SKot

PM sent to Puggo.

g-force said:

Zion said:

Not sure if anyone else noticed this, but Rifftrax.com just released a “NEW high-ish quality VHS Transfer” of the SWHS. I wonder what version they used.

https://www.rifftrax.com/the-star-wars-holiday-special

Have you not seen the broadcast master EditDroid gave us a couple years ago, Zion? It has about 4 times the resolution of that Rifftrax clip.

-G

In fact, Zion did a hybrid version based on the EditDroid transfer which included the optional RiffTrax commentary and commercials. Doesn’t look like RiffTrax used that one, but they should have. I’m curious as well what version they used. I bought a copy, so I’ll see if I can glean any information from it.

–SKot

Sent a new donation in the other week - I’m mentioning it now to encourage more others to do the same. This is one of the best projects out there.

–SKot

Too bad I didn’t know about this just a little sooner - I was just in Hollywood over Memorial Day weekend and the following two days and could probably have spoken to you there.

I’m in Oregon. I’ll contact you privately to discuss contact details. (By the way, you may want edit your post to remove your phone number since this board is very public and may invite unwanted calls.)

–SKot

Hi, Steve…have I heard from you previously? I run the website starwarsholidayspecial.com. If you have questions or need advice on anything, I’ll be happy to help out where I can.

Is there a reason you’re sticking strictly to Southern California people for this?

–SKot

pittrek said:

There’s so much more fun with the scenes…
I am now working on a scene from Conscience of the King, the dialogue with Lenore. When I’m going through it frame by frame, I see things like misaligned channels, “ghosting” which can be found only in the green channel, sometimes the movement is “weird”, for example Lenore’s hand moves, but in one frame only a part of her hand moves, and the rest of the hand moves in the next frame - almost like bad deinterlacing.
Also there are many scenes, which are “squished” for some reason, almost all of them have compression artifacts …
And I’m not going to even talk about the fact that EVERY scene is ruined by huge annoying yellow text saying very intelligent things like “Deleted scene”, “Omitted dialogue”, “alternate take”… Oh really? This is a release for people who have seen TOS a million times before, why are you degrading the quality of the video even more?

Also the transfer… I was very nervous when Denise was saying things like “we telecineed the reels” and “DVD”, but I was hoping that it was just a simple human error. Nope, it looks like they telecined the reels and encoded them to DVDs for the Okudas to catalogue properly, and instead of going back, scanning it properly on a proper 1080p scanner they aparently used the 10 years old DVDs 😦

And people don’t like when I say that CBS are a bunch of (self censorship) who don’t want to invest in Star Trek a cent more than absolutely necessary.

Still, I am happy I have it, I love deleted scenes from absolutely anything, and this release has scenes I was hoping to see when I first read about them online some 20 years ago, so…

From what I’ve seen, none of those additional problems surprise me. This is probably the biggest botch job I’ve ever seen on a commercial release.

Of course, I’m happy as well to see these scenes at long last. Having lived with the regular episodes of Star Trek my entire life, it’s great to finally have a few more little windows to peer into.

But at the same time, it’s like someone gave you the best birthday cake you’ve ever had and always hoped for, but then tells you the frosting is made of poo.

–SKot

^…^ said:

I’m not a super expert but, until some of them would chime in, I could write down something that may turn useful.

VCR: if possible, go with S-VHS. Stay with JVC or Panasonic. An industrial model would be better, but head life could be too high, so keep this in mind. If you are lucky, you could find one from a school, so * probably * not heavily used. Don’t forget TBC!

I can add also that you could get a more than decent TBC using a DVD recorder as pass-through; there is a nice thread on the lddb forum.

Interesting…I wasn’t even aware of TBC before and had to look that one up. I just watched some clips on YouTube of TBC vs. non-TBC capturing, and the difference is notable, especially with damaged tapes. But how/where do you get a TBC unit, and what should I look for there?

Capture card: before getting mine, I did my homework, and found some interesting models; the one I get are the Sweetspot (aka PDI Deluxe) and the Aja Kona/Xena; the latter were top of the line, high end product worth thousand $$$, but you can find them used, often in pristine state, for few bucks. Also Blackmagic made great cards; I’d go with the internal versions, if possible.

So I’m guessing the Diamond cards I have are probably consumer-grade piles of crap in comparison (which is to be expected). I’ve also heard a lot of people using Hauppage cards in the past for serious capturing.

