As a nerdy kid in the 90s, I spent a fair bit of time watching the computer-themed cartoon Reboot. During the course of making a documentary about the show, [Jacob Weldon] and [Raquel Lin] have uncovered the original digital master tapes of the show.
This is certainly exciting news for fans of the show, but there’s a bit of a wrinkle. These digital masters are all on D-1 digital cassette tapes which the studio doesn’t have a player for anymore. The dynamic duo are on the hunt for a Bosch BTS-D1 to be able to recapture some of this video for their own film while also heavily hinting to the studio that a new box set from the masters would be well-received.
As the first CGI TV series, Reboot has a special place in the evolution of entertainment, and while it was a technical marvel for its time, it was solid enough to last for four seasons and win numerous awards before meeting a cliffhanger ending. If you’re an expert in D-1 or have a deck to lend or sell, be sure to email the creators.
Feeling nostalgic for the electromechanical era? Why not check out some hidden lyrics on Digital Compact Cassettes (DCC) or encoding video to Digital Audio Tapes (DAT)?
[via Notebookcheck]
A good resource for this type of thing is the Association of Moving Image Archivists (https://amianet.org/). They have a supplier directory as well as an email list server which can be used for inquiries and discussion.
Oddly, I’ve been thinking about this show recently, but it was driving me nuts trying to remember the name of it! Fond memories of watching it as a child in the UK
As an old ReBoot fan, this is fantastic. I hope we get a rerelease. I wonder what resolution it is?
All I want now from this is discovery of the original models. I’d love to be able to do my own renders of Mainframe…
I recall reading a while back that when they went to make Season 3, the models were incompatible, or lost or something, so they ended up having to make them all from scratch.
I’ve got the DVD set of the series, but I’d love to have something higher quality from masters.
Creative Cow’s Storage and Archiving forum might be a good place to get a line on a D-1 machine. https://creativecow.net/forums/forum/storage/
I thought that site went defunct years ago. Based on the forum posts, traffic looks pretty anemic.
FWIW, the producers of the documentary have been in contact for some time with people who can read the tapes. But there are a few issues. For one, they’re asking for the playback machine to be sent to them so that they can read the tapes themselves–which is like asking someone to loan you their electron microscope so you can look at a few bugs, gratis. There’s also legal issues as to if the producers have the rights to the contents of the tapes. This is the entertainment industry and they’re very careful with copyright issues.
So, unless you have a D1 deck that you are willing to ship to Canada for free and maybe never get back, this is just a feel good story for people who may have liked Reboot.
This is the first I heard of this information, even after reading articles about this story earlier in the week. If accurate this brings some much needed context to the situation. Most of the news pieces seemed to imply that no working D1 deck was known to exist.
There has been a lot of incomplete reporting of this. There are still a reasonable (though not huge) number of working D1 VTRs around (though these VTRs have a limited number of head replay hours as new heads are not manufactured) – and both the first and second gen Sony D1 VTRs are all dual 525/625 switchable so ‘NTSC’ vs ‘PAL’ isn’t an issue, though I don’t know about the BTS decks. (BTS decks were less widespread and less reliable ISTR – and though D1 could be a bit finicky between record and replay VTRs, BTS recordings should be persuaded to play on a Sony VTR)
The people who have custody of the tapes have already been pointed in the direction of a number of companies who will transfer/ingest D1 tapes – but they don’t seem to want to ship the tapes or they aren’t willing/able to pay commercial transfer rates.
Also – transfers of archive VT formats are best carried out by those who are across the quirks of a format AND can evaluate the state of the tapes before they are played in their VTRs. If the tapes are shedding/gummed up – you don’t want to write off your only D1 heads in attempting to play sub-par tape stock that has deteriorated. You’d also want ingest/transfer handled by systems that are already correctly set-up to minimise errors- and that will log things like VTR-reported tape drop-out/errors etc.
Maybe read things optically? Not the fastest, but speed isn’t everything.
https://www.tapeheads.net/threads/visualizing-magnetic-signals-on-tape.39958/
This is really good to know, and also sad to hear unfortunately.
To try and run headlong into archive media is incredibly foolish and makes me fear that someone will actually get them a player and these people with no archive/recovery experience will damage the tapes or player trying to do something just because “they want to do it themselves”…
If you want to do good for the history of this show, then work with people who do this for a living to give these irreplaceable master tapes the best chance for success to be preserved.
As a Canadian I really want this example of our history in this medium to live on.
The service manual for the Sony DVR-1000 deck is up on the Internet archive.
https://archive.org/details/manual_DVR1000_SM_SONY_EN/mode/1up
The closest thing I’ve got is a Panasonic NB-G110P and it has compatibility issues with D-1 cassettes. https://help.panasonic.ca/PCS/OperatingInstructions/NBG110P.pdf
Whats really annoying here is the reboot team didn’t just encode SDI to betacam like most studios at the time were doing. They literally could have just plugged their SGI computers into the SDI in on the betacam recorder and had the same if not better quality.
Also if anyone wants to see peak analog video tape quality betacam looks absolutely amazing. I had to transfer a tape my mentor had on the format to digital. It blew my mind at how good it looked.
Its strange how they didn’t opt for the easiest and most common path to have the highest quality video and went with some oddball d1 format.
Betacam (early-mid 80s) and Betacam SP (late 80s) VTRs are analogue – and there was only an SDI input and output on the relatively niche BVW-D75 that came late in the format’s life – all the rest were analogue component and composite only for I/O (Non-SP Betacam wasn’t deemed broadcast quality at all in Europe, and Beta SP was marginal). Betacam SP suffered quite badly from drop-out – it wouldn’t be a mastering format for high-end productions.
Digital Betacam came later and was compressed – whereas D1 is uncompressed. High-end post production used D1 instead of Beta SP. Once Digital Betacam arrived things changed and though people were initially nervous of the compression, many operations moved down from D1 and up from Beta SP to DigiBeta. If you were going for the highest quality possible – D1 was still better than Digital Betacam. (SD-D5 was also uncompressed and 1/2″ not 3/4″ like D1, but didn’t get much traction until it was re-used as a compressed HD format)
And to add – D1 isn’t an odd-ball format. It was the de facto standard for high-end post production from the mid-80s through into the 90s and used for mastering high-end commercials, pop promos and some very high-end TV shows. If you went into any post-house with a Quantel Harry or Henry suite they’d be running with D1 VTRs, and so were high-end linear suites with GVG’s Kadenza or Kaleidoscope. D1 replaced 1″ really quickly in high-end post production.
Betacam SP was an OK format (and very cost effective0 – but nothing close to D1 quality.
Any word on if the source material still exists? It’s one thing to have decent quality masters recorded in the 90s, it would be something else if they could re-render the video, especially with the opportunity to render in widescreen formats.