A Tale of Two Sisters

[RainyDog]

Originally Posted by Bruce Morrison

Another question for you, Hugh. I've just received my Blu-ray copies of 'Sympathy For Mr Vengeance' and 'Lady Vengeance'. They both have exactly the same running times as Tartan's corresponding Region 2 PAL DVD editions. But PAL DVDs normally run 4% too fast as they are encoded at 25fps.

So are these Blu-ray editions also running at 25fps - or were your PAL DVDs somehow running at the correct speed after all?

According to the IMDB, the correct running time for 'Sympathy For Mr Vengeance' is 121 minutes, which matches the running time on your DVD and Blu-ray. So it seems that there isn't a problem - but I'm puzzled as to how your PAL DVDs were apparently running at 24fps rather than the usual 25fps! Can you explain this?

Have you checked the actual running times or just going by the listings on the cases? Many UK blu-rays just port the case info from their UK DVD counterparts and are hence wrong as the DVD's were PAL and 4% shorter.

I've not seen the UK DVD's of Sympathy... or Lady Vengeance (I own the US ones), but another and more likely scenario is that they were NTSC>PAL conversions which meant they ran at the original speed but suffered from standards conversion artefacts (interlacing, image ghosting etc). Tartan were notorious for this.

EDIT: Just rechecked the ...Vengeance discs in BDInfo and the running times are definitely correct. So it must've been the UK DVD's that were NTSC>PAL standards conversions.