SwissToni34

After downloading and reviewing all of the content available for this series on Internet Archive and the only thread I could find on here, it seems as though restoration efforts on this series have stalled.
Episodes on Internet Archive marked as “Restored” all seem to have noticeable combing and tiling artifacts and (because of the differences of VHS and DVD audio) their soundtracks have dropout and sound a bit hollow during “restored” segments. Also notable is the fact that, in one episode; missing footage was replaced by a low-resolution still image.
The commercially produced DVDs have also been blurred and mosaic filters were added in some skits to obscure copyrighted photographs. I think it would be much less distracting to add these images back in from VHS sources. However, camera motion and low video fidelity are proving to be stumbling blocks for me, as I have too little experience editing video to composite or add these images back in using “mask” filters.
I think advancements in decombing algorithms and audio editing software made within the last couple years could greatly improve the quality of these fan edits.
To that end, I have undertaken a new restoration effort, aimed towards providing a bit more video fidelity and higher quality audio.
Test results from the first week of December 2025 are promising, but I could use some help fleshing out the archive of original broadcasts and editing new restorations of the episodes effected by outdated obfuscation techniques used to obscure copyrighted photographs.

WANTED:
-Higher quality versions of any original MTV broadcasts. Most notably, the fourth and fifth episodes of season 1 (notated by the Internet Archive as episodes 1.6 and 1.7. [The DVD collection lists these as episodes 4 and 5.])

-A list of changes made to the episodes of seasons 2 through 4 from broadcast to DVD. (A Reddit post detailing the changes to season one was very helpful and I’d love to know if anyone else has already done this for the rest of the series.)

-Video and audio editing help. I lack experience and only possess low-level editing skills, any help I could get to make restored versions of The State look or sound better would go a long way.
I’d like to get the VHS audio to blend as seamlessly with the DVD audio as I can. The audio editing software I have the most experience with is Reaper. I’ve used the “Subtract” FX to remove tape hiss, but the audio sounds a bit muffled or hollow from time to time. Is there a good way to get more high end and less low, so spoken dialogue is a little more clear and lifelike? The GUI for enhancement of bass and treble in Reaper was a little too esoteric and I gave up trying to adjust them after I began to ruin the sound by over-tuning the settings.

I hope to have a draft of the first 5 episodes (with audio fixes and re-added clips like Doug and his friends singing Pearl Jam’s “alive” and the deleted Don Law umbrella joke) ready for community perusal/feedback before 2025 ends.

If you have access to broadcasts not available on Internet Archive and are willing to share them, please reach out. I plan to replace the missing footage from some episodes with the best quality download I can find. But I will make an effort to provide revised versions whenever higher quality footage is shared with me.

If you want to contribute your time and editing skills or wouldn’t mind watching my rough drafts and giving feedback, please feel free to reach out and PM me.

Thank you for your time and consideration of my project. I hope to hear from you soon!

This detective series from Fox centers on an FBI task force in Los Angeles. In nearly every episode, the team’s young and beautiful profiler goes too deep “inside” the case and gets kidnapped by the suspect.
I have used good quality files of the episodes (16x9) that I can no longer find on YouTube and my own 4x3 home recordings of the Fox broadcasts to reconstruct the series in the order they were originally produced with content warnings, bumpers and next episode promos (when available) to provide a version of the series that I could not find on YouTube nor the Internet Archive.
I’d say the overall quality is a 7 out of 10. The episodes have a good amount of detail, but can be a bit too dark at times. The original warnings, bumpers and credits from the 4x3 Fox broadcasts are lower resolution but have good detail and color.
If you are interested in this series please feel free to message me for a link to my project!

I recently found an eleven hour omnibus file of the entire series from a rerun broadcast in late 2008. I have cut it into its constituent parts, then re-edited the first 2 pieces into a pilot movie that more accurately recreates the experience of watching the series when it originally aired back in 1994.
I’d say the video quality is about 6.5 out of 10. (Detailed picture with ignorable tiling issues.) The audio is clear and subtle with very little distortion, to my ear.

Summary: This twelve part miniseries takes place in a rather protopian version of 1990s Australia, where the government is a corrupt Theocratic Monarchy in mid-transition toward becoming a corrupt Constitutional Democracy. Therein, we meet Harvey McHugh… a temporary clerk in the Government Offices who desperately wants a permanent position. However, his honesty and piety seem to hinder him at every turn. Meanwhile, the dastardly Minister of State Security works behind the scenes to keep McHugh employed and close-at-hand for his own nefarious purposes.
Darkly comedic and bitingly satirical, irreverent as it is poignant… this series is truly a hidden gem of TV history. Lightning-fast wordplay and layered environmental storytelling invite and reward attentive repeat viewings.

