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A question of comic timing

18th November, 2007

A British ROM COM without Hugh Grant, is that as much risk as it used to be? Well Director Col Spector didn’t think so when he shot the movie Someone Else a couple of years ago in Super 35mm.

The film is a kind of Bridget Jones for men and relies heavily for its ‘COM’ on ... timing. Not a problem at the time of the shoot or at the film transfer stage but it was when Col went to get a DVD copy made that the full impact of the ‘mis’-timing hit him.

“We shot at 24 fps as normal but when you author for DVD for PAL you end up at 25 fps which is perfectly standard. However the result is that your film is shorter which made ours 72 minutes from the original 78, so it was quite short already. “But that wasn’t the worst problem. When the film was sped up to 25 fps it wasn’t funny anymore! The humour relies on lots of space around the words and when there is this condensing of time it really doesn’t work as it should.”

This was obviously a major problem for Col, to have a ROM COM but without the COM! “I talked to a lot of people about this problem, everyone said it wasn’t possible to transfer to 25fps without speeding up the film, but I had heard of On Sight and decided to see what they could do with some DVDs I needed for festivals and publicity.”

On Sight were able to transfer the movie using their Snell & Wilcox UKON conversion platform which smoothed the transfer without any visible speeding up.

“I can’t say enough about how efficient and professional On Sight were – even their DVD authoring looks better than anywhere else I’ve used.”

On Sight’s UKON was used for the master to author the final DVD - which is out now.