Are European Dubs done in PAL?

[Emilius123]

Hello, everyone. This has bugging me for a while, I just need to ask. First though, some explanation:

Broadcasting in Europe sure is done in PAL. And as far as I'm concerned, DVDs are all in PAL too.

Buuuut Blu Rays. Any Blu Ray I pick up here is in 23.679 FPS. And what about streaming services? Well, on Netflix and Google Play, I get 23,976 FPS, on Amazon Video though 25 for the PAL content.


Soo, as explained this all is a big mess, but this is not what this is about.

In all this mess, I'm left wondering what the dubs are actually done at. Are they done onto the 25FPS speedups or onto the source and only sped up for broadcasting (and DVDs, etc.)



Thanks in advance - Emil

[Emilius123]

bump

[pm-s]

Speeding up was only a thing during interlaced era

[Skiller]

In all this mess, I'm left wondering what the dubs are actually done at. Are they done onto the 25FPS speedups or onto the source and only sped up for broadcasting (and DVDs, etc.)

It used to depend on the kind of production, mostly.
Productions destined for cinema are and were pretty much always dubbed at 24 or 23.976, but TV series, especially in the standard definition days, may be dubbed after the standards conversion (which can be either a speed up, or – much worse – field blending of a telecined 29.97i source). Unless of course it's a native PAL production.

Thanks to blu-ray with it's native 24p support almost all productions are dubbed without speed up these days, although there happen to be some oddball cases where the dub was done at 25 fps, and then slowed down for 24p blu-ray (sounds awful).

[dvd3500]

It depends on the source I think.
If it is a PAL TV show it may still be "PAL" i.e. 25 fps and whatever resolution it was broadcast in (720p, 1080i etc...)
As stated. that is not done for movies/films...

The fact of the matter though is unless you have an old TV and Blu ray player can play any Blu-ray. Only region-locking will get in you way..

[Quint]

Since PAL speed is still 25fps (no matter what resolution), productions especially done for TV are still made for 25fps. Not only tv shows but also movies if not shown in cinema in the first place. When such dubs are slowed down to show the picture in the correct speed for BluRay or later cinema, the sound of course also has to be slowed down. If done only by resampling, the pitch will be a little lower (a quarter- to halftone), so this pitch will be corrected in most cases (not all cases, which is a big issue in PAL countries...). But the slowed-down dub will sound still too slow in 23.976 or 24fps, because it wasn't meant for. Sadly there is no final really perfect solution for this problem up to now.

[dellsam34]

I don't think it matters anymore as most modern TV's can tune in to any resolution, frame rate or line scanning type.

[Quint]

Yes. But the sound problem remains. Read the last three answers.

[dvd3500]

It's not a "problem". Video production companies know about it and adjust the sound accordingly.
While there may be a a theoretical difference it will never be one most humans can hear.

[Quint]

It is a problem. While not all (but quite a lot, who are very loud) can hear the difference in pitch, almost everyone can hear the artificial slowdown of sound.
F. e. Star Trek NG, that has a quite slow style in the first episodes anyway, is - although pitch-corrected - quite annoying slow sounding on the 23.976-BluRays.
But if they tried to release in 25fps (50i) - which would have been a real working solution, because the speedup in PICTURE really nobody can realise - this would have been an absolut no-go for a lot of people.

[DB83]

I do not have 20/20 hearing and the typical pal speed-up from film (24 fps) to vhs/dvd (25 fps) does not trouble me.


Yet I will always respect those that can appreciate the difference in pitch. However tiny.


However. No self-respecting blu ray will be created by SLOWING DOWN a 25 fps source back to 24 (23.976) native film source.


So I do wonder if your ears having been accustomed to that sped-up version notices the correct speed more.


I will close this rant by throwing more fire on to the flames. Not all dvds creating in, marketing in, and sold in Europe were 'dubbed' as PAL. I own several such dvds that are NTSC. However, I have not recently checked to confirm, I suspect that these dvds are region-free so that they could also be played in US machines. Since from an age ago practically all PAL equipment could play back NTSC sources whereas the opposite is not true.

[dvd3500]

I guess a "problem" in the sense of some people notice it and some (most?) don't.

I have watched hundreds if not thousands of videos on VHS and DVD on any combination PAL/NTSC you can think of and I used to play in in symphony orchestras and I never heard any difference but then again there are people who might.

Was this speed up though really a thing with DVDs?
I know VCRs output "PAL60".
My mother-in-law's East German TV that could not play NTSC VHS tapes could play NTSC DVDs in color (I think)....
Since I never had anything that old I just made sure my TV could handle pure NTSC or at least PAL60 for my US DVDs.

BTW: Japan is in region 2 (same as Europe) but the TV standard is NTSC so I always assumed that a region 2 DVD player had to be able to so some sort of circuitry to make sure going back and forth was not a problem...
I am more than happy to be incorrect as usual...

