was entirely uncut: the missing minutes were entirely due to PAL speedup.

I should also stress that if the original source was video (whether PAL or NTSC), pitch-shift issues don't arise, so in actual fact the vast majority of music videos should be fine in PAL.

Posted by: Michael Brooke on August 29, 2004 4:04 PM






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