Last thing: a nice bit-perfect audio card will be the icing on the cake; maybe not so important to grab VHS audio, if your current one is good enough, but essential to capture PCM, AC3 and DTS from laserdisc!

I have yet to make any forays into laserdisc capturing, but there are a few titles (mostly music titles: ABC’s “Mantrap”, Kate Bush (anything), Tom Waits “Big Time”) that don’t exist on digital that I would love to have great captures of. The trouble is I don’t own the LD or a player, and the discs are crazy rare and expensive as well. So at this time at least I’m not looking to capture from LD.

Alternately, are there any serious services out there that do high-end captures from VHS that already have the equipment needed? I know there’s plenty of mom-and-pop video transfer services, but 99% of those are just doing family stuff and are not going to be high quality results. I’d certainly be willing to pay a premium to get someone that could do a far better transfer than I could ever do, so that I could have my digital backup in archival quality.

–SKot

I have a fair number of personal VHS capture projects piling up that I want to get done once and for all. I am also hoping to preserve them in the highest quality I can afford.

Currently I have a couple of Diamond capture cards (one internal, one external USB) that seem to be pretty capable of doing the job - however, if there are any cards that are significantly better for this task, I’d love to hear about it.

The VCR I have at present is not adequate (single head, no S-VHS output), so I definitely need to seek out a better one. I know I’m going to want a 4-head player with Stereo HiFi and S-VHS out. I just don’t know what brand or model I should be trying to seek out (or avoid). These days there are tons of players in thrift stores to be had for fairly cheap.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

–SKot

FanFiltration said:
Contains Reels #1,#2,#3 in dark fuzzy VHS defective non-quality.
Also has a brief edit of a number of out-takes from reels #1-#4 taken from some 1980’s bloopers show. These out-takes contain added (stupid) sound effects and an annoying laugh track. This is not the Reel #5 (“Forty Years of Science Fiction Television Featuring: Star Trek”) compilation. This is something else altogether. A shorter version of this outtake compilation is on YouTube in about the same bad quality. This edit just has more scenes. Also, this tape includes some of the NBC per-premiere promos in bad quality.

You have been warned!

I figured this one would be crappy. Generally I try to avoid any releases with bad xeroxing on colored paper, and this one fit the bill.

However, those outtakes you’re talking about: are they actually TOS outtake material that’s not included on any of Maab’s sources above? Because if so, then they should be preserved anyway, even with the bad quality and overdubs. At least until a better source can be found. On the other hand, if it’s just excerpts from the same blooper reels but in poorer quality, then let it die.

Do you have a link to the shorter version on YouTube?

–SKot

Maab said:

Well, here are my preservation files, used for the video I uploaded on YouTube some time ago and now no longer available. They are all sourced from various VHS (I have several, original and copies), and for each one I tried to select the best source, sometimes mixing differnt parts coming from different sources. I also did some video adjustment and color crrection but the final result is still bad.

Reel 0: excerpt from the “Star Trek 25th Anniversary Special” (includes scenes from reels 1-2-3-4)
http://www.marcellorossi.info/Blooper0.mp4

Reel 1: first part of the first season, probably made for 1966 Christmas holiday’s party
http://www.marcellorossi.info/Blooper1.mp4

Reel 2: full first season, includes scenes from reel 1 and the happy birthday video for Roddenberry’s wife Eileen at the end
http://www.marcellorossi.info/Blooper2.mp4

Reel 3: second season
http://www.marcellorossi.info/Blooper3.mp4

Reel 4: third season, includes scenes from reels 1 and 3
http://www.marcellorossi.info/Blooper4.mp4

Reel 5: compilation of reel 1-2-3 with better quality, released on VHS within the documentary “Forty Years of Science Fiction Television Featuring: Star Trek”
http://www.marcellorossi.info/Blooper5.mp4

EXTRAS
Outtakes compilation
http://www.marcellorossi.info/Outtake.mp4 (no audio)

Scene 29D: unused take from “Whom Gods Destroy” released on startrekhistory.com website (http://startrekhistory.com/article2.html)
http://www.marcellorossi.info/UnusedTake.mp4 (no audio)

Dailies from “The Cage”. Released on startrekhistory.com website (http://startrekhistory.com/cagepage.html), those were used on the “E! Mysteries & Scandals” Jeffrey Hunter documentary (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0567719/), I suppose they were in possession of Hunter’s family
http://www.marcellorossi.info/TheCage.mp4 (no audio)

Audio bloopers
http://www.marcellorossi.info/AudioBloopersLP.zip

According to my research, this is all the behind the scenes material available, aside from the official releases (“Billy Blackburn’s Treasure Chest” and the wonderful Roddenberry Vault boxset).

