Why High School Musical sounds "Autotuned"

I have figured it out!

I watched the rest of HSM last night, still annoyed and surprised by how Autotuned their voices sounded. When the last song "We're All In This Together" come in, I thought "Gee, that sounds higher in pitch than I have heard it before".

A quick check against the official music video on the DVD confirmed it, and I realised why all the singers had sounded massively Autotuned.

Part of the reason is that they HAD, of course. But the film was made for American TV - 30 frames per second, and the video standard here in Australia calls for 25 frames per second. To get the 30fps video into 25fps, you have to SPEED UP the video, hence the reason why the voices sounded high to me.

If the video wasn't sped up, the movie would blow out to 105 minutes.

The reasons why it is not more readily noticed are:

• Most American stuff we get on DVD isn't musical.
• That which is, is shot onto film, and film is 24 frames per second (very close to our 25fps)
• Most people are not musical, and therefore don't notice differences in pitch (my first draft had a description of these people which was less nice :-P)

In short, I'm not worrying about the DVD transfer of Hairspray, as that was shot directly to film, and undergoes almost no speed change to get it to 25fps.