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VHS Nostalgia: NTSC vs. PAL

🕑 Added 2024-10-08 17:35:48 +0000 UTC

Comments

Zygmunt Dean

Back in the 70s the BBC used to get regular complaints from people who thought films had been edited because they apparently had a shorter running time, but were in fact just played that bit faster. No one noticed on ITV because the ad breaks made it harder to time the film.

Philip Stephens

One of the downsides to PAL was that 24 fps movies were just transferred directly to 25 fps PAL, meaning the movies played back 4% faster. Although I can’t say I ever actually noticed. Movies were converted to 30 fps NTSC by having one film frame repeated over 3 NTSC fields then the next frame over 2 NTSC fields, which resulted in the correct playback speed but caused the image to jitter whenever the camera panned across a scene.

Laura Halliday

Never Twice the Same Color People Are Lavender System Essentially Contrary to the American Method I used to have a multi-sysytem VHS player. Now I have a multi-system/multi-region DVD player.

Eric At Random

A friend of mine in the UK graciously sent me a tape of The Hitchhiker's Guide in 1986. Pure static. I figured it got wiped in transit, not realizing that the format was on the tape and not part of the VHS player only.

Bob Pockney

I seem to remember, in the dim distant past, when I got a PAL VHS player that would also do NTSC. DVD regions weren't really an issue. Before they became more easily available in the UK, I'd get R1 discs from the US to play on a modified R2 player. NTSC stands for Never Twice the Same Colour of course. I think the 29.97 frame rate was the least worst solution.