Goonies, but it was recorded from TV and you had to switch tapes at about the pirate ship.
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
11 points (100.0% liked)
People Twitter
5151 readers
2547 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a tweet or similar
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That’s what you get for recording in SP.
What's SP in this context?
Standard vs Long play.
Tape speed / recording quality. Frames on VHS are diagonal stripes from one edge to the other. At lower tape speeds, those stripes get shorter and closer together. The horizontal resolution is unavoidably reduced. Color information gets muddy, because that's some deep magic in a black-and-white signal. Adjacent frames can bleed into one another. Worst of all, you're more likely to get tracking problems, where the ridiculous wheels-in-wheels of the diagonal / helical read mechanism get misaligned with the stripes, and the whole picture can drop out.
Wait wouldn’t stripes get longer the lower the tape speed?
Nope. The tape travels a shorter distance in each 60th of a second, so there's a steeper diagonal between the start and end of each frame. The whole magnetic pattern gets scrunched.
I don’t understand what you’re saying.
Why would the stripes be longer, if the tape travels less distance, in the time it takes to make one stripe?
I think I don't understand the stripes thing. so it's a diagonal stripe. are the edges of the tape the sides of the screen or the top and bottom of the screen? what do you mean by steeper? is there a a gap between frames? how is the gap created? why would putting less information onto the tape (standard play vs long play) cause less readable data and lower quality? usually packing more into a given space makes quality worse.
Getting a millennial to explain CRTs is the free space in our bingo card.
Okay, so: tube televisions are a glass bulb containing vacuum. There's an electron beam at the back, and electromagnets steer that beam in straight lines left to right, from the top of the screen to the bottom, every single frame. But in-between each straight line there's a brief "blanking interval" where the beam has to move to the next line. The video signal itself goes dark during these periods. There's a longer "vertical blank" when the beam moves from the bottom-right corner back to the upper-left.
VHS encodes one sequence of lines, one frame, from the top edge of the tape to the bottom edge of the tape. The tape is pulled around a drum, and inside the drum, there's a read-write head spinning perpendicular. If the tape stopped then it'd overwrite the same vertical stripe across the tape, top to bottom, over and over. But because the tape is moving around the drum, it writes each stripe diagonally, slightly separated from the previous stripe.
It's okay to lose some signal between the bottom of one stripe and the top of the next, because there's not supposed to be any signal. That's the vertical blank.
Magnetic media has limited "response." You can only cram so much signal onto it before everything smears together, and you lose information. When VHS moves the tape more slowly, each stripe is closer to vertical, and also closer to its adjacent stripes.
Limited response is the reason for all of this. Industrial video recording just records linearly - like audio cassettes. But to do that, the tape has to move much faster, to avoid losing information. Studio-quality tapes come on enormous reels. VHS is compact, and moves at a more manageable speed, because the head moves quickly, even though the tape does not.
I am a millennial. An older one at that. And I did already know how CRTs worked, but thank you. My question was how running slower, which usually means encoding information more stabily (think of any HDD and how it took a long time to get to the point where we could even run the disks at higher speeds), would mean the information is worse. I’m still not sure my question was answered. I’m guessing it has to do with the size of the write head, and maybe you are trying to say that the write head only has one speed, which would explain the problem a bit more. Therefore the slow tape speed wouldn’t result in any finer detail because the write head can’t write any finer grained, it has nothing to do with the speed of the tape.
Me and the other Brave Little Toaster kids ended up a bit weird.
We just rewatched this with our daughter the other day and it is rrrrrough.
HE'S MY FRIEND AND A WHOLE LOT MORE
...wait what
DEN-VER! The last diiinosaur
My brain did the same thing. What the hell else is stored down in there??
I have finally found it, thank you stranger.
And I'm actively trying to go back to that. I ripped all of our old DVDs and Blurays and cancelled most of our streaming services. I told my kids that we can buy pretty much anything they want (so they don't miss out), provided it's not an exclusive.
The net result is that my kids really like Clue (1985) and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008).
My daughter liked both of those a lot.
But then she also really loves Forbidden Zone and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
She's a weird kid. Like her mom and dad.
Uncle Buck Great movie.
When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be uncle Buck. Unfortunately my brother took that position (down to driving a shit car that randomly backfires) and I'm just a normal dude 😕
Yeah, being the slightly dangerous uncle is a pretty sweet gig, NGL.
And it was recorded off the tv so you had to fast forward through commercials about clap-on clap-off lights
And the beginning of films were cut off. Big Trouble in Little China starts at the poker table for me-- I never realized Jack Burton (😍) had a monologue at the start.
I had the same thing with video games. My dad got a free promotional copy of Morrowind from Fry's. I didn't have a computer/ laptop, but every summer, my dad would let me use his on our road trips. That game made me want to learn so much about anthropology, biology, history, mythology, etc... I played for hundreds of hours and never even came close to finishing.
My dad got a PS2 when I was six. There was Jak and Daxter, and there was Colin McRae Rally. Later I also ended up with Sly Cooper.
I didn’t have many friends to compare with so that was what I played. Everyone else played Crash Bandicoot, Pokémon, Mario games, etc. and I was like “have you heard about Ratchet and Clank”? Those series eventually got more popular but no one I knew had them at the time.
