time discrepancy in DVD editions

Harry Palmer

Hi everyone. I have a question for the experts, and I'd be grateful to anyone who could enlighten me on a puzzling discovery.
Here's the back-story:
I own the complete set of two-disc ultimate edition DVDs (zone 1) which I've seen several times; recently I watched TLD at a friend's house on his DVD-copy (which is from an earlier edition and Zone 2). I noticed that his version had slightly longer scenes (for instance Bond's surveillance of Pushkin in Tangier has a slower build-up, and Koskov's escape after his jeep collides with a plane is more clearly shown. There are many other exapmles of this sort). I went to Amazon to check for running time and discovered to my complete amazement that my version is in fact listed as being longer than the zone 2 version (131 mins as against 126). So how come my friend's DVD had the longer scenes?
Can anyone confirm or disconfirm my impression of this discrepancy--and explain it?

Thanks in advance

Blodskur

I can't explain the longer scenes, but, the time discrepancy is due to PAL 4% speed up. Basically, because PAL televisions can only display 50 fields per second (that's 50 half images or 25 full images/frames per second) and movies are 24 frames per second, something had to be done.
They could've either repeated the 24th frame for another frame, which would be very jarring or they could speed up the film by 4% (that's 1 frame per second quicker).

So pretty much all PAL DVD movies are 4% shorter than their NTSC counterparts. Your R1 versions are the most accurate length wise. A small amount of people notice the 4% speed up because the voice and soundtrack's pitches are increased by just under one semitome.

For anyone wondering: Blu-ray Disc versions of films do not suffer from PAL speed up.

A7ce

nice one Blodskur, first post and very informative

Harry Palmer

Thanks, Blodskur,
Very helpful answer.