Somewhat OT: Can someone enlighten me why exactly we need to "speed correct" them in the first place?

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.

“ While the illusion of motion works at 16 fps, it works better at higher frame rates. Thomas Edison, to whom we owe a lot of debt to for this whole operation (light bulbs, motion picture film, Direct Current, etc.) believed that the optimal frame rate was 46 frames per second. Anything lower than that resulted in discomfort and eventual exhaustion in audience. So Edison built a camera and film projection system that operated at at a high frame rate.

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...

Old film was less sensitive, so it needed longer exposure time. Film was therefore cranked slowly to avoid under-exposure. During playback, it was generally preferred to run the film slightly quickly than to have a lower frame-rate (which would have made motion jerky)

It doesn't really appear that jerky after being slowed down. My taste apparently differs from people's in the past, since I'd rather have it that way than sped up...

Early film cameras were hand cranked, so the actual speed of the film was all over the place. I assume it was just too much of a hassle to manually correct the speed of these films, so they didn't bother.

It wasn't all over the place (in professional productions). Rather, it was an important part of the craft of cinematography to adjust the speed of cranking to fit the mood of a scene. Experienced cinamatographers would vary the speed even during a take, envisioning how the film would look when projected at standard speed - slower crank, faster movement, and vice versa.

But that does make it all over the place even if intentional

Probably in the same way that a visitor from the past would find the volume all over the place in a modern movie, or the lighting.

You put a nice twist on it and I almost agree. I think "all over the place" is more closely related to ideas like disordered, indiscriminate, every which way, unsystematic -- you could intentionally create a work that looks unsystematic, but that's not the case for the people and films we were discussing.

I agree that all over the place doesn't imply intentional or not. In this case all over the place had a human artistry twist and the final product as a piece was not all over the place but the framerate itself was.

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.

That's a great anecdote, and now I will not be satisfied until I too own a Pathé-Baby projector. The curse of knowledge.

https://library.princeton.edu/pathebaby/node/2245

If I remember correctly you could go backwards too. The film would collect a glass covered container inside the projector's body and when the film was over you had to crank it back inside the cassette.

I feel like others have probably replied well enough, but to add: you seem to be under the impression that they are only "too fast" because modern TVs play them at the wrong frame rate. On the contrary, contemporary audiences in theaters also saw them move "too fast."

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.

Peter Jackson made a whole ww1 movie using these techniques (documentary).