Idea: Safari 3000 (1982)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084625/

I’ve been considering a preservation of this long OOP film starring David Carradine, Stockard Channing, and Christopher Lee.

It’s not a very well respected film, but I love it anyway.

Over the holidays I purchased a new/sealed VHS from Amazon’s Marketplace. Lddb has no listing for this film so that (seemed) like the best idea.

To my horror the picture quality is terrible. There is very little left to restore.

I still have an old analog cable/VHS tape copy that has better whites and blacks, more vibrant colors, much more detail, and correct aspect ratios.

The original has tall thin characters during the credits, the cable copy letterboxed these parts. And even though I haven’t checked directly, to my eye the rest of the movie’s AR appears slightly off.

Of course the cable recording’s audio is better as well with better detail and a more clear high end.

As much as I hate having to restore Analog Cable2VHS2DVD, I can’t think of anywhere else to find a better source.

If anyone has a suggestion, please jump in.

These are the only 2 screen caps I made (from the opening credits) before I deleted everything in disgust:

(Images are raw and resize to 1:1 only. No other changes were made.)

Official VHS

Cable broadcast

Mod Edit: Doctor M’s finished ‘Safari 3000’ project can be found here:-

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Safari-3000-A-Doctor-M-Preservation/id/10133

I remember this movie for the familiar looking helmet Christopher Lee wore! Some wiseacre fooled a lot of fanboys with a still of him from the film when he was cast as Count Dooku in the prequels. ;)

It's too bad there doesn't seem to be a Laserdisc of it. Do you think a Betamax copy would look any better?

http://snakemasterproductions.com/beta_movies3.html

There is no way of knowing.  The box design is the same as the one I have.  Possibly the same master.

I know there was an "Amazon Exclusive" release.  I don't know if it was just a rebox or new transfer.  Frankly, after getting burned once, I'm hesitant to buy a second copy.

It seems that there was a PAL VHS on ebay.de:
http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300075481419

No PAL equipment, and most importantly, no screen shots.

For anyone following this, I was about ready to run a really slooow script to encode the capture I made.

I was disappointed to find out after running telecide that there are fewer than 24 unique frames a second.  Enough so that after decimate the picture is jittery.

This may actually look better interlaced.  Not ideal, but at least it will be smoother.

Someone needs to cap an HDTV broadcast of this somewhere.

So the original cable broadcast was time compressed?

I don't think so.  It was telecined to 30fps just with fewer base frames.

The runtime is the same as the official tape as well.

I would think it could be a way to expand runtime (make fewer frames go farther).

It's almost like they trimmed a few minutes but wanted the runtime to be the same.  Hmm.  I may need to watch both versions side by side now.

Tested official VHS (which definitely appears to be a different transfer) and I'm finding the same thing.

A B C D D A B B A B C D D A B C D E F F A B C C

And that's within the same scene w/o any camera cuts.

No rhyme or reason to the pattern. Using any sort of decimation makes the picture jerky as all heck.

Looks like it is staying interlaced. Ah well.

Heh heh.  So I thought maybe something like TDecimate might do the job.  It gives the ability to open up the cycle size.  Typically you decimate 1 in 5 frames.  I set it to 6 in 30 to make up for the irregularity of the pattern.

No luck.  So I found a clip noticeably bad and counted frames... 90 of them.

Subtracting duplicates, the frame rate was 19 fps!!!

Crazy.  Maybe THAT'S why the movie hasn't been to DVD.

Sorry to bump an old one, but for anyone who fancies taking a peek at this, Hulu currently has the film: http://www.hulu.com/watch/163487/safari-3000

While it is full of compression artifacts, in many ways it may be the best copy I've seen.

If a new video master of the film has been done, the chances are good it could end up part of Warner's made on demand DVD program eventually.

It would be MGM on demand I suppose, which does exist now, and I agree.

The colors are a bit muted compared to my old VHS, but it is sharp and widescreen.  Funny thing is that I found interlace artifacts in it.