Amadeus - 1993 NTSC VHS Release (any interest in me uploading this?) (Released)

I made a copy of my Lumiere/Replublic Pictures (1993?) VHS release of Amadeus years ago, and was wondering if anyone would be interested in such a thing. The picture, while being a Pan and Scan VHS from 3 decades ago, isn’t bad. The audio is excellent, being a stereo release. It’s quite punchy, and not distorted or buzzy.

I’m unable to do any kind of de-interlacing, stabilization, upscaling, etc; so this release would be a raw capture.

I don’t know what the interest in such a thing would be, as there are better releases available and I don’t know if it’s 100% the theatrical cut. It runs 158 minutes where the theatrical is 161 minutes. I think it would appeal as more of a novelty or something for us that grew up with VHSs to get a bit of nostalgia.

It looks great on a CRT television, part of what made me rediscover I had made this copy so many years ago.

Just want to know what you folks think, if anyone would think it worth the upload, or not. I could post some raw screengrabs, if you like…at the moment I don’t feel like bothering with the markdown coding out of pure laziness.

EyeShotFirst said:

I don’t know what the interest in such a thing would be, as there are better releases available and I don’t know if it’s 100% the theatrical cut. It runs 158 minutes where the theatrical is 161 minutes.

Is it a PAL tape? That could be the explanation, the speed up issue would cause the film to have a shorter running time.

Yes, it is NTSC. I don’t know of any obvious changes to the VHS tape compared to the theatrical release, as I’ve never had the fortune of seeing the theatrical print. I can imagine there were changes, even before Milos made his later cut.

Three minutes is quite a difference. It would probably be worthwhile to upload this so that fans of the film can make a comparison and note the differences. 😃

See below

Doing some deeper looking at the DVD I made, I made it in 2005 on one of those VHS to DVD machines, so take that nugget of knowledge anyway you please. I’ll be leaving everything as it is all the VIDEO_TS, as I wouldn’t want to degrade it anymore by converting it to another file type. For preservation sake, I think it’s probably wisest if I don’t mess with it too much.

Here are some screengrabs. Ignore the aspect ratio, I was putting them on a grid. I forgot just how washed out some of the scenes looked, looking back I remember being wowed by how vibrant the DVD release was.

I use imgur myself. 😃

Considering the methods of capturing that were involved, it doesn’t look too bad at all. I agree with you about not excessively modifying the file - it’s easy to end up going too far.

Thanks for the recommendation, I updated it above. The picture quality is marvelous on a CRT. I had a wave of nostalgia and wanted to watch some VHSs, but my VCR crapped out on me, and the closest thing I had was this copy. I was quite surprised with how well it looked and sounded. I’m mostly happy to have this copy as it’s special to me. Amadeus is my favorite film ever, and this was the copy in which I first saw the film. It poured gas on the flame in me for a love of music.