Beta or UHS? Get the facts in 1976

[ARC Tech-109]

I have plenty of vintage professional analog around here, U-Matic, Type-C and Betacam-SP all available on a Panasonic CT34WX54 widescreen CRT. Movies include Dirty Harry 1971, Magnum Force from 1973, got Goldfinger and Dr. No along with French Connection and 7-Ups. If it's hard rockin' you want there's a pristine dup of Streets of Fire in it's original format that came from a duplication house on Type-C. Nothing digitally processed or molested just pure analog at its best with 600 watts of audio amplifier to back it up. If you want vacuum tubes they're also available on a 1970 Magnavox 23" Astro Sonic combo with a Zenith pix tube.

Thanks to Trump and DOGE I'm now working nights in the private sector as a process technician at a plastics molding firm, at least I don't have to make up excuses for why the mail is late.

[Dude111]

Hehe no you dont huh?

[ARC Tech-109]

Bring some popcorn and see for yourself ��

[Dude111]

Ill be right over buddy!!

Do you have these?

Bullitt - 1968

Closest I have is an official 1980 release (WCI HOME VIDEO) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

You only Live twice - 1967

Closest I have is an official 1983 release (20th Century fox) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

Casablanca - 1942

Closest I have is an official 1981 release (Magnetic video) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

Willy wonka and the chocolate factory - 1971

Closest I have is an official 1984 release (Warner home video) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

I would love seeing the original paramount release!!

[ARC Tech-109]

Only have Bullitt from 68 on Type-C and it came from a dup house, it's the first release original that didn't get the jazz ensemble overdub'd during the dinner scene. The reel is marked digital audio but I don't have the 2801 module for this. Overall the tape looks far better than a DVD given the gamma, no digital artifacts or enhancements. My prized reel.

You can see the deck on the sister site https://audiokarma.org/forums/index....#post-17628737 and there's a screen shot of the Thunderbolt Hotel parking lot if you scroll down.

[Dude111]

Is that the music playing with the lady with that flute when Bullitt goes into that restaurant??

I have that in mine.... If that was there in a 1980 release,when was that added??

I assume the original 1968 movie didnt have it??

Wow......... I would have thought the 1980 release would be no changes.......

EDIT:

I found this

In the restaurant scene with McQueen and Bissett, the live band playing in the background is Meridian West , a jazz quartet that McQueen had seen performing at The Trident, a famous restaurant in Sausalito.

What was added??

[ARC Tech-109]

Yes, it was "sweetened" for the later DVD & BlueRay releases but present on the original which has more of the background sound. During the scene cut the background is muted on the later release and if you watch the timing closely the finger strikes on the bass and hits of the drum are out of sound sync.

My reel has several dates ranging from 1986 to 1989 but I don't know what they're for, I do know it is marked digital audio which was a very rare option for the Type-C format and used mostly for Laserdisc mastering and requires an outboard interface (2801 which makes the 2830 package) to take advantage of this... a something I will never afford.

[Dude111]

Wouldnt it be nice to find one cheap on ebay or even better Salvation army??

Thats sad they muted the background sound..... It makes it more natural sounding.......

[ARC Tech-109]

Last time I saw a 2801 on eBay it was over a grand, not something I'd find at the salvation army.

[Electronic M]

I wonder how hard it would be to duplicate that decoder with an SDR and some signal decoding algorithms...

[ARC Tech-109]

Don't know, there's a few mods that would need to be done to get the FM subcarrier from the head amplifier but it's a standard PCM digital format.

