Just out of curiosity, I was wondering: 1. Was SatAM mastered for 30fps or 24fps? 2. How did the PAL DVD handle framerate? Any frameblending, or just the 24-to-25 fps trick? 3. Does the PAL DVD have any extra visual detail due to the higher resolution, or is it just upscaled from the NTSC version?
I have the PAL box set, I'll put one of the discs on when I get back from work tomorrow and let you know. Tbh I only casually watched it years back and wasn't aware of the mastering process at the time (especially the challenges of PAL framerates and resolution) but now I'll be able to see easily enough.
Alrighty. Just had a watch and scan through the PAL DVD boxset I've got. I can answer the last two questions. 2. The PAL DVD went with frameblending. The speed and pitch match the NTSC broadcast and DVDs. No PAL speedup on this one. 3. The video quality isn't too hot, even by usual DVD standards. Definitely an NTSC upscale! In short, it's fine for casual watching but certainly not something I'd pick over the NTSC DVDs.
For what it's worth, the PAL job wasn't great on AoStH either. Muffled sound and some really dodgy video editing: This episode has the distributor information on the front! Regular consumers should NEVER have seen this.
Thanks much! Now I know that I should not bother with the PAL DVDs at all and stick to the NTSC version for the best quality. I figured it was probably just a conversion of the NTSC content, but I wanted to confirm before plopping money down on importing a PAL copy.
Oh wow, that's quite a treat! Thankfully the PAL SatAM DVDs seem to be good and not muffled on the Audio side of things at least (well, from what I heard of my quick rewatch through the first episode that is...) I feel like it would be nice to have an up to date BD Box set of these shows. Obviously HD is out of the question, but a cleaner transfer and (for PAL at least) no framerate issues would be great.
So, I do this stuff for a living. It's a little tricky, and sometimes the answer is kind of both. Here's the technical stuff. The original shows are likely 23.976/24fps progressive film pulled up (additional frames/fields added) to 29.98fps interlaced. The titling (like the end credits) and episode edits could've been done either on film or more likely using a titling/editing solution contemporary to the time and done on tape (such as an AVID). If they were done on video, those segments are true 29.98. You can usually look at the titles on a show of that era and can tell if it was done on video or film. I'm pretty sure AOSTH's titles/credits were done on video and I don't know about the titles on Satam- they look cleaner, and are fade-in-and-out so it's hard to say. Sometimes, also, stuff in the middle of a show can be edited on video as well. This happened a bunch on older Simspons episodes where they fixed lipflaps in video, or later season Transformers and GI Joe episodes. This can break the interlacing cadence. I don't doubt that AOSTH probably had some bad edits done this way. If you've ever seen an old TV show where the show itself is obviously film but the credits scroll by really smoothly, usually it's the case where material is mixed. An example of this is Tiny Toons: How I spent my summer Vacation. The movie is film but the credits were created on video at 30fps. Usually, in these cases, you can IVTC the shows and cheat/force the credits to 23.976 if you know what you're doing. I've no doubt that given the masters I could remaster SATAM to 23.976 and get good results. That said, while I haven't checked, it's likely that the shout factory DVDs are just 29.98 interlaced and not encoded at 23.976. Most licensors don't fiddle with the video for fear of messing stuff up. Sonic Underground, on the other hand, is a digital show. While the animation itself is mostly 24fps, it had 29fps pans which is why all the pans in the show's pilot episode look super weird and smooth, for instance. As a kid this looked weird to me and it's only years later I understood why it looks so weird.
Wow, that's crazy informative! I love reading about things like that. I learned a small bit about framerates for TV shows back in college (and the reasons for said framerates and resolutions) in my rookie-level editing days (pour a drink out for Mini DV..), but nothing quite as in-depth as this! I'm just personally glad that with BD, PAL formats have moved away from having to stick to 50hz/25fps/768x576 along with all the headaches that come with that (games too slow, movies too fast etc.).
Sorry, I meant the PAL DVD speed and sound is correct, as it matches the source NTSC footage. So it doesn't sound any different to what we know and love thankfully! Normall PAL DVD releases suffer from speedup which gets noticable if you've ever compared with NTSC films. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/576i#PAL_speed-up The complete opposite of the issue PAL games used to get! (30fps down to 25fps) Thanfully SatAM avoided this, but did it in a way that means certain frames had to be blended together due to having to match the original NTSC timing but on a 25fps disc. It looks all fine and normal in motion, but when paused you can see there's not much clarity between the frames. I can post some screenshots of the frameblending in action though when I get back to my home PC as I took some reference pics the other day.
