MovieChat Forums > Cats Don't Dance (1997) Discussion > Widescreen version is not pitch correcte...

Widescreen version is not pitch corrected. not good for soundtrack...

posted 14 years ago by Sean_Pierce
3 replies | jump to latest

I finally imported my own copy from Amazon.de (Germany) since they finally got their widescreen version in 2007 or 2008 was it ... http://www.amazon.de/gp/offer-listing/B0015NDVES/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&qid=1285286723&sr=8-4&condition=new Bought it from "world-of-video" - recommended seller and probably the only seller that's willing to ship internationally outside of Germany/Europe.

But ya, got it August 2010 and was happy like seizures through the roof.

And don't ask how but I managed to play this on my North American Ps3 without any conversion. Quality is intact with the way it was mastered on this DVD. Sound and Visually. The picture was beautiful, upscaled to my 1080p HD TV. And the surround sound quality - what can I say, lossy but great.

BUT ... having heard the soundtrack so many times before, I could tell the PITCH of the ENTIRE MOVIE was just SLIGHTLY HIGHER.

That's the thing. Long story short, PAL DVDs plays at 4% speed faster than the original speed intended for technical reasons. That said, everything from dialogue to music, sound - is a teensey pitch higher. But since I've heard the soundtrack gazillion times, man it pains me to notice the pitch difference.

Hopefully it's barely noticeble for y'all lol. Unless you got a DVD player / PAL blu-ray player that has pitch correction ...

[–] dashpacek 14 years ago

THANK YOU!! Somebody finally notices it! I'm South African and we use the PAL system, however, the 4% speed increase is just a cheap technique to get the movie to move from 24 frames per second (film frame rate) to 25 (PAL frame rate), some DVD specialists think we won't notice, But I did. However it dosn't happen often, the only other time it did that, that I can think of, is the so called Gold Edition of Disney's Hercules (PAL)
They need to rerelease it in a better quality. I mean how else do they get film to work on NTSC DVDs (30 frames a second)?

[–] Sean_Pierce 14 years ago

Exactly. They worked their way in having 24 frames into a 30 frames by doing the 3:2 pull down (is that it?). I could careless about NTSC being 100 pixels less if it means the entire movie's PITCH and speed is kept ORIGINAL, not sped up.

I know it's just 1 frame away from PAL's 25 but I wish they would've worked into that.

When Sawyer sings "Tell Me Lies" in the movie especially, it bugs me that it's higher than I remembered along with the rest of the movie. It just bothers me so much because I listened to the CD soundtrack a lot!

I just hope that this movie gets a blu-ray release soon since All Dogs Go To Heaven got one. This way, this movie will be released in high-def widescreen (it doesn't need to be remastered in my opinion), DTS-HDMA 5.1 surround.

Sigh. There's a catch if you guys still want to import Germany's Cats Don't Dance widescreen copy if you don't mind the pitch anyway. I feel like buying the NTSC version just for the correct pitch ... sad. I know.

[–] [deleted] 3 years ago

I stuck to the NTSC version because they had the decency to not mess up the pitch. And I wouldn't give a shit if the NTSC version was in 4:3 or not.