Starring Aaron Blabey (21 years before he started publishing children’s books in “The Bad Guys” series).

If you’re interested in this series, please message me!

I used my original DVD recordings and files found online to create a collection of the complete 13 episode series. The first 9 episodes are in 4x3 aspect ratio with their original bumpers, promos and end credits included. Episodes 10 through 13 are 16x9 from a PAL source. I have corrected their PAL conversion back to 29.97fps and slowed the audio proportionally to match the first 9 episodes.
If you are interested in this series, please send me a private message.

I have recently used Original broadcast recordings of the 8 episodes broadcast in 2005 to restore the licensed music removed from/replaced in home media releases. I also added the promos and bumpers from the original broadcasts back in. If anyone is interested in this series, PM to gain access to this project.

Hello Community!
I recently noticed that the only version of this series easily accessible online is the home media edition which has been significantly altered… not only omitting the licensed songs but almost all of the score by Daniel Ash and Orbital.
In response, I recently made a reconstruction of this series in the original production order using clean digital video with the original soundtrack, bumpers, and promos from my own VHS recordings of original broadcasts.
I would love to share these 13 H.264 MP4 format files with anyone who is interested! On my 55" LG OLED TV, they look as good as the DVDs, when compared.

Please feel free to PM me for the link.

Using 16:9 aspect files from the Internet Archive and my own collection of VHS tapes, I have begun editing episodes of Roswell to run a little more faithfully to their original premiere night broadcasts. I have cropped them back to their original 4:3 Aspect Ratio. I’ve added the introductory and “next episode” Promos back in whenever available. I’ve also included the original bumpers (“Tonight’s all new Roswell will return in a moment”), the Music Bumpers (“Tonight’s Roswell featured music by:”), plus the end credits have been re-edited so the production logos run before them, not after. From episode 1.16 through the end of season 2, a little bug with the show’s logo was placed in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and I’ve added those back in whenever I could. (Frame-rate disparity between VHS and digital sources made scenes with too much camera movement pointlessly difficult for this process.) All of these edits bring the episodes closer to their original broadcast presentation.
I did make one pretty major change to the series: During the original broadcast run of Season 2, episode 2.16 was shown 20th. I moved this episode back to the 16th spot in the season. I have also re-edited the promos from 2.15, 2.16, and 2.20 to reflect this change. Plus, I edited the recap for episode 2.16 to omit spoilers from 2.17 - 2.20.
This is a project I have been wanting to do for a long time and I’m having so much fun doing it.
To me, “Roswell” was the perfect extrapolation of the “Buffy” format, it’s campy mix of teen angst and bonkers sci-fi hijinks was a true delight to behold.
I have finished seasons 1 and 2 as of November 2025. I plan to have season 3 ready for its 25th anniversary in October of 2026.
Please feel free to PM me if you’d like to access this on-going project.

It was a wonderful birthday present to find 2 people reply to my thread about this amazing show on Dec. 7…
As of now? The only update I have is this: I found SLP (EP?) Mode VHS tapes of The Nightmare Café episodes 4/“Heart of the Mystery”(Partial 30+mins of a WKEF broadcast) 5/“Sanctuary for a Child” (WKEF) and 6/“Aliens Ate My Lunch” (WKEF) I was also able to locate an SLP mode tape with all but the Pilot episode taped from the Sci-Fi series collection circa March 1995. I have a VCR that can pull a pretty stable picture off of them.
I believe an entity called “Bob Betamax” intends to sell a Blu-ray using rips from the Chiller broadcasts. Which gives me hope that a community member somewhere has those versions.
In the interest of preserving the show and as many versions of the episodes as possible, I’d like to preserve these tapes digitally. Can anyone give me some recommendations as to the best method for transferring them? I really am a complete noob but I would love to learn. Thanks again for your time and help with this project!

I’m an American fan of the Fast Show. I’ve been searching 20 years or more for these unedited episodes. (Here they were shown edited as “Brilliant!”) Is there any way I could access the archive of unedited episodes mentioned here?

