A new version of the Wing Commander Movie has been released on DVD in France. This one appears to be the first edition to include complete French dubbing, and various sites with product reviews show that fans are super excited. The box has a new cover with a very hot Wing Commander logo. The last Region 2 release in 2006 was still in English and included localized subtitles. Its artwork was also more closely related to the Region 1 disc. To appeal to European audiences, the names across the top now read Tchéky KARYO, David WARNER and David SUCHET. Alternate printings also show Warner replaced by Freddie PRINZE Jr. Pick it up at Amazon.fr for EUR 4,83. -- Original update published on April 18, 2010
The American DVD is 100 minutes. These two DVDs are 95 and 97 minutes in length. I wonder what was cut.
Film runs at 24 frames per second. NTSC (used in America, Japan, etc) format DVDs run at 60 fields i.e. 30 frames per second, but thanks to the wonders of 3:2 pulldown (I'm not going to explain that here, but there are good explanations on the net if you're interested) the resulting playback is at the same speed as the original film. For PAL discs (used in parts of Europe, Australia amongst other places) they run at 50 fields per second, i.e. 25 frames per second. When film is converted to PAL format they simply have one film frame equal one DVD frame, so the movie runs at 25 fps rather than 24 and therefore plays around 4% faster (the pitch of the sound also rises because of this too, so unless it is corrected voices and music can sound wrong). None of this matters for HD releases as all HDTVs can accept 60Hz input and therefore movies either run at 30 or 24fps depending on the screen's capabilities.
Yeah, I believe some long movies are actually 10-15 minutes shorter in PAL compared to their identical NTSC counterparts. Blew my mind when I first read about that.
AFAIK, human perception won't be able to tell a difference that small with voices (at least most people can't) - this has to do with the brain "auto-correcting" the difference or something; the music, however, is another issue, if you know how it sounds in the original you propably will notice a difference. And you know what's really cruel? Play both (music tracks) at the same time. ...that hurts. I guess if you would play both voices at the same time you could notice it as well... But maybe they'll kinda "merge" in your perception to one normal sounding voice. Oh, yes. There even is (at least in PAL countries) a difference like that between the theatrical version and the TV or DVD release. This leads to people thinking something has been cut when really nothing has been cut. (Or, most of the times, making it harder to determine, how much actually has been cut, and people claiming a lot more had been cut than actually the case.)
Most of the time that's true, but in some cases it stands out (for example, men with voices that are already higher pitched than average, or voices that you are very familiar with).
The info is changed on the disc itself(datarate/FPS) If your player sees a PAL disc and recognizes it as PAL it'll output PAL to your TV. This is also an issue with the "NTSC playback on PAL TV" VCR's.
I know but that's not what I was talking about in that quote, I was talking about HD content on HD displays. Virtually all movies on Blu Ray will play back at either 60Hz or 24fps depending on whether your display supports 24p, the PAL/NTSC formats are not relevant for HD releases (except in a few cases with PAL format TV programs) as HD movies are not displayed at 50Hz .
