Were old TV shows routinely sped up for some reason?
I have recently made a habit of waking up early, and as a by-product spend my mornings catching re-runs of The Donna Reed Show. I've noticed in a number of episodes, though not necessarily all of them, that the video seems to be sped up; characters either seem to speak too quickly, or their movements look rather stop-motiony. If a specific example is needed, The Foundling was the first instance of this I noticed.
Was there a habit of speeding up TV shows back in the day? Or maybe this is a choice made by the channel broadcasting the re-runs for commercial reasons?
Best Answer
Old television shows were shot using motion picture film of that era, and were shot at either 24 or 25 frames per second. Television video today is played at 30 frames per second.
The speed problems you see are artifacts of the conversion process. The shows you watched might have been converted to television during the 1950's when kinescopes were largely used to do the conversions.
Most television networks that show these old TV shows are using video footage that was already converted from film. If that conversion was off or done for a different format, then correcting the problem would reduce the quality of the video (which is already of poor quality).
It's like trying to fix a photocopy of a picture by making another photocopy. You're just moving away from the quality of the original.
So the television networks broadcast the video "as is" because it's the best copy they have.
Pictures about "Were old TV shows routinely sped up for some reason?"
Why do old footage look sped up?
The films were then shown to audiences using a 16fps projector. Today when we see the videos play, they run not at 16fps, but at 24fps, so instead of having 16 frames taking up a full second of time, it's compressed to . 67 seconds which gives the illusion of a sped up film.Are old TV shows sped up?
It's said that time speeds up as we get older. The same is now apparently true for old TV shows. Actress Courtney Cox, who starred in the series "Friends," noticed it while watching a rerun of one her old shows.Why do old TV shows look different?
For broadcast TV, video is delivered to your set at a rate of 60 "fields" per second. One field can represent an interlaced mash-up of two frames so that motion appears more fluid. Until recently, all TVs had a standard refresh rate of 60Hz to match up perfectly with the rate at which that stream feeds into your set.Why do TV shows look different now?
The combination of the frame rate and the image quality of film is what makes a big difference in the overall look of movies and higher quality TV shows. Today many TV shows and movies are made with digital cameras.tv girl - not allowed (sped up;pitched)
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Answer 2
Many cable channels are using video compression technology to speed up reruns so they can fit in more ads. Here's a story in the WSJ about this practice, citing as examples a showing of the movie The Wizard of Oz, and reruns of Seinfeld and Friends, the latter on TVLand where The Donna Reed Show has aired. So that channel definitely has made use of the practice.
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