PALling around

So the word is that while movies are shot at 24 frames per second, quite a few countries follow a TV standard called PAL – which displays 50 “fields” per second. One field actually is updating only half the screen (e.g., every odd line of pixels, then every even line) in a process called interlacing – that way you only need to store 25 frames per second but the visual effect is very much like a 50-Hz recording. The clever might have already noticed that that 25 is not equal to 24, and in fact there is a common solution to this problem: international releases of films in countries following PAL are generally sped up about 4%. Audio is slightly higher-pitched and faster, action quicker, film shorter.

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