Was reading about changed in the Star Wars trilology when I read that some of the original Star Wars releases on CED and LD are time compressed meaning they were sped up slighly to prevent the time from going over a 2 disc span. In this case they were sped up 3%.




http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ ... e-releases

Yeah, I think that happened quite a bit in the early days of home video to keep costs down. Of course if you live in PAL regions we've always had to make do with PAL speedup (not sure how much it's been sped up, I'm sure someone here can tell you) and in some cases we still do, the UK release of The King's Speech on Blu Ray had PAL speedup! Thankfully it's becoming pretty rare here now.

Or alternative PAL slowdown. I've seen some video games released your way that are unbearably slow, because they were designed for 60hz, and just released slowed down at 50hz. Very irritating.

Didnt they just do that near the end of the movie or is it throughout?

That's quite common with PAL Nes-games.

Time compression was done across the entire film. CBS/Fox was nortorious for this during the early 80's performing time compression on not only the first two Star Wars films, but on the bulk of the James Bond catalog. The worst offender in the James Bond library is "The Spy Who Loved Me". MCA/Universal did a handful of time compressions too (Jaws and Battlestar Galactica). I believe Disney did a couple of time compression releases too (Bedknobs and Broomsticks).

It's interesting to note that all of the Japanese versions of these same titles were NOT time compressed.

Japanese release of Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell pops first to my mind.

How noticeable is this time compression?

Speaking of different numbers of disc for the same movie, what's up with Indiana Jones and the temple of doom? All of the Us-version's I've seen has two disc (regardless if it's CLV or CAV) but all of the Japanese editions of it I've seen has just one disc but the same runtime? Does the two-disc editions have better side break?

jamisonia: Nearly every PAL-release of any movie is speed up with about 4%, it's mainly noticable in background music or if you've seen the movie many times in its original speed. Whenever whatching a movies with PAL speed up, you usually don't even think about it so I don't think that a speed up at 3% would ruin anyone's experience with the film.

The UK trilogy box set version I have is on one disc though parts of it are censored.

PAL speed up for Europeans is hard to notice as we grew up with it. However as nissling said when you hear music it is noticable. A good example is hippiedalek's Queen live in Budapest disc. Right from the first song it is obvious. The last example I remeber is when the Nirvana live in Paramount concert came out and which was shot on film and an Australian satellite feed surfaced on the net. If you can get that and you have the original disc you can compare. Each song is seconds shorter.

I've never really noticed the speedup with music but the purest in me has been tempted to get the Japanese release of Queen Live In Budapest.

Yes, "Missing" is time compressed from 122 minutes to 116 minutes. As with other titles discussed, the Japanese edition runs the full 122 minutes. You do have to have the subtitles however.

Paramount was wacked when they did "Temple of Doom". For the CLV, you got better side breaks, but they didn't want to produce a 3 disc set for the CAV edition.

When CBS/Fox did the first CAV editions of "Star Wars" and "Empire Strikes Back", they mastered the discs from the existing time compressed CLV transfers, which would have produced a 2 disc set. When they went and played them, the time compression totally screwed up the 3/2 pull-down, so every frame would jitter - defeating the entire reason for CAV! So they went to the uncompressed film-to-tape transfer (probably for VHS) and remastered the titles - and increased the price too.

The titles were repressed a number of times. I do not know why they never 'completed' the trilogy and issued Jedi. The Japanese CAV trilogy was pretty cool, and had Digital Sound. And the subtitles stayed in the black banding of the letterbox video, which was nice. The first CLV Widescreen versions of Star Wars in the US were taken from the same film-to-tape transfers as the Japanese CAV discs.

I think because it may be against the actor's contract, or it may cost them too much to severly time compress the credits.

question- are there any players where you can slow down the speed of the film, if you only have a version thats time compressed? and how would you know if a movie is time compressed, by looking at the box? will it normally say, like they do with aspect ratio?

something like that would annoy me, even if its 3%. I wanna see it exactly the way the director wanted you to watch it

I don' know of any player that can slow it down. And most to find out if it is compressed or not is to check the running time and compare it with imdb's running time. It is still not the best option, as some UK movies are indeed cut, but also it fools people to think the EU version is cut when it is only sped up.

If you compare it with the CD or LP release (only the tracks from Budapest on them) you can see/hear it. As for me just as One Vision starts it is obvious. The pitch is just not right. I also want to get the japanese release one day. There are however two releases and the '99 release is listed 90 minutes also. What I am hoping is that the later release is a better film transfer.

What I will soon try is to digitalize the UK disc and then slow it down to 24 fps and resample the audio to match the speed.