Hey TubeBar!
Though it should be noted not all PAL DVDs have sped up audio.
That's correct. One such region B, 'PAL' DVD is 'HILARY and JACKIE' [1998] AEN 6867449002095 [2007] (i.e., H&J). H&J was made from 24fps cinema, same as the 'NTSC'-soft versions, but it is not 'PAL'-fast. It is not Euro telecined via 13-12-13-12 pull-down, either. Every frame is combed! as though it was PAL TV. I don't know how they did it. Why they did it is obvious: J&C has a lot of music -- the film is about the cellist Jacqualine Du Pre -- and they needed the music to be right (i.e., not 72-cents sharp), so they found a way to put 24fps into 25fps while preserving the running time. Euro telecine would have done that, but it would have had 13 'progressive' frames followed by 12 combed frames, and so on -- Granted: Euro telecine is awful. But this disc has every frame combed(?)
BTW, 100-cents is from C to C# for example. So 72-cents sharp takes C 72% of the way to C#. That's way too much for musicians to tolerate.
I have a few that were straight NTSC conversions w/ frame blending interlaced video.
I assume you refer to 30/1.001fps telecine (what I call 'NTSC'-hard) with 2-3-2-3 (or 3-2-3-2) pull-down.
I even have a few newer ones (they are Japanese Anime PAL releases) that are progressive 25fps using some type of frame blending as they run identical to the NTSC versions.
Well, if they were shot (or synthesized) in 25fps, progressive, then they would look just like the NTSC versions and with the same running time. After all, Japanese Anime is not cinema.
But you may be right about blending. After all, anime would be a lot easier to interpolate than actual analog film would be. Oh, I've done it with VapourSynth, but going from 24 to 25 would be quite difficult. (What I did with VapourSynth was 24 to 120 but edge artifacts sometimes ruined motion sequences that had strong vertical repetitions such as picket fences -- it is a well known hinderance.)
Neither of those are running any faster. Some PAL movies are sped up but the pitch is preserved so playing it back at 24 would result in a lower pitch.
Yes, the pitch is preserved (as is the case for H&J), and, for what it's worth, playing at 24fps would result in 72-cents flat, however, why every frame is combed is a mystery to me. That universal combing pretty much eliminates interpolation as the technique used in H&J, eh?
I have concluded that ReClock is simply to turn 'PAL'-fast into cinema. I've done that with ffmpeg for a long time simply by remuxing and resampling audio and subtitles.
I have some 'NTSC'-hard & -soft movies that I think may have originated as PAL. They have very strange 'telecine' that repeat some frames and comb some frames but with no pattern except that there is always an odd number of combed frames. I suspect that some tool analyzed frames and chose where to put the telecine to make the result as smooth as possible.