Many thanks for that, Maab!

This is the kind of thing I had in mind with this thread: compiling the the best sources for the bloopers that we know of, possibly with some editing done to add in missing bits or bits from better sources.

–SKot

SKot said:

litemakr said:

The vault footage is presented in a rather outdated SD transfer. None of it is in HD, even on the blu-ray. There are lots of digital artifacts. So that makes doing any color correction or restoration much more difficult because so much resolution and color information just isn’t there. I don’t know if they intentionally used substandard transfers to specifically prevent fans from restoring it into the episodes, or if they were just too cheap to make new HD transfers. I’m betting it’s the latter reason. Either way, it’s a huge shame because even faded 35mm footage would have looked much better with a modern HD transfer.

Well that is very disheartening. And it makes me not want to buy the Roddenberry Vault discs now. What good is throwing something onto Blu-ray if you’re not going to bother even transferring it in HD?

At least the Star Wars Blu-ray set has the deleted scenes in stunning 1080p HD resolution, warts and all. I own it for nearly that alone.

–SKot

Well, I broke down and bought the Roddenberry Vault finally…and while it was nice to see the 30 minutes or so of trims, the quality is indeed greatly disappointing…worse than I expected, even. And I’m not talking about their unrestored state with scratches, burn marks, fading, etc., because that’s part of the charm of those old film segments. I’m talking about the transfers themselves. The clips that are embedded in the documentaries are the worst: not only are they in a squashed aspect ratio somehow, but the frame rate is choppy and there is a horrible combing effect going on like you would see with interlacing problems, leading to lots of stair-stepping on the edges of everything. The clips that are stand-alone are mercifully spared the combing effect, but are still plagued by the squashed aspect ratio and a bit of stair-stepping on edges as well. And of course they’re all in SD rather than HD, which was expected but still disappointing considering it’s the primary reason for purchasing this whole BD set (though I understand the included episodes may be botched as well, with parts of the audio mix missing in some cases).

Just two questions about it come to mind:

• How did they manage to eff the transfers up so badly?
• Who is responsible for greenlighting this obviously botched product?

Offhand, I’d like to blame CBS/Paramount even though it’s probably not their fault this time, just because they screwed so many other things up for Star Trek’s 50th last year.

In any case, a preservation of these scenes seems mandatory at this point just to fix the rotten aspect ratio. I wouldn’t mind seeing a collection of the standalone clips paired up with all the other clips extracted from the documentary, all with repaired aspect ratio and maybe some kind of fix for the combing effect.

Maybe if we’re lucky there will be a better transfer of this material down the road. One can only hope.

–SKot

I don’t know myself, but I’m certainly interested in finding out. So far my searches of sources have turned up nothing.

–SKot

Maab said:
Well, the picture shows that David Tilotta, co-owner of startrekhistory.com, has a copy of one blooper reel, but he was not involved the the Roddenberry Vault project. Also Gerald Gurian, author of the book series “To Boldly Go - Rare Photos from the TOS Soundstage” and owner of the website startrekpropauthority.com shows a blooper reel he owns in this article:
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2014/01/special-report-behind-scenes-look-at.html
And there are certainly other collectors who owns them. Simply they weren’t on Roddenberry vault, and in any case they decided they were not interested in them.

The one I showed above appears to be a 35mm copy, which has got to be about the best one could hope to get their hands on. About 3 years ago, I emailed Curt from startrekhistory.com about the bloopers, and he told me that they plan to post the blooper reel - which I assume is the one in the picture above. So far that has not happened, but I really hope they do go through with it.

The blooper reel you mentioned from startrekpropauthority.com, does that look like 8mm or 16mm to you? The single-sided sprocket holes made me think 8mm, but I know that Super16 has single sprocket holes as well.

–SKot

FanFiltration said:
Have any of you heard the Star Trek Blooper LP? I just ordered one off line and I am looking forward to hearing what it is. I used to love finding such titles in obscure record stores and conventions, but those days are long passed.

I understand it’s just audio of blooper stuff. Reportedly, some of it is very tedious and some of it is actually funny.

FanFiltration said:

So this is the tape I have in storage. Having it sent to me and I will report back what is on it and the quality. I plan to dub it to my PC when it arrives.