September 2025 Update, my restoration efforts for the six episodes of Nightmare Café have resumed.
I have access to these versions of the episodes:

• KGET VERSIONS (480i)
  All six episodes with commercials bumpers and end credits. I call these the KGET versions because the pilot episode bears station identification from that NBC affiliate. The quality on these is about 5 out of 10. As far as I can tell, the KGET versions were uploaded to YouTube when files were only 10 minutes maximum, combined into full hour long files, then put onto DVD. They have ok detail, washed out color, and a fair amount of “tiling” and/or “digital artifacts”. Lighter scenes look better with ok detail, while darker scenes lose much of their detail with lots of noticable artifacts.
• WDAF VERSIONS (480i)
  All six episodes with commercials sloppily edited out. I call these the WDAF versions because the pilot episode bears WDAF station identification from that NBC affiliate. The A/V quality of these is around a 4 or 5 out of 10. Again, lighter scenes have more details than darker ones. The colors and the black areas on these are very washed out, with black mostly appearing as charcoal grey. As far as I can tell, the WDAF versions were recorded from a VHS to a standalone DVD recorder, then that disc was duped by the same or another standalone DVD recorder. (In episode 5 “Sanctuary for a Child”, the original disc skipped during the process and the message “Disc error minor-- Clean me” appears. (This message is present, even on digital rips, so a dirty disc cannot be the culprit.)
• WKEF Broadcasts (480i)
  I have 2 and a half episodes (Half of episode 4, episodes 5 and 6 mostly complete… only missing their end credits.) These are recorded in SLP mode but have only been run through a VCR around half a dozen times each. They’re also around a 5 out of 10. Okay picture and sound, but the details are muddy and the colors are a bit washed out.
• SciFi Channel Versions (480i)
  I have an SLP mode tape which is missing the pilot episode of the series (overall quality 5 out of 10). I also found 2 LP mode tapes containing the full series but the Pilot is damaged throughout and the overall quality is around 4 out of 10 because of red and blue flecks present throughout most episodes. The Sci-fi Series Collection versions are trimmed down from 45 minutes to 42 and have a scifi channel logo present in the lower left corner. Details are muddy, but the colors are richer. These versions have not only had scenes excised, but it also seems they’ve had frames lifted out from time to time, much like modern reruns do, as scenes from these versions (when placed side by side with KGET and WDAF versions in an editing timeline) run just a bit shorter than the NBC broadcast, even though no dialogue is missing.
• Dark Network Versions MKVs (PAL standard?)
  These were gifted to me by a member of the preservation community. These also recently showed up on the Internet Archive. I’d rate them around a 5 in quality also. They have amazing color and detail, but the screen has been cropped on all four sides. They are the full versions of the episodes, in a sense that no scenes were excised to fit a shorter runtime… But the conversion from NTSC to PAL has turned all the voices to “helium mode” and the change in frame rates has caused all panning shots to become “choppy.” I’ve tried using a video editor to “inflate” the video back to around 30 fps. But the audio still isn’t quite right and when I tried going through the pilot and editing it at each and every camera angle change, inflating each cut to the same length as the NBC version then synchronizing the NBC audio up to it… All the lip sync and foley was “off.” Also, when I tried to convert them to 480p, the detail was all lost amongst the intensity of the vivid color information.
  *Chiller Network Versions
  I recently obtained downloads of YouTube videos containing all 6 episodes from a Chiller Network broadcast. The bumpers feature crows and tree branches (if anyone knows approximately when those bumpers were used, I would love to give these an approximate age). These episodes run about 43 minutes total with credits and all. Entire scenes are either truncated or cut entirely, but the edits are much cleaner and more thoughtful than the Sci-fi Series Collection versions. The details are muddy and the picture has plenty of digital artifacts. The chiller logo is always present near the lower right corner. There are also some banner ads for other Chiller Network broadcasts in the lower left/lower third.

This post regards my current work in progress on my Nightmare Café restoration project. I recently found a JVC VCR able to output S-Video. With that, I redigitized my WKEF tapes and my Sci-fi Channel tapes using a standalone Toshiba DVD recorder. Currently, I’m trying to use Shotcut to layer the WDAF versions over the KGET versions once again with a layer made up of bits and pieces of the Sci-fi Channel and Chiller Network broadcasts sandwiched between the 2. In the Preview window of Shotcut the first draft I made this week of the Pilot episode was “hit and miss”. I’m currently tweaking it and plan to do the entire series, if it works out.