Ryan McAvoy said:
Personally I'd be quite happy for all prints of TPM puppet yoda being burned and erased from existence.
NOOOOOO!!!!
SilverWook said:
Maybe it was someone taping it straight off the satellite feed? Not that hard for someone with one of those big dishes in their backyard, or a cable company employee to do it on the fly back then.
But why on earth would anyone with access to those kind of resources, choose EIAJ as the capture medium?
Thanks - so, in other words, it could be done, but currently isn't being done?
So, when a movie is shot in 3D, and then "down-converted" to 2D, are areas of the frame chosen to be "blurred" to simulate the depth of field, after-the-fact?
Finished baking the second tape.
Maybe he was assuming he would be able to just bluescreen the whole thing, given that's how the last three episodes were made?
Ryan McAvoy said:
Actually TPM looks amazing, ....
That depends on what you mean by "amazing".
I watched most of the first reel, and so far haven't seen anything.
More evidence that it's a VHS dub and not a broadcast... Tape #2 overlaps about 20 seconds of material with the end of tape #1. As if whoever copied it wanted to make sure and not miss anything, by rewinding the source tape slightly before starting the dub onto tape #2.
Transfer of tape #1 is complete. Tape #2 started and squealed a bit -- requires further baking.
It is not a 16mm telecine or bootleg theater capture, because there are no reel-change spots.
There also appear to be no advertisements or breaks. My initial impression is that it is probably a dub of a fullscreen VHS release. The scroll says "Ep.IV".
New thread started.
This set of two EIAJ open-reel videotapes was acquired by OT member Poita on eBay. I agreed to digitize them.
The tapes are Memorex open-reel black and white tapes. I transfered them to computer using a Panasonic NV-3160 EIAJ deck, with dropout compensation. The signal was passed through an AVTools timebase corrector, and a Canopus ADVC-100 digital converter.
EIAJ at best has resolution similar to VHS. These particular tapes were in superb condition (for EIAJ), although exhibited severe sticky-shed and thus required baking as most EIAJ tapes do. The tapes were baked for 6 hours in an American Harvest food dehydrator, eliminating the sticky shed.
The resulting digitization is SD .avi.
I will know more after I've had a chance to look at it.
I was actually surprised to see the Ep.IV. EIAJ was pretty much gone by 1978 or 1979. So I was expecting this to be a copy of an early bootleg. Hopefully it's from a broadcast - but I think it is more likely that someone just hooked up their EIAJ to someone else's VHS and for someone unknown reason made an EIAJ dub of it. A dub of a broadcast would be much more interesting.
I baked both EIAJ tapes, and they now are playing fine.
Unfortunately, it is at this point that things became quite a bit less interesting, as the scroll came up "Ep. IV..." etc. Seems quite strange to me that someone at this late date would still be recording to a black and white EIAJ machine.
Anyhow, I'm digitizing them.
poita said:
Wait...what?
Darth Vader is Princess Leia's father???
In Ep.VII, we will learn, through a series of disturbing flashbacks, that in actuality Jar Jar Binks is Leia's father.
I like the stars.
I'd buy one.
poita said:
How about a new thread for it?
Right - that's why I was asking what you'd like to call it?
Won't be able to watch it until I bake it.
poita said:
Excellent. The Star Wars tape should be there Monday.
Just received and tested the SW tape(s). They are also black and white EIAJ. The quality looks excellent - among the best I've ever seen for EIAJ. (that means roughly like good VHS, albeit black and white).
Unfortunately, it is Memorex tapestock, which means - unlike the Close Encounters tapes - these exhibit sticky shed. After about 10 seconds of playback, they ground to a halt. They will require a few hours of baking before they are playable. No biggie, I do it all the time and it generally works. And of course I have to clean the tape path of my machine now that they have gummed it up.
I'm going out of town until Sunday, so this will have to wait until next week. Once I know more, I'll start a new thread. Poita, think about what you'd like these called.
I don't know the answer to that yet, because I haven't had time to watch the entire movie.
poita said:
The seller also has Thunderball, Close Encounters and Sinbad on the same tape format.
Just tested the Close Encounters tape... it's EIAJ, black and white, in excellent condition. Looking forward to seeing the SW tape.
johnlocke2342 said:
...except for the GOUT which is of awful quality compared to HD, as we all know.
It's awful quality compared to SD, too.
poita said:
But is there a HR PuffnStuff forum?
Google it, there's like 10 of them.
deadman911 said:
Set up a kickstarter......
Itll make you some summer cash to work on these.
Seriously illegal and would be a great way to get the forum shut down.