Definitely looks like a boot. I’m curious as to the quality, though.

–SKot

litemakr said:

The vault footage is presented in a rather outdated SD transfer. None of it is in HD, even on the blu-ray. There are lots of digital artifacts. So that makes doing any color correction or restoration much more difficult because so much resolution and color information just isn’t there. I don’t know if they intentionally used substandard transfers to specifically prevent fans from restoring it into the episodes, or if they were just too cheap to make new HD transfers. I’m betting it’s the latter reason. Either way, it’s a huge shame because even faded 35mm footage would have looked much better with a modern HD transfer.

Well that is very disheartening. And it makes me not want to buy the Roddenberry Vault discs now. What good is throwing something onto Blu-ray if you’re not going to bother even transferring it in HD?

At least the Star Wars Blu-ray set has the deleted scenes in stunning 1080p HD resolution, warts and all. I own it for nearly that alone.

–SKot

Maab said:

Yes, I’ve asked Roger Lay specifically about the bloopers reels. He said that they weren’t among the materials found in the Vault. This does not necessarily means that Roddenberry’s son does not have a copy of them somewhere else. Roger said that they wanted to include only new materials, things that has never been seen before. Honestly I don’t find this very convincing, my idea is that they don’t know exactly where to find them.

Hmm…well what about this, then:

That looks like one of the original reels. Here’s the original article on StarTrek.com, written by the StarTrekHistory.com guys:

http://www.startrek.com/article/new-guest-blog-tos-artifacts-ephemera

Looks to me like they have at least one of the master blooper reels. What could their plans be for the bloopers if they didn’t use them on the Vault discs?

–SKot

SilverWook said:

FanFiltration just posted a link to this in the Off topic Trek thread. It’s a weird hodgepodge of sources. Some cropped, some that looks like it was shot off a screen without a tripod.
https://youtu.be/V5g5GoRSfMc

This is a great collection of material, despite the varying quality. It’s interesting to read the description here, which claims that one of Gene Roddenberry’s own original blooper reels was stolen during a convention, and that was the source of the endless bootlegs…followed by a TNG blooper reel being stolen from another convention years later. If this is true, it’s an interesting perspective on how the blooper reels made the rounds.

One bit I’ve wondered about for years, what episode is the set seen at 11:42 from? I’ve never been able to identify it. Is it even from Trek at all?

If I remember correctly, I believe that was a behind-the-scenes shot, with the girls who were in some of the scenes being shot doing their morning stretches before shooting. The guy who walks in to inspect the set (I forget who it is) then turns around and stumbles right into one of the ladies bending over right in front of him. The look on his face is priceless! As to what episode they were shooting at the time…no idea. But I’m sure someone knows.

–SKot

Maab said:

I had the opportunity to talk about this release with Roger Lay Jr., who supervised with the Okudas the Roddenberry Vault project (along with all the other recent Star Trek Blu-ray releases). He assured me that there is nothing else. They didn’t left out anything of value, all the new materials found in Roddenberry’s reels (and they’ve checked all of them) was included. And there was no sing of the bloopers reels.

I believe that’s true, as that’s what I’ve heard as well: their intent was to use all the footage on this release, and they apparently did use it all.

But regarding the blooper reels, did Roger Lay actually mention them specifically? Because we know they exist, and they’re out there…it’s just a question of whether anyone knows where the original reels are. And even if they don’t, I imagine they could still locate the next best copy and clean them up for inclusion as well. Not sure why they didn’t. Did they even try?

–SKot

Jetrell Fo said:

I have a disc called Bloopers Bonanza 1960’s that has a TOS Blooper section that starts out with a Gorn on a microphone. Would this be of some use to you? It is a 16min 55sec piece.

https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Television-Blooper-featuring-Laugh/dp/B000ZC1X2M

Holy crap…I had forgotten that I actually have this!

Quality is pretty low (fuzzy, muffled, and very poor color), but better than a lot of the YouTube uploads I think. But I’d really love to see a copy that was clearer and closer to the source.

–SKot

I actually ordered a couple of the blooper VHS tapes from eBay…the “40 Years” one and the clamshell case one called “Star Trek Bloopers”. I don’t expect much, but at least they were cheap. But do let me know if you find your digitized copies, SilverWook.

–SKot

SilverWook said:

According to Starlog magazine, the old rumor was one cast member didn’t appreciate those being shown to the public. Which might be why they never aired on any of those blooper tv specials of the 80’s and 90’s.

