Are movies on European TV higher-pitched?

Factual Questions
1

I just learned a disturbing fact about the European PAL television standard.

Here in the U.S., our television standard – called NTSC for historical reasons – displays 60 interlaced fields of video (30 full video frames) per second. The European TV standard, called PAL, on the other hand, displays 50 interlaced fields (25 full video frames) per second.

Now, remember, movies are typically filmed at 24 frames per second. Thus, when it comes time for a broadcaster or a video distributor to take a movie – say, Plan Nine from Outer Space, to pick a classic, well-recognized example – and put it on TV, they are faced with a bit of a dilemma. Namely, how do you display a 24-frame-per-second movie on a 30-frame-per-second or 25-frame-per-second TV? Well, in the case of good old American NTSC, we do a neat little trick called a “2-3 pulldown,” where every other frame of film is spread over three consecutive interlaced video fields instead of the usual two fields. The effect can be a little bit herky-jerky, and a “true” movie afficionado will probably turn his nose up at the end product and insist that it doesn’t jibe with the producer’s original vision and whatnot, even if the producer were just a two-bit hack like Ed Wood who didn’t give a load of Dingo’s kidneys about what his films looked like, and besides, a 480-line-high interlaced picture with around 330 lines of horizontal resolution per screen height isn’t exactly going to be a sharp enough display to show off the grains in the original film anyway. We Yanks can get away with the 2-3 pulldown trick because 24 frames per second is a nice, round 4/5 of the 30 frames per second that NTSC is displayed at. But what happens when a European broadcaster wants to show Plan Nine from Outer Space on TV? His viewers all have PAL TVs that show 25 frames per second. 24 frames per second isn’t a nice, round fraction at all of 25 frames per second, unless you’re deranged enough to think that 24/25 qualifies as a round fraction.

So what do PAL broadcasters do with movies? They speed them up. They play them back at 25 frames per second instead of the original 24.

I have just, suddenly, realized the staggering implications of this. Every European who has seen a movie on video has been seeing it too fast! And not only will the action on screen be a little faster; in order to keep the audio track synchronized with the video, they have to speed up the movie’s audio as well. And what happens when you speed up audio? That’s right. You get the same effect as when you playt a 33 RPM record at 45 RPM. Everybody’s voice goes up in pitch.*

Think of the consequences! Everybody’s voice will sound almost a complete half-step higher in pitch. Darth Vader will sound like a high-voiced sissy. “Do-Re-Mi” in The Sound of Music will sound like it was written in the key of C-sharp instead of C. Sexy, sultry actresses will sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks – or, at the very least, like Alvin and the Chipmunks when they are a little hung over from partying all night. Ronald Reagan’s movies will make him sound wimpier, at which point the Europeans will only laugh at us even harder for having elected him President. Twice. And Every European will experience this same high-pitched shift in movie audio! They will all think it’s normal!

What is the European Economic Union going to do about this sad state of affairs? Or have they been watching movies on PAL TV for so long that they too think that all movie stars have high-pitched nasally voices? Somebody has to stand up for Hollywood, dog gone it!

[sub]*) I realize there are modern techniques that can “time compress” audio without altering the pitch. However, these techniques were only developed in the last decade or so, and I’ll bet you dollars to donut-holes (assuming they even have donut holes in Europe) that nearly all movies transferred to PAL video have merely had their audio portions sped up, pitch rise and all.

2

Umm…probably not much.

Going from 24fps to 25fps is a mere 4% increase in speed, nowhere near the 50% increase between 33-1/3 and 45 RPM. Maybe enough for a well-trained ear to pick up, if one is listening for it; doubtful that the European market cares enough to notice.

3

It is pretty common for local low-rent television stations to play movies slightly speeded up in order to better accomodate ads. Skilled eyes (and ears) can pick this out, but most people don’t pay enough attention. Perhaps video (and broadcast television) is low-quality enough that a it’s pretty hard to make it too much worse.

4

A mere 4 percent? A mere 4 percent?!?!!

Why, raising the pitch by an entire musical half-step would require “only” a 6 percent increase in speed! Would you just sit there while someone butchered Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto number 5 by playing it in the key of E-flat instead of D?!? I ask ya!

5

Look sorry tracer, complete hijack but can I just say: where on earth did you learn to use the expression “dingo’s kidneys”?

Not that I mind, quite the opposite, but it’s just that I think of that expression as being one that not even many Australians use. Seeing it in a post by a Californian came as a shock.

