none said:
Do betamax tapes degrade in any significant way?
Would the original recording have been impacted by any technological limitations of early 80s home systems. Any guesses on camera type?
Return of the Jedi bootleg was camcorded off the screen.
I don't believe they had any professional gear for camcording in the cinema. There were commercial cameras around by 1983, but they were bulky so you couldn't sneak them in to a public showing. You'd have to have an arrangement with a projectionist or indeed, a stolen copy of the film like the one you alluded to in a previous post.
(Though I remember having a bootleg of Back To The Future that was camcorded at a public showing, with people responding (laughing) and getting up to take a leak, crossing the screen. Someone really had cojones taking one of those ginormous video cameras into a public screening.)
Remember, even if the copy I have is on Beta, that doesn't mean it was captured on Beta. Beta L-500 blanks ran 2 hours, 10 minutes, while VHS were 120 minutes, so Beta would make a better fit for +2 hour film. They probably used either 3-hour VHS blanks or 3h, 15mins. for Beta anyway.
..and beta does not degrade differently from VHS, if at all. The actual tape is identical (to all intents and purposes). A guy wrote in to heavyweight UK magazine What Video, that he'd successfully spooled VHS blank tape onto a Beta cassette and could record to it as normal. You couldn't play back VHS recordings in this way, obviously, but the tape is the same.
The Empire Strikes Back is obviously a telecine done with professional equipment at a duplicating store or somesuch. It is not an official transfer, as they used a worn release print (especially at the reel changes), the contrast is too high and the framing is off at reel changes. And the telecine wobble is just atrocious.