[MX70]

ARC Tech-109:

I have a Sony VO 2600 and a VO 2850 that I occasionally use for transfers. I actually just repaired the 2850; a real chore wrestling 83 pounds of U-matic on my counter. The 2600 is tucked neatly in the bottom of a wooden TV stand in my living room; it also serves as a stabilizing weight as I have 30” Toshiba wide screen CRT TV on top.
I used to have a VO 3800 portable, but still have a VO 4800 and a JVC CR 4400 portable.
I really do appreciate the performance of this format

[ARC Tech-109]

There was a time before climate change when I had one of those VO-3800's strapped to my side and a TK-76 on my shoulder... all powered with a motorcycle battery that lasted maybe half hour. I was an A/V nerd in school and made the mistake of volunteering for camera duty during a school event at 12 years old, I was no match for this but I managed to keep it steady. We also had those Sony open-reel porta-pack's with the big camera and this long lens but being B&W wasn't good enough for me... lesson learned. Back then everything was clunky and heavy, we had a number of those Setchell Carlson "Educator" TV/monitors on tall carts with either a VP-2000 U-Matic or Sony 8600s feeding them. Problem here was the school floors were that terrazzo from the 1930's and the big carts had 4-wheel swivel steering meaning they would go in any direction and being top heavy would crush an A/V nerd flat. We didn't get VHS until the mid-80's and those were top load hand-me-down's from a larger school district that went front load and the big Setchell Carlson's survived into the early 90's.
There were a number of Panasonic NV-3160's in the A/V lab along with two of the "new" VO-5858's and Panasonic SEG which I always hated because everyone wanted to get EFX happy and make everyone sick. I ended up with the 3160's and a number of other decks when the district auctioned them off paying $20/lot but passed on the big sets. The 3160's died years later from the head chips coming off the little mounts. Just the centrifugal force of running at 1800 is enough to pull them loose so do be mindful of yours as both Sony and Panasonic used that urethane glue of the day and it gives out over time.

[ARC Tech-109]

Okay so an update on my 3/4 U-Matic caps project.
Been spending some time recently on putting together this little clips project and I'm at the point of uploading to YouTube however each time I do the end result looks like... don't step in it. My capture chain starts with a Sony VO-2860A U-Matic feeding a NOVA 800 TBC and that feeds the composite input of my DVW-A500 DigiBeta which then does the conversion to SDI which I capture as an .avi using a Blackmagic Decklink SDI card in my Tricaster TC550. From there I do the cuts using kdenlive under Fedora then export the entire project as a high rate mp4 and upload to YouTube which waters things down to basically garbage. What I'm fighting is the interlacing which is really making things look rough and coarse so my question is does anyone have suggestions on how to either interpolate the scan lines to a progressive format or somehow smooth things down? I've tried capturing direct from the composite using the Tricaster's own capture but this makes no improvement and uses a hardware mjpeg-2 compression which is great but the bit rate suffers as it's designed for web streaming.

The purpose of this is to demonstrate the ancient capabilities of the format itself and the camera I used to capture with which was a Sony DXC-M3a, these were recorded during the early 90's when the best we had was color-under for the home. Right now the modern tech is making things look far worse than what we had and with over 30 years of my own experience I'm at my wits end.

This is the results I'm getting right now, this was shot last weekend using a Sony DVW-790 DigiBeta camera, edited using kdenlive in Linux then exported as mp4 and uploaded to YouTube... https://youtu.be/4aiuFKTzbTA and it looks worse than VHS.

Now just for the sake of comparison these videos were also shot using Digital Betacam https://youtu.be/YDu7YpkkfJE and https://youtu.be/AUWMDCUofUg but with no editing, just captured using the SDI input of the camera bus of the Tricaster and watered down to mpeg-2.

[old_tv_nut]

The video frequency response (horizontal resolution) doesn't look bad.

The following may be repeating what you already know, but let me know if that's right:

The vertical has something wrong, either the interlaced fields are in the wrong order, or (I think more likely) you are only getting one field in the output, causing stairstepping on diagonal edges and gaps on diagonal lines.
When you run just the vintage gear into an analog monitor, are both fields present?

Can you tell if the final result posted to YouTube has only half NTSC vertical resolution? When I look at settings, it says 480P, so I think somewhere in your processing chain it is dropping one field (leaving 240 lines) and somewhere it is interpolating each retained field to 480P.