Originally posted by: boris
Absolutely not! The picture may actually be greater quality, because they've stretched it (professionally) all the way to the sides of the display, whereas they haven't with the NTSC. Therefore, the thin black borders will distort the picture at the very edges right and left. Also the audio isn't a problem... technically they don't "speed it up" anymore anyway, what they do is they "stretch it" in a way that keeps the pitch consistent (rather then speeding it up, which raises the pitch slightly). Also, you get thicker scan-lines on NTSC which may bother some people, and the NTSC pulldown - which is far worse the speeding the movie up 1 frame per second.
Personally, I don't think it would be worth importing PAL if you live in NTSC-land either.
Absolutely not! The picture may actually be greater quality, because they've stretched it (professionally) all the way to the sides of the display, whereas they haven't with the NTSC. Therefore, the thin black borders will distort the picture at the very edges right and left. Also the audio isn't a problem... technically they don't "speed it up" anymore anyway, what they do is they "stretch it" in a way that keeps the pitch consistent (rather then speeding it up, which raises the pitch slightly). Also, you get thicker scan-lines on NTSC which may bother some people, and the NTSC pulldown - which is far worse the speeding the movie up 1 frame per second.
Personally, I don't think it would be worth importing PAL if you live in NTSC-land either.
I've read what you're saying about "stretching the picture to the edges" on two threads now and still don;t know what you mean. Some comparison screen shots would help to clarify. I don't see how you can gain resolution when you are upconverting from NTSC to PAL size, no matter what gets cropped off the edges. Thats like saying if you crop a JPG image to a section in the middle of the images and then stretch that up to the original images resolution, the second imag will be better quality. That defies all "digital" logic, surely?!
You're wrong about the audio anyway, your statement saying "they don't "speed it up" anymore anyway" is totally false. It has been done (very very occasionally) in the past (ie the PAL Faces LD and VHS releases back in '93) but when you listen to the audio on a high fidelity system, it sounds rubbish. No audio engineer with a clue would choose time stretching over just letting the audio be sped up these days, it makes things like the orchestral score sound horrible. PAL Pitch Correction of film soundtracks is to audio what NTSC 3:2 pulldown is to video, both give awful results.