knq wrote: ↑Sat Dec 15, 2018 4:00 am
itasca00 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 15, 2018 3:16 am
So I have a fun question for anyone to answer if they're able: What is the runtime of your copy of
Interactive Introverts?
While working on timestamps for the directors' commentary, I discovered that the length of the film is not consistent across platforms. For the specific combination of platforms I was able to test (Blu-ray with directors' commentary on and Google Play), this discrepancy cannot be eliminated with a simple offset or scaling factor applied to the time. (So these versions of the movie don't just have different amounts of blank space at the beginning or end, and they don't just play at slightly different speeds). My hypothesis is that these different run times are the result of two slightly different cuts of the movie.
Below is the list of different runtimes I've been able to collect for different platforms. I'd be very interested to know if turning the directors' commentary on and off changes the runtime on the Blu-ray disc or DVD, and I'd be very interested to know whether the runtime of the DVD is any different than that of the Blu-ray disc.
- Google Play: 1:58:12 (I own)
- Amazon Prime Video: 2:03:13 (friend owns/source)
- iTunes: 1:58:12 (source)
- Blu-ray (with directors' commentary on): 2:06:19 (friend owns)
- Blu-ray (with directors' commentary off): ?
- DVD (with directors' commentary on): ?
- DVD (with directors' commentary off): ?
So the ITunes/Google Play time and the Blu-Ray time are a whole 8 minutes different? I’d suggest different playtimes had something to do with region, NTSC/PAL, or the BBC logo playing, but 8 minutes seems like a lot.
I just checked my DVD (region 1, NTSC) playtime: 2:03:08. It’s 13 “chapters” and the commentary is the same length exactly.
The blu-ray disc I can’t actually play.
Thank you for checking the DVD!
My first thought on this matter was: Maybe there's an offset due to blank space (or a logo) at the beginning/end. My second thought was: Maybe the different versions are just playing at slightly different speeds. Turns out, both of these things are happening:
- There's about an extra minute of stuff at the beginning of the Blu-ray version.
- If you synchronize and start playing the Blu-ray and Google Play versions, they very quickly go out of sync.
But this doesn't seem to be the whole story. I synchronized the two versions I'm working with at five different points covering the entire film, and I performed a linear regression on the two sets of timestamps. If there's just one offset at the beginning and the two versions are each playing at their own consistent rate, the function resulting from the regression should be able to take one set of timestamps and convert them into the other. But its predictions are inaccurate. See the data below:
Code: Select all
Blu-ray Google- Google- Diff.
-Actual Actual Predict (secs)
---------------------------------------
0:01:12 0:00:13 0:00:14 1
0:31:11 0:28:42 0:28:36 - 6
1:04:05 0:59:40 0:59:43 3
1:37:20 1:30:59 1:31:10 11
2:03:51 1:56:23 1:56:15 - 8
There are only two situations that I can think of that would explain these results:
- The rate at which the movie plays is inconsistent when the directors' commentary is turned on. I.e., it's sped up in certain parts and slowed down in others. I guess this could make sense if they're trying to make room for something Dan and Phil are saying or getting through parts of the film where they didn't say anything. However, this explanation seems technically infeasible, and it also seems like it would be visually and audibly noticeable when watching the film.
- There are (small) parts of the movie in one version that are not included in the other. I.e., there are two slightly different cuts of the movie out there.
I'm not sure I have the patience to go through the two versions I have to see if I can pin down exactly what's happening, but I am curious to know what the differences between the two versions are. It will also be interesting to see how these differences come into play when the Twitter watch party happens...
If anyone with a copy of
Interactive Introverts is bored, they could look up the timestamps for the audio cues I used to perform the regression above, and I could use those data to see which versions of the film match. My guess is that the DVD and Amazon Prime Video versions match the Blu-ray version, and the iTunes version matches the Google Play versions. But who can say for sure? If anyone wants to do this, the timestamps above will give you the approximate location within the film to look for the cues listed in the spoiler below.