There are a number of speed-corrected vintage film clips on Youtube. Here’s an example from late-1890s France:
While not upscaled, they are still pretty impressive, and interesting to watch.
While not upscaled, they are still pretty impressive, and interesting to watch.
It always struck me as odd that those old b/w clips were often shown playing too fast on TV. Isn't it more like they were simply recorded at lower fps rates? Then how can you call this speed correcting, when you merely just played them at the wrong frame rate before, just because TV is 25/30/50/60/59.4i² frames/fields per second and you didn't want to convert it in any way. And then suddenly a few years ago these speed corrected versions started to pop up on the internet, like "hey we just fixed the past, people didn't actually move twice as fast back then!"
I guess I just don't like the term, but maybe there is more to it.
As an anecdote, I remember when I was a kid (early 80s) my uncle who collected old cameras and projectors exchanged with me an old hand cranked pathe-baby projector for a solar powered calculator. The projector was working properly and had a few films cassettes and they were supposed to be played back at variable hand cranking speeds according to the scenes. It was an interesting experience to play those films back to my family in the only room that had absolute darkness, in the kitchen.
But with the slowness of film stocks and high cost of film, this was a non-starter. Economics dictated shooting closer to the threshold of the illusion, and most silent films were filmed around 16-18 frames per second (fps), then projected closer to 20-24 fps. This is why motion in those old silent films is so comical, the film is sped up.”
https://www.filmindependent.org/blog/hacking-film-24-frames-...
Another take on film speeds says that films were projected at a variety of speeds, depending on the original filming as well as the economics of fitting multiple showings into a schedule. https://web.archive.org/web/20110724032550/http://www.cinema...
This was a result of both the mechanics of the time, and the style, as other people have posted.
"Speed correcting," therefore, is simply an attempt to view these at natural speeds, even though this may not have been the expectation (or intent) of the filmmakers.