6

I’ve seen that, too. (Like you, I live in Northern California, which is most decidedly not in Europe.) A few years back, I caught an old movie on some local station where at the beginning they ran a little blurb saying:

“This film has been altered from its original version. It has been time compressed.”

The time compression technology they used, though, was the new shiny sophisticated type whereby the audio is sped up without actually going up in pitch. Everybody talks faster, but their voices don’t sound any higher.

My main concern is that this technology is, as I’ve implied in the above paragraph, new and shiny. Before it was invented, the only way to speed up a movie’s audio track would have been to speed it up the old-fashioned way – play it faster so that everything goes up in pitch.

Last year, I watched Shallow Hal in the theaters regularly. (I love that film, what can I say?) I heard the songs in that movie so often that, what with my good musically-trained pitch memory, I knew by heart what keys they were in. At one of the theaters I saw this movie in, though, the film had accidentally been sped up by a couple of frames per second. I could definitely tell that something was amiss because these renditions of the songs I’d heard over and over were quite definitely higher in pitch than I’d remembered. And in one scene, there was a John-Wayne-looking actor whose voice was quite authoritative-sounding in every other viewing of the film; that time around, he sounded like he’d just inhaled helium.

And now that I know that PAL broadcasts of movies are all sped up in this manner, I shudder to think how much more helium-inhaling-sounding every American actor must sound to every Euorpean who’s ever watched their movies on their PAL TVs – so often and so consistently that, as KGS points out, the entire European market doesn’t even notice it!

7

Yeah, but remember time runs slightly slower in Europe. It’s still 1996 over here.
Also, some European filmmakers shoot at a PAL-friendly 25 fps. Other than that, you have a point. A near semitone difference would definitely be noticeable.

8

It doesn’t really matter much. Nearly every american movie that I see on german TV has been dubbed over in German, so the voices are different anyway.

I really hate Spock’s voice in the dubbed in German Star Trek shows. The german actor has a higher pitched, whiny voice that makes him sound like a goof ball idiot.

9

Douglas Adams broadened the popularity of this term by using it in one of the books in the Hithhiker’s guide to the Galaxy series.

10

Well, a) I would not consider it a butchering of Bach and b) Orchestral pitch has gotten sharper since Bach’s time, so the Brandenberg concerto really is being “butchered” now as we play it. However, for his works on organ, most of Bach’s organ pieces were porbably played on organs at around A480 (between current A sharp and B), rather than A440. In France, during the baroque era"standard A" was lower than A400 (around a G in today’s time.) Usually, A415 (a modern G sharp) is considered around the standard tuning for a Baroque piece. So we are, in effect, hearing something slightly different than what Bach heard anyway.

That said, I’ve never noticed any difference on PAL sets. It’s not that noticable, and the actors certainly don’t sound like chipmunks if that’s what you’re asking.

11

That sounds like robbing Peter to pay Paul. What do they do when they want to show one of these PAL-friendly, 25 frame-per-second films in a movie theater, where all the projectors are calibrated for 24 frames per second? Do they just let them slow the film down, so that everyone’s voice is a half-step lower? And what happens when the European filmmaker’s film gets so amazingly popular that they want to show it on American 30-frame-per-second broadcast TV?

12

PAL does have advantages over NTSC.

  1. It displays 625 lines compared to NTSC’s 525. So the resolution is higher and closer to the film’s. (This is particularly noticable when American TV shows are shown in Europe. They have to pad the signal out with blanks, so it has that distinctive American TV fuzzyness.)

  2. It refreshes at 50Hz. So if the film is played at 25 FPS they can neatly fill in one frame to every 2 refreshes. NTSC at 60Hz however, using the 3/2 trick means that every second frame is shown 3 times. This gives the film a bit of a uneven, jerky feel.

  3. NTSC, strictly speaking, is actually 59.97Hz. So even the 3/2 frames trick isn’t spot on.

So you takes your pick. Either way they’re not perfect. Of course digital HDTV is now making both obsolete.

13

And no, the net effect is not movies going at 4% higher speed. I don’t know how this is compensated, but beleive me, I would notice the dif when catching a movie on TV that I’ve seen in a theatre.

14

Widespread inexpensive software to do this may be this recent, but electronics that do this are older. The Exploratorium in San Francisco used to have a small tape player that would do this. IIRC this technology was used by blind people to listen to books. I saw this tape player in the early 80s, and I’m sure it’s older than that.