> Behalf Of Ronn Blankenship > > > > > Are you sure? For NTSC, I think that a frame is 1/60 of a sec and a > > > field is 1/30 of a sec (NTSC is interlaced). It is hard to tell if a > > > single blank field is there or not. > > > > > > I'm not sure what it is for PAL, but probably about the same. > > > > I'm not either. Though it couldn't be much shorter, or the picture would > flicker. >
PAL refreshes at 50 frames per second. It is quite usual that US TV viewers when first confronted with PAL register a flickering for a while until they become used to the different display rate. But then most US TV viewers when first encountering PAL get swept up with seeing far better detail (525 lines v 450?) and way better colour. In TV talk, NTSC is known as Never Twice Same Colour. > Does your current VCR have frame-by-frame capability? (One of mine, the > then-top-of-the-line Sony, does.) If so, you could take a tape > of a movie > that seemed to you not to have any break between the program and the > commercial, run it to just before the break, then step through > frame-by-frame to see if there were any black frames in between. > > There is usually a slight gap between the commercials and the TV show proper: commercials are usually racked up on a separate machine in cassettes/cartridges and a control signal is sent within the TV station to trigger the commercial. At least, that was how my then Videotape Operator brother showed me a few years back at Channel 9. Sometimes a movie is copied with the commercials already inserted, but with networking that is much less common because the network stations usually play their own local commercials. > > >With some movies there were instances were we were totally > confused about the > >continuity in a scene, only to realise a few seconds later that we were > >looking > >at commercials instead of movie. > Easiest way to tell it's a commercial is by the sound quality. Commercials always seem to be much louder. The TV stations here keep saying they do NOT increase the volume during the broadcast. Instead, they evidently have some sort of machine or filter that changes the commercial's sound so that it stands out from the background programme. > > Yeah. And what's even worse is when the commercial makes more sense than > the movie it interrupted . . . ;-) > Half the time, the commercial's director may well be the same person as the movie's director. At least, here in Oz, that is how most of the directors start out, from Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, etc) and Fred Schepisi, to Russell Mulcahy (Highlander), Alex Proyas (Dark City) to Ray Lawrence (Bliss, Lantana). > > Remember: the only reason they make the program at all is to > entice you to > see the commercials. A very major reason I'm glad we have the two public funded networks, ABC and SBS. Although SBS now carries commercials (as distinct from programme promos) but at least they run their commercials ONLY between programmes, not within them. Brett