Yes, I’ve always suspected that might possibly have been a factor. There are also one or two things in the blooper reel that are not very politically sound by today’s standards. The Battlestar Galactica TOS bloopers are even more so. I imaging that gives some people pause when it comes to releasing the stuff.

The USA cult cable show Night Flight dared to air a couple minutes of bloopers attached to a TWOK trailer in the wee hours of the weekend in the late 80’s. I managed to get that on tape back in the day.

Have you digitized that? How was the quality?

There are a few clips used in one of the anniversary documentaries that are not terrible quality. But they are just excerpts as well.

One of those bargain basement video labels had the balls to release a good portion of the bloopers in the early 90’s tucked within the body of a 30 minute documentary about Sci Fi television.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Rare-40-YEARS-of-Science-Fiction-TELEVISION-1993-VHS-STAR-TREK-BLOOPERS-MORE-/112233200125
I preserved my copy, but haven’t checked the disc in a while. I think the original VHS was one of those SLP speed releases.

SLP is always a bad sign for the tape itself, but how was the quality of the original transfer? Murky, muddy, and dark like most of the others? Or actually reasonable?

Prior to home video, Super 8 and sometimes 16mm copies were sold at conventions, and these sometimes pop up on Ebay today.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Star-Trek-Original-Series-Blooper-Reels-1-3-Super8-Film-Color-Sound-/152285300601
Even one of those is going to look a little rough as blooper reels were copied and copied again among fans who had the ability to do so.

That’s the big problem…nth generation transfers or copies make up most of what we see out there. But somebody has the original reels. And somebody else has copies made from those reels that are not as bad as the rest of what’s out there. I’d really love to find out what’s the best source out there, whether it’s an 8mm reel, a VHS release, a DVD, or a torrent somewhere.

–SKot

Most of us who are Star Trek fans know there are a set of blooper reels from Star Trek TOS. They were shown often at conventions in the 1970s & 80s, and really terrible copies of them wound up on VHS bootlegs later, followed by DVD copies of these same terrible quality bootlegs.

So the question is this: what happened to those blooper reels and why have they never been released? Short clips from them have shown up on some documentaries, but the DVDs and then the Blu-rays and then finally the Roddenberry Vault releases contained not even a scrap of the blooper footage. Why is this?

Additionally, as far as preservations go: what is the best copy of the bloopers out there that one can currently get their hands on? I have numerous copies in varying poor quality, but nothing that is remotely satisfying. We were able to pinpoint here a select few copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special that were of exceptional quality…can we do the same for the ST:TOS bloopers?

–SKot

I’m definitely a Trekkie since before there was a Star Wars, and though I haven’t picked the Roddenberry Vault set up yet, I undoubtedly will soon.

I really dislike it when deleted footage is buried in documentaries so that you can’t access it any other way. There should always be an option to watch the footage separately, as well as within the documentary. A common thing these days is to have deleted footage viewable separately, but then have additional segments that can only be seen within some documentary piece. They did this on the Star Wars BDs, and it sounds like they’ve done this on the Star Trek discs as well. This is part of why I haven’t purchased it yet.

On another related note, where the hell are the Star Trek TOS bloopers? Certainly not included with the BD release, or even with the new Roddenberry Vault release. Those reels have got to be out there somewhere; they showed for years on the convention circuit. Time for a new topic on this, I think…

–SKot

So…after a prolonged pause, an update on the situation:

I’ve now been in touch with animation archivist Steve Stanchfield, and I can reveal that there is in fact a project in the works through his Thunderbean company to collect and release the Felix films in highest quality on a 3-volume BD set of 3 discs each…which is exactly the best case scenario I was hoping for when I started this thread. It is being worked on as we speak. Fantastic!

Unfortunately that’s about all I can say about the project at the moment, but I will certainly keep this thread updated when I have future information. Suffice to say that right now Felix’s early films are in good hands (the best hands, in fact!) and I look forward to the day when we can purchase a definitive collection to reside on our collective shelves.

Stay tuned.

–SKot

It looks like there’s a good chance that a number of those films aren’t what they say on the canister or reels. That one marked Felix the Cat doesn’t look like a Felix film - the animation and artwork doesn’t look right for any of the Felix releases. So I’m guessing that’s something else as well, but I’m not sure what. Oh well.

–SKot

I don’t suppose you wound up with any Felix the Cat in there?

See my separate thread on this for details on the missing Felix films…

–SKot