question about time compression (1 Viewer)

[DaneClark]

When The Super Mario Bros Super Show aired on The Family Channel back in the early 90s, they slowed all the episodes down to make up for cutting out the Zelda preview. They were somehow able to do this without changing the pitch of the audio. The question is - if the technology to change the speed of a show without effecting the pitch of the audio already existed back then, why wasn't it used more often? Because in those days most time-sped syndication prints being made still had that annoying helium effect

 

[mattfire64]

Perhaps they were hoping no one would notice the "helium" effect, or most distributors were too lazy to go back and make new copies of their shows.

One infamous example that has been discussed around here recently is Combat!, which was released on DVD using timesped prints since the master prints weren't able to be restored for one reason or another. Combat's timesped prints were made back in the mid-80s, yet they don't seem to suffer from the helium effect, just sometimes characters seeming to talk faster than they should.

 

[bigshot]

I suspect that the time compressed masters they are using were done for syndication in the 90s and might have been compressed on equipment that wasn't capable of pitch correction. I worked on a show that had to be compressed for syndication back then, and there wasn't any option to re pitch.

 

[Vahan_Nisanain]

Time compression and/or slow down was also, believe it or not, part of original broadcasts of some shows as early as the 1980's. Examples:

* At least one episode of Riptide ("Be True to Your School") was sped up.
* A few episodes of The Simpsons were time-sped originally to make way for music videos.
* When you're watching episodes of Friends that you recorded from the original NBC broadcasts, you may have noticed some very minor sequences being sped up.
* And some episodes of Miami Vice ran quite slow originally, because they ran too short without the slow-down.

 

[Neil Brock]

Perhaps they were hoping no one would notice the "helium" effect, or most distributors were too lazy to go back and make new copies of their shows.

One infamous example that has been discussed around here recently is Combat!, which was released on DVD using timesped prints since the master prints weren't able to be restored for one reason or another. Combat's timesped prints were made back in the mid-80s, yet they don't seem to suffer from the helium effect, just sometimes characters seeming to talk faster than they should.

The "one reason or another" was Image didn't want to pay to go back to the 35mm prints and have them transferred again.

 

[mattfire64]

Hmm, I read in an old thread on here that the 35mm prints were "in bad shape" and out of Image's budget to properly restore them. Of course, that could have been a fancy way of saying they didn't want to fork over the cash to restore them though...