I watched the PAL edition of independence day this evening and thought it was interesting that side 3 CLV ran for 63minutes and 40seconds. Side 2 in CAV ran for 53,000 frames which also seems very long.

Considering my PAL release of commando runs for about 62 minutes on one side can PAL discs hold more per side than NTSC? I had always thought the runtime was limited to more or less 60 minutes.

I've come across a disc (NTSC) that ran for 53940 frames on CAV.

I think PAL can have a tiny bit longer running time because of the format differences. 62 minutes might be the most you can squeeze into the disc.

PAL discs have a slightly longer running time, I'm guessing it's due to the lack of an analog audio track (which also allows for the greater resolution of PAL).

The longest side I've encountered so far is the first side of Star Trek: The Pilots [PLTES 34071] at 63:55, not too much more than Independence Day. I've got the same ID4 disc, I hadn't realised it ran so long.

What is the max frame count for a CAV NTSC disc? Any common titles with really long sides?

The difference in time of CAV NTSC vs PAL is because of the framerate of the standard. The number of frames on a CAV side is fixed (pal or ntsc) at 54,000 by spec (see attached excerpt from pioneer tuning for #6, the page # is the pdf page, not the actual book page).

54000 / 30 fps / 60 seconds = 30 minutes
54000 /25 fps / 60 seconds = 36 minutes

(note all specs are frames not fields, each track on a CAV disc holds 2 fields or 1 frame, the standards are 60/50 fields per sec = 30/25 frames per sec).

The audio difference is because the video bandwidth is higher on PAL, so they left out one or the other audio channels.

That's interesting to note about the CLV discs, maybe it is similar to "overburn" on writeable CDs...

Not really a common title, but the one I saw that have 53940 frames is Record of Lodoss War: vol.1 (1990) [VILF-1]. Since there is 60 frames left, it would be something like 2 seconds left. I'd say it is pretty much full if 54000 frames is max. Haven't seen any other disc that go that far on CAV, yet.

The longest frame count I can recall on a CAV NTSC disc is 54014, side 1 of "Olivia: Physical"

For a list of very, very long running time per side, there was a previous topic:

What is the longest side on any Laserdisc?

Julien

Is the running time CLV 60(ntsc) vs 64(PAL) minutes due to the field/frame rate? or is it due to the fact that in PAL a discs speed is slower at the edges of the disc? I don't know, just asking.

I think both? Because I guess the speed is slower because the framerate is slower so you don't need to fit as much data in per unit time, so the disc can run slower.