They may have been referring to film (24 FPS) or its broadcast equivalent (23.976 FPS) being shifted to PAL, which is quite a bit smaller of a jump.

NTSC —> PAL can either be annoying, or difficult to manage without artifacts. If the NTSC source is telecined from a 23.976 source, you can invert that process to get the original back, and then deal with the minor time shift to PAL. If it’s pure NTSC, there’s a lot of filtering to be done to get an acceptable result. At least, last I played with it.