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ZilogJones

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19-Feb-2012
Last activity
27-Nov-2012
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Post
#568646
Topic
Star Wars : 'Tantive's Orange Items' Thread & other unintended objects
Time

Regarding early TV broadcasts, I suspect live telecine or film chain would have been the norm back then for such showings until high-resolution, relatively cheap cassette formats like Betacam SP became available in the late '80s and '90s. It's not something they would be broadcasting too regularly (maybe once every year or two?) so they probably deemed transfering to tape unecessary.

So it's possible every early broadcast of the film would be somewhat different, and they could have just been given typical theatre-grade 35mm prints from the distributors for each showing. But I'm just guessing here :)

On my unsuccessful searching of more information about this I did come across something possibly useful - what cue marks (the dots before the end of a reel) are on these older releases, if any? Black cue marks would have been made on a negative, and white ones on a positive.

I don't know what US stuff was like but cue marks were often present on UK TV broadcasts of films and home video releases well into the '90s. With a lot of UK video releases you'd even get the BBFC certificate at the start just like you'd see on cinema reels (and it looks like it's part of the film, not digitally generated or anything), so it's likely they used locally-sourced prints as opposed to anything else.