Speaking as a former film/tv editor, one frame here or there can definitely affect the pacing and feel of a scene. Yes, sometimes external constraints—broadcast formats, licensing issues—can force compromises, but it's still an artistic decision where to cut a frame and where to keep one.
Much better to adjust coloring slightly in central but low entropy parts of occasional, appropriate frames, sort of like Omron rings[1], but designed specifically to be visually inconspicuous while surviving encoding.
The newish CineFence supposedly does something like this. In any case it wouldn't be hard to improve on the horrible Deluxe code.[2]
Now I'm eagerly awaiting a colorist jumping into this conversation to tell us why that would be unacceptable. (Agreed that it's probably less of an issue to encode data in color than timing, but it just strikes me as funny how we've passed the buck from programmer > editor > colorist)
Much better to adjust coloring slightly in central but low entropy parts of occasional, appropriate frames, sort of like Omron rings[1], but designed specifically to be visually inconspicuous while surviving encoding.
The newish CineFence supposedly does something like this. In any case it wouldn't be hard to improve on the horrible Deluxe code.[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy