nightstalkerpoet said:
Nice! Looks possible, but time consuming. And would take programming a new analysis program.
Considering the lengths people are willing to go to for star wars preservations, I wouldn't be surprised to see an "electron microscope laserdisc scanning and analysis to retrieve pure video signal" project pop up. (Fingers crossed).
But yes, a 3 source cross reference scan is more probable by far.
Either would be an awesome source for Harmy.
This was actually discussed by the guys back in the X0 project days, but the data is RF modulated analogue (kinda like FM radio), so not only would you have to get an SEM scan, you would have to write a program to extract the data and reconstruct the video signal. Not feasible on too many counts. If you were clever you could pickup the RF signal from the player before it is processed and digitise *that* to achieve nearly the same result, but would still have to write the reconstruction software, effectively doing in software what the player does in outdated software.
A more realistic goal is to pickup the composite video signal before it is amplified and before it goes through the overlay chips etc. and build a better video amp circuit with current components, bypassing the outdated and noisy LD circuitry. That is relatively simple to do and should result in a much cleaner signal. But anyway, we are derailing this thread again!