Running Time

I have had the difference be quite significant in two seperate copies of "Flesh and The Devil" that I own. Everything's intact onm both copies, but the Milestone release is a little over five minutes longer then the one I dvd recorded off Turner classic movies.












"Remember to deliver with the speed of light a little bit of love and joy...."

Itarex is correct, frame rate can have a big impact on a film's running time. On celluloid there is a small gap between frames and if a film was transferred like that directly onto video there would be a flickering of the image. To combat this, video frames are interlaced and because of the interlace 30 frames fit into each second on video. To preserve the original running time of a movie, a film to video transfer would then require every fourth frame to be duplicated so that only 24 individual frames from the film are included in each second. With silent films, since there is no audio that needs to sync up, a lot of film transfers were done lazily without duplicating every fourth fame and thus 30 frames of the film are now packed into each second. If shown six frames per second faster that means that after only four seconds the film would be already running one second faster than if the film were shown at the usual 24 frame rate. Over the course of a 90 minute movie, those seconds really add up. If a 90 minute movie is on video at 30 frames per second then the movie's total running time would be cut by 18 minutes. A lot of DVD's of films in the public domain, which include a lot of silent films, are produced very cheaply. Since film to DVD transfer is expensive and a tape to DVD transfer is far cheaper, many of the public domain films are simply transferred from old VHS copies that were often times at the 30 frames per second rate which explains why a lot of the DVD's also have varying running times.