Surrogates. (Page 1 of 3)

It's there.

Welcome to the forums, sir!

We experimented for months trying to find the magic number by which you could compress the time of an NTSC episode and have it line up with PAL copies of the movie.

The result? Three separate times very smart people came up with a number, the first was twice revised, and people still couldn't get it to line up some of the time. Not out of user error, but for some reason there isn't the linear conversion you'd expect. Either some movies are differently PALified (IE, some sped up, some just have frames excised, etc.) or a magic leprechaun comes along just to fuck with us when we try to help out a non-US viewer, but in any case, the PAL conversion techniques we've tried in the past have not been worth it.

Cooking one up just for you.

PAL version with delightfully high pitched voices.

The number is 960/1001.

Watch me get nerdy up on this shit.

Movies are shot at 24 frames per second, because projectors in movie theaters run at 24 frames per second. Yes, there are exceptions, but shut up.

In order to be broadcast on television in the United States, or released on DVD etc. in the US, movies are slowed down from 24 frames per second to 23.976 frames per second, in order to be compatible with the NTSC time base of 59.94 Hz. (These decimals are rounded off; the actual values are the irreducible fractions 24,000/1001 and 60,000/1001, respectively.)

In order to be broadcast or released on video in PAL countries, movies are usually sped up by 4 percent exactly, from 24 frames per second to 25 frames per second. These are integer values, not rounded-off decimals.

So the difference between an NTSC DVD and a PAL DVD would be the difference not between 24 fps and 25 fps, but between 24,000/1001 fps and 25,025/1001 fps, or 960/1001.

So if the guys are watching an NTSC DVD and you have a PAL DVD, you're going to drift out of sync by about two and a half minutes per hour; after the first hour, you'll be 2:27 ahead of the podcast.

But if you play back the podcast at 104 percent of normal speed, Teague and the fellas will sound delightfully chipmunky … and also you'll drift out of sync with them by only about nine seconds per hour. To get better than that, you'll need more decimal places; the actual factor to speed the podcast up by is 1001/960, or 1.0427083etc.

Most of your good audio packages have a variety of preprogrammed audio pulldown presets for things like this. They work by changing the sample rate of the audio file from 48 KHz to some weirdo fraction that has the net result of playing back the audio either faster or slower in order to match a known video frame rate.

Just finished. Great job

I'll just add the expected anime geek correction that "Read or Die" does involve reading, mostly in that the main character is a book freak and her super power involves using paper. The sequel "R.O.D. the TV" (based on both the original Read or Die manga and its sequel Read or Dream) is lots of fun as well.

It's more of an issue in the original comic, true, and in the later TV series. Like a band, often creators are stuck with the name picked out before you really knew where things would end up.

I would like to thank you for getting me to watch another film that I otherwise wouldn't have. Especially the film that inspired EVERY other sci fi film with the promise (and delivery) of an amusing commentary. Thank you all for taking the hit and watching this film against your better judgement! ;D

Oh, and I meant to say - Smeg probably wasn't a reference to Red Dwarf, there is a real company that makes fridges and that kinda thing called Smeg. It's product placement!

Last edited by Daltana (2010-08-31 21:01:31)

"Sex isn't a sixth sense!"

SPOILER ALERT! At the end of Surrogates, it's revealed that Bruce Willis was cumming the whole time!
You guys were absolutely right about everything you brought up regarding this movie, but I still kind of enjoyed it. It's true what Leonard Maltin said, Surrogates, if nothing else, is "entertaining".