One possible reason Star Trek The Motion Picture Directors Cut is not on blu ray?

Yeah, SECAM always seemed so close to PAL I assumed it was just a "we're French - we have to be special" kind of thing.

That having been said, the French had HDTV in like the 1940's...

Analog high-definition television system - Wikipedia

 

It's apocryphal. The 800-line French system was BS because they didn't have lenses with a good enough MTF to resolve that much detail, and the tubes back then couldn't do it either. By the 1970s... maybe, but there's still a lot of chances for it to fail.

 

Neither do I, it looks more a way to mark/make a difference from the rest of the world than a technical one.

 

It's not just the UK using 25 frames, a lot of other countries use it as well.

 

NTSC vs. PAL – Which Is Better and What Is the Difference

Not sure how true this is but it seems reasonable.

 

Interesting. I just remembered the French system was used to record The T.A.M.I. Show...

Electronovision - Wikipedia

 

Nonsense. There was nothing stopping them from using 24. Anyway it's the digital age. No need for that anymore. Regardless we are just guessing.

 

Film has been 24 frames no matter the region for forever. The 25fps rate is just for video, is my understanding.

 

yeah, it's the 50 Hz which is my understanding ; 50 cycles per second and 25 divides evenly into 50 vs. 24 so any filming expressly for British television back in the day - 16 or 35mm - was done at 25 fps...there's more technical reasons for it - they "could" have filmed 24 fps but it wouldn't have looked as good because then the frame rate and interlacing images wouldn't match - but that's above my pay grade.

 

I thought "Aliens" was shot at 25fps to synchronize up with the British Pal monitors they were using in the movie.

 

If that was the case I could write them an angry letter (I wish) but the film industry doesn't work that way. These guys are professionals not ahhh..laymen who go, "Yea, 25fps...That is way cool. Let's go with that." It better not be!

 

If course there is good reason why it's 25fps. Some of us were hoping it was for some stupid reason. Not we can't bitch about it.

 

For Broadcast TV,yes, all Europe, Australia and part of Latin America (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay...) use 50 Hz, 25 fps. But one thing is broadcast TV and producing content like TV series or documentaries. Most content produced in Spain if not all is done at 24 fps as it's easier to convert to 25 fps and 30 fps and with less motion artifacts. Many TV series done in Spain are sold to many European countries that use 25 fps (former Pal and Secam countries) and also some Latin American countries that use 30 fps (former NTSC countries like Mexico or Colombia). But all UK TV series and documentaries I've seen are produced at 25 fps.
I read somewhere some time ago that BBC's Planet Earth from 2006 was shot and postproduced at 25 fps and had to be slowed down to 24 fps for its US BD release.
I think all countries should have gone to 30 fps when making the change to Digital HD, it not only has a better temporal resolution, it also would have avoided having different standards on different countries and territories, for me it's a lost oportunity.

 

30 doesn't really tie with anything though, apart from US NTSC.

I assume for film in Europe traditionally they just sped it up slightly and converted it at 25fps to 5o interlaced fps for PAL.

 

Yeah, I wrote the Electronovision entry on Wikipedia. Inventor Bill Sargent was kind of a twisted genius who was way ahead of his time; I'm sad he didn't live to see digital motion pictures take over the industry.

No, Aliens was shot at 24fps.

 

Too funny.

The T.A.M.I. Show looks really good on DVD, considering its vintage and compared to other television shows of its era.

 

I wrote a few up there -- check the edit and you'll see my name on it. If I had oodles of spare time, I swear I'd write a book on Electronovision. Fascinating system. Didn't work worth of crap, but it was an amazing idea. Electronicam (the Dumont system used on The Honeymooners) was interesting as well, but videotape killed it off by 1956.

When you can get the original camera negative, an Electronovision show can look adequate, but it's only as good as the screen they filmed off of. I think Sargent went bankrupt several times, so the master videotape of The T.A.M.I. Show disappeared more than 50 years ago and was never found. The tape could look amazing.

 

Pardon my ignorance but what is Electronovision?

 

Question? When the DVD came out why didn't everyone agree on a world standard? I can understand the different frame rates but why does the North American and European DVD system have differnet resolutions? (Region 1 480 lines of resolution and Region 2 576 lines)

 

Agreed. Which leaves me confused as to why they would bring out such a high qualtiy system for broadcast and monitors when the video resolution wasn't possible. Was there some reason for this 800 line French system? I read about it years ago and my first reaction was - And where is this 800 line content coming from?

 

Because there were three world standards and that was it. It wasn't like today's TV sets that can display Pal, NTSC, Secam, different flavours of HD (720p, 1080i, 1080p at either 60 Hz/30 fps, 50 Hz/25 fps or 24 fps) and even different frame rates of UHD (I've only seen one UHD BD disc encoded at 60 fps).
When DVD was developed it had to conform to either NTSC or Pal as that was all TV sets of the time could display. And beware, region codes have nothing to do with TV System, there you have Japan which is Region 2 (like Europe) but releases their DVD discs on NTSC/476/60 Hz/30 fps. That was an attempt to avoid importing US NTSC discs into the Japanese market and viceversa despite using the same TV standard.

 

Note that was only B&W. Once color came in, they went SECAM... and that was back to 625 lines. SECAM, of course, was "System Essentially Contrary to the American Method," and was (as we say in Hollywood) a steaming piece of crap as a transmission standard. Nowadays, it doesn't matter: it's all HD, which is far better to NTSC or PAL or SECAM or anything else prior to the 2000s.

Electronovision was a cockamammie system invented by entrepreneur Joe Sargent, where he took 1960s B&W TV cameras, recorded video images during a live (or live-ish) performance, edited the videotape, then released the production on B&W film for release to theaters. This was how the famous T.A.M.I. Show and several similar stage and music specials were shot. Sargent was kind of a genius, but there were massive technical and financial problems that caused his dream to collapse in the 1970s.



You can say that Electronovision was the precursor to digital film production, where they shoot on digital video cameras, capture to files on hard drives, edit and run the show through post production, then later project the show on digital projectors in movie theaters and telecast them on TV... which is how Hollywood works today.

Electronovision - Wikipedia

 

Have you been to France back in the days of analogue TV? Have you ever seen an OTA or satellite broadcast in native SECAM (the news, French produced series...)? I think there was nothing crappy about SECAM. The problem with SECAM is that there were not many native SECAM equipment so TV stations used Pal equipment and then converted to SECAM (no need to convert the luminance part as both are 625-576/50 Hz/25 fps) for broadcasting,but the system was good.

 

Yes, I saw it in the middle-East and it was haaaaaarible. It's all over with now: it's all digital HD and streaming, which I'm sure you'll agree is far, far better than analog broadcasting.