I've read about a supposed "cropped" or edited versions of The
Wizard of Oz in Europe. About how scenes have been cut, making the European
version run shorter than the US version. Almost as though Hollywood was
cheating Europeans of the full Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon experience.
There's a less sinister solution, though the original "Curse of
Babylon" does rear its head.
I believe I've sourced the problem for European viewers, and it has to do with
framerates and the conversion process between the different formats. Here in the
US we use NTSC for television, which is 29.976 frames per second (fps). European
PAL tv runs at 25 fps. Film runs at 24fps.
The Wizard of Oz was originally shot on film, then transfered to the two video
formats, PAL and NTSC. To transfer the 24fps film to 29.976 NTSC, every fourth
frame is divided into two seperate frames to create a fifth frame, causing an
"interlaced", or combing pattern on the two new frames, (there are
websites dedicated to this subject, do a search for "telecine" or
"Interlaced NTSC" and you'll get great explanations, but that's it in
a nutshell).
To transfer 24fps film to 25fps PAL, a very different process is used. The film is sped-up to 25 frames per second, and the audio is altered for pitch and tone. There's the problem.
From the website: "The album is about 2mins off the heartbeat where it is supposed to finish the first time!" <-- which I take to mean the end of the first play.
Converting the 24fps per second film to the different formats we get some
hard numbers to work with, based on a 43:00.00 minute running time:
43:00 running time = Film(24fps): 61920 Individual frames
NTSC(29.976fps): 77338.08 Interlaced Frames
PAL(25fps): Individual Frames
Taking the difference between the Film and Pal framerates, we get:
64500 PAL - 61920 FILM = 2580 Frames. Here's the catch: The audio is
still running at 24fps! So, converting that 2580 frames in 24fps AUDIO,
2580 / 24fps = 107.5 Seconds = 1.79 minutes. So the Audio, at the end, is
1.79 seconds slower than the movie. ("The album is about 2mins off
the heartbeat...")
If you were to speed up the audio the same amount, 4.16%, the heartbeat would fade at the appropriate point. I'm not certain, but I believe most PAL/European Video format movies are like this. They should all have running times approximately 4.16% shorter than their NTSC/US counterparts.
The only real option is to use an NTSC DvD in a multi-region player.
And so you see how the ancient Curse of Babylon can destroy a good synchronicity with video framerate translation problems.
Further, by the math (ugh):
In a normal situation, both the audio and the video would be sped-up when
converted to PAL. If a straight film recording were transcoded to PAL
framerates, there would be no problem, both the audio and video would be sped-up
the same amount,
24fps (Audio and video) / 25fps (Audio and video) = .96
61920(# of film frames A/V) / 64500 (# of PAL frames A/V) = .96
However, the audio is being run from a cd player at the normal, sync'ed film rate of 24fps, so:
DSOTR has 64500 PAL VIDEO Frames and 61920 NTSC AUDIO Frames. By
subtracting the number of audio frames from the number of video frames,
64500(V) - 61920(A) = 2580 frames of audio to video discrepancy, or 1.79
seconds.
Owwwww! Mommy! My head hurts! Make him stop!