Not so in the US, as you stated DB83: Until my Mom got a fully digital, multi-system TV I had to encode everything for her in NTSC otherwise it would not look right on her (older CRT) TV.

And, as you also stated: This is simply cannot be the case for Blu-Ray as the standard allows for whatever is needed. If it weren't for the stupid region coding everything from everywhere would play back exactly as it is meant to...

[Quint]

Nice to meet you, DVD3500, I am a studied musician, too (classical guitar).
This astonishes me: A quarter to half-tone difference in pitch is most noticeable to me. But as I said: It does not mean that much to me than this speedup or slowdown issue, especially the latter. The atmosphere can change a lot if slowed down.

The speedup thing of course didn't come up with DVDs, but with the decisions made for TV standards in the - let me think - fifties? or even earlier, maybe thirties, long before PAL came up, which is only a standard to handle colors.

Yes, in former times there were a lot of "hybrid" recorders that could handle PAL and NTSC. Your mother-in-laws set must have handled SECAM too, because this was the color standard in East Germany.

[dvd3500]

My point was that after they did the video speed they re-encoded the sound to pitch it back down hence why I don't think the difference a 1/4 half tone but much smaller... if at all...

[Quint]

Sorry, but the difference is - you can quite easily calculate - between a quarter and a half tone, nearly a halftone.
One halftone up means 12th root of 2 multiplied by the actual frequency. So an a sharp over the a with 440 Hz has a frequency of ~ 466 Hz.
The 12th root of 2 is ~ 1,0594630943592952645618252949463.
The factor between NTSC and PAL is ~ 25 / 23.976, so 1,0427093760427093760427093760427.
It's really nearly a halftone difference.

[hello_hello]

These days all "PAL" players and TVs can handle "NTSC" frame rates. In fact they're almost like "NTSC" equipment with the ability to handle "PAL" added on.
Both the Bluray players here connect to the TV at 60Hz by default. They display their own menus while connecting at 60Hz. One of them only switches the TV to 50Hz when you play a "PAL" 25fps Bluray disc, or a PAL DVD. The other is a little more clever and will also switch the TV to 50Hz when playing 25fps video via it's USB input.

Back when video rental outlets were a thing, it wasn't all that unusual to rent a DVD and discover it was NTSC rather than PAL. I assume sometimes they couldn't get "PAL" stock. I'm not sure I've seen a HD/Bluray source that was sped up from 24 to 25fps, as all PAL players can play 23.976/24fps discs, so if a Bluray disc is 25fps, chances are the content was originally filmed at that frame rate.

As I live in PAL-land I'm certain the PAL speed-up isn't something I'd generally notice until I have a reference. I can watch a season of a TV show and not think about it, but a few times I've had DVDs where one season was NTSC and the other PAL, and once I've watched the NTSC version, the NTSC to PAL audio speed-up becomes quite noticeable, but I need that reference first.

Based on my experience, 99.9% of audio that's sped up from NTSC/24fps for PAL isn't pitch corrected, so if you re-encode while slowing the video down to 24fps, not applying pitch correction to the audio is one time two wrongs do make a right. Concert/music videos are often the exception to the rule, but almost everything else is simply sped up.

I haven't had much experience with PAL/25fps content converted to 24fps, but slowing PAL down to 24.975 fps and applying telecine for 29.97 fps seemed a common method at one stage. From there instead of repeating fields to spread 4 original frames over 5 NTSC frames (standard 3:2 pulldown), it's 5 original frames spread over 6 NTSC frames.

I'm sure I've see at least a couple of 24fps HD sources converted from 25fps without the speed of motion changing, and they looked like they'd been filmed at 24fps. There's probably clever interpolation methods used to convert between frame rates these days.

[hello_hello]

F. e. Star Trek NG, that has a quite slow style in the first episodes anyway, is - although pitch-corrected - quite annoying slow sounding on the 23.976-BluRays.

Wouldn't that have been filmed at 23.976/24fps? I must be missing something.

[Quint]

Of course Star Trek is filmed in 24fps...
But the German (important to me) dub had been made in 25fps, because made in the late eighties/beginning nineties for PAL-TV.
The DVDs are also PAL, and everything sounds fine. (Also looks fine, because, as said, rather no person will be able to tell if picture has been sped up or not.)
But the BluRays are as common practice done in more original picture speed (also in Germany 23.976, not 24fps), to show, how meant in the original.
So the sound had to be slowed down, and that, only that is the problem I mentioned. This is - not only to me - hearable. They corrected (I think so? Did they? I have to watch it again.) the pitch, ok, but the atmosphere of sound is still SLOW. This you can hear, and it's always a problem. So I wrote, that I would prefer to rather use 25fps, also in HD, to keep the original sound LENGTH.