Oldest surviving color tape of entertainment show
 

It's the debut episode of Kraft Music Hall With Milton Berle from October 8, 1958. Berle's widow has kept the tape preserved, and David Crosthwait of DC Video has expertly restored it. It'll be screening at the Billy Wilder Theater near LA on the night of 2/24.

https://deadline.com/2024/02/oldest-...le-1235818725/

From an earlier thread on this site.

http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=276325

I hope they make it available outside of the screening through a streaming platform or disc release.
There's no way in hell I'll be in California anytime soon, if ever.

Personally I'd like to see the original unrestored on say an AVR-2 without the modern digital magic

About a month ago, it was being discussed on eyesofageneration Facebook group...

I wish I could find a Quadruplex machine....I ended up being given about 15 quad video tapes last fall and I'm curious what's on them/would like to have the first moving head VTR format to keep my other early VTRs company. (Slightly scared I'll end up having to move a fridge that weighs as much as a Volkswagen).

Hi to all,
Hi Electronic M,

contact this guy!

ETF Zoom monthly meeting, Jan 2024.
Broadcast Systems integrator John Turner (80), 50 years in Broadcast shows his collection of 1" VTRs, 15.000 sq/ft facility, all generations, all brands, from the 60s to HD.
The amount of "stuff" is staggering & most work, 3 Hours 34":

https://www.youtube.com/live/KaSBboz...ZptVvlhHKcnJ0A

Also has a bunch of 2" Quads, all brands.

His company: Turner Engineering inc. Mountain Lakes, NJ:
http://www.turnereng.com/

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

Yup mee too..... Digital is garbage no matter what people think......

I don't think they can project it as interlaced, so I hope they've digitized it through a TBC into a proper 60p with correct aspect ratio and plenty of bitrate.

I came across a digitization project lead by one of the nation's universities, and the clips they had online are in 30.00 fps progressive - not 29.97 fps interlaced or 59.94 fps progressive. I asked them whether these are just low-bitrate web files, and maybe they have properly converted files in their vault, possibly available for interested parties for a fee, and they responded that basically it is what it is. I was flabbergasted.

Another digitization project, MediaBurn, also has digitized early 1990s videos in 30p. So much for preservation.

Ignorance is bliss.

I still have a working Philips CDV-488 Laserdisc player and it beats my Sony BlueRay hands down even when viewed on a 64" Samsung plasma in composite mode with all the internal magic filters off. I also have a Sony BVH-2000 Type-C in my living room and a duplication master of Duran Duran Decade, nothing in our modern digital world comes close.

Our ears & eyes are analog.

There is something wrong with your setup or with your eyes.

Digital audio and video is only stored in digital form, it is delivered to our ears and eyes as sine waves. The needed math and engineering has been invented, designed and licked out by the early 1990s. There is no "digital sound", there are no square waves, because they would require infinite bandwidth. The only issue with digital is macroblocking caused by insufficient bitrate.

Average digital looks better than mediocre analog, premium analog looks better than average digital, and premium high resolution and bandwidth digital usually looks better than premium analog.... Trouble is most digital that most people consume is average at best... It's usually not given enough bandwidth to be free of artifacts.

DVtyro , Electronic M +1

I'll admit when digital TV first came out, I hated it. I was the low bitrate or crappy encoding at the time. Things came a long way. LCD TVs have a pretty decent picture now. I do still have a 27" tube TV in the bedroom though. Looks fine with my eyes closed! (I set a sleep timer!)

No offense taken here but I do have to ask if you've ever seen a real high bandwidth analog video and I'm not talking from a consumer format SVHS or ED-Beta, instead I'm referring to the likes of BetaSP, Type-C or Quad on a purely analog monitor like a Sony PVM2530.

I do have both Type-C and BetaSP and the best high-end monitor I can muster up is my Panasonic TAU series CT-34WX54 widescreen CRT so I'd like to invite you over for some popcorn to watch either some first generation BetaSP that I shot with a DXC-537 docked to a PVV-3 or a 2nd gen RF dup of either the first Bourne movie or a distro copy of the 1968 classic Bullitt on Type-C and you can bring your BluRay or DVD of the same and we can do the Pepsi Challenge in my living room. No sweetening or proc amps just raw composite from the analogs and HDMI from the BluRay in real time.

Exactly. Just for kicks I recorded some digital video to VHS and then digitized it back, you can see the comparison in my YouTube video. Twenty years ago we had MPEG-2 HD@ 15-18 Mbit/s, now our OTA HD dropped to as low as 5 Mbit/s and even 3.5 Mbit/s, it is garbage. There are tons of SD subchannels @ 2 Mbit/s, they look horrible too. Still, when you compare VHS copy with digital you can see how the edges are much better defined in digital, color does not bleed over edges, and static scenes look almost perfect. The quality of digital depends on bitrate, and the more detail and motion you have the more bitrate you need. Analog is different here, you get more or less the same results no matter fast or slow scene, but it is a known fact that the Japanese MUSE had chroma interlacing, so fast scenes looked less pretty. This is why most MUSE demos use slow to medium pans and tilts, very careful, with stabilized camera.

BetaSP is SD. The fact that you mention first generation reminds everyone that analog loses quality with each generation. Yes, BetaSP holds much better than Umatic or VHS, but it loses quality nevertheless. Digital does not lose quality when it is copied without editing, this is what everyone likes it for. This is why torrents are so great :)

34 inches? You got to be kidding. My computer monitor is 27 inches, it is not a gaming monitor, and I sit one foot away. On the other hand, my VHS captures look great on my smartphone :)

CRT is great for motion. Plasma is comparable. My main TV is a 50-inch Panasonic plasma, I wish I bought the Kuro when I had a chance. Early LCD TVs were crap for motion because of the ON/OFF character of the elements and low refresh rate, this is why I bought plasma back in 2006. But LCD TVs went a long way, and their 480 Hz or even 600 Hz refresh rate is good enough to portray smooth motion.