One of the many pleasures of owning an inexpensive multi-region DVD player is being able to purchase DVDs from around the world and watch them at home. (Well, I suppose an expensive multi-region player would do the trick as well.) But one of the problems that sometimes occurs with European DVDs (or North American DVDs sourced from European tapes) is that they have been recorded in the PAL video format, which runs at 25 frames per second instead of the film-standard 24 frames per second. If care isn’t taken, the film simply plays 4% more quickly on video.
My friend Trond S. Trondsen demonstrates why this is an ongoing problem for cinephiles and why image specialists with PhDs in Cosmic Geophysics write good technical analyses in his new article, PAL speedup–Case Study: A Man Escaped.