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Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Fame: I’m going to make a very serious attempt to live forever, though no warranties are implied or given.

So tonight I dubbed Fame from VHS to DVD-R, and to be honest, this one’s gonna be a walk in the park. The master tape is in SP, so believe it or not, it’s considerably sharper despite still being VHS. Also, fortunately, the action seems to be confined to a single camera – I haven’t seen any switching-back-and-forth – which caused the huge number of problems with Up The Down Staircase – at all. This means you get a few more random camera movements – trying to follow people, the camera being bumped, and so on. But I think that’s the sort of thing you expect on something like this. There’s one tape edit toward the end that’s a bit messy, but it seems to be right in the middle of a fade-down on the stage and house lights, so that’s easy enough to skip. Sound quality’s pretty good for a camera that’s 1/3 of the length of the auditorium back from the stage.

This is another case where a bunch of synapses that haven’t fired in 20 years kicked in, and I remembered a heap of stuff. … Read more

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Gadgetology Toiling In The Pixel Mines

The play(s) (are) the thing – Northside drama DVDs revisited

I burned the completed 13-minute “1981” segment of PDF Level 2 to DVD tonight (via the dip-a-toe-into-the-analog-pool method I described earlier in this blog entry), and had ample space left on the disc. Since I hate to waste disc space on that silly a scale, I thought I’d have a go at a transfer of the troublesome VHS tape of the Northside High drama department’s production of “Up The Down Staircase.” As it turns out, there’s even a helpful slate at the beginning of the tape nailing this down to the January 14, 1989 performance.

That’s just about the only thing helpful on the tape, though. … Read more