Documentarians Secure Original 'ReBoot' Master Tapes, But Need Help To Play Them (globalnews.ca) 60
"Predating even Toy Story, ReBoot was the first 3D animated television show," writes longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger, sharing a new report from Global News. "The master tapes have been located in storage but the hardware needed to play the 1990s-era media has yet to be located." From the report: Produced in Vancouver by Mainframe Entertainment, it aired on YTV between 1994 and 2001, and decades later still has a committed fan base. Among those super fans are Jacob Weldon and Raquel Lin, a B.C. duo now crafting a documentary about the creation of the show and its impact in the film and TV world. Weldon said he wants to see ReBoot recognized for its place in the evolution of computer animation -- recognition he said it rarely gets.
When ReBoot was finally cancelled -- cut short in its fourth and final season -- its protagonists were left in peril and the show ended on a cliffhanger. It's another factor that Lin and Weldon say has helped immortalize the show and has helped fans hoping for a revival that might finally explain the characters' fate. Earlier this month, the documentary also got a potential major boost. Mainframe allowed Lin and Weldon to come to the studio to look for the show's original master tapes, recordings some believed might have been permanently lost. They struck gold. "They had boxes upon boxes upon boxes, hundreds of tapes," Lin said. "It's original resolution, original frame rate, uncompressed. If we could get a deck to play these, they would look beautiful," Weldon said.
Finding that deck, however, is the pair's next major challenge. The recordings are on a rare digital tape format called D1, a technology that Weldon said was cutting edge and rare when Mainframe was using it. It's even harder to find today, and even Mainframe doesn't have the equipment to play the tapes back. Weldon and Lin have since put out a call on social media for a working Bosch BTS D1 deck that would allow them to play the tapes, and incorporate them into their documentary. "I can't tell you how many people have called us, DM'd us, emailed us -- people from all over the world," Lin said. While the pair still haven't secured the deck, they're aiming to release their documentary by next summer. They're hoping it will help renew interest in the show, introduce it to new generations and perhaps see it get new life on a streaming platform.
When ReBoot was finally cancelled -- cut short in its fourth and final season -- its protagonists were left in peril and the show ended on a cliffhanger. It's another factor that Lin and Weldon say has helped immortalize the show and has helped fans hoping for a revival that might finally explain the characters' fate. Earlier this month, the documentary also got a potential major boost. Mainframe allowed Lin and Weldon to come to the studio to look for the show's original master tapes, recordings some believed might have been permanently lost. They struck gold. "They had boxes upon boxes upon boxes, hundreds of tapes," Lin said. "It's original resolution, original frame rate, uncompressed. If we could get a deck to play these, they would look beautiful," Weldon said.
Finding that deck, however, is the pair's next major challenge. The recordings are on a rare digital tape format called D1, a technology that Weldon said was cutting edge and rare when Mainframe was using it. It's even harder to find today, and even Mainframe doesn't have the equipment to play the tapes back. Weldon and Lin have since put out a call on social media for a working Bosch BTS D1 deck that would allow them to play the tapes, and incorporate them into their documentary. "I can't tell you how many people have called us, DM'd us, emailed us -- people from all over the world," Lin said. While the pair still haven't secured the deck, they're aiming to release their documentary by next summer. They're hoping it will help renew interest in the show, introduce it to new generations and perhaps see it get new life on a streaming platform.
Enjoyed it! (Score:4, Interesting)
This was a great series full of era-appropriate computer and IT in-jokes and adult humor, definitely not a kids show.
Absolutely groundbreaking ray-tracing/rendering graphics used at the time, state of the art for it's day.
And who could forget Tony Jay as Megabyte?
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This is more true for the last two seasons than the first two. ABC's Broadcast Standards and Practices division was notoriously hard-assed for the two seasons they ran. This is a show where they mandated a uniboob, after all.
Between the wiki [fandom.com] and TV Tropes [tvtropes.org] there's a sizable list of things BS&P did, or things the writers did to get crap past them.
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>This is a show where they mandated a uniboob
To be fair... that's in-line with the rest of the graphics quality and kind of charming.
Now, if they'd stuck around long enough for another upgrade, Dot could have been given separate breasts with realistic motion and it wouldn't have been inappropriate as long as the other humanoid characters had similar appearance updates... I can just imagine a room of animators and execs in a serious meeting discussing the appropriate size of Bob's crotch bulge.
Re:Enjoyed it! (Score:4, Interesting)
It was full of references that I'm sure the target audience didn't get. The other villain was Hexadecimal, and the old wise elder was called Phong (after Phong shading). Much of his knowledge came from ancient readme files.
My favourite episodes where the X-Files parody with Fax Modem and Data Nully, and the talent show episode that was basically a series of parody skits.
There was even some controversy over one of the main characters' appearance. Dot Matrix initially had a "uniboob", a sort of single wide protrusion from her chest. Later they were able to give her a more realistic shape, but apparently there were complaints so they changed it back. Ironically later they had another female character in a much more revealing outfit, and got away with it.
The Quarxs were before (and they were amazing) (Score:5, Informative)
The Quarxs aired 1990-1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ; Wikipedia refers to ReBoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] as "One of the first" and The Quarxs as "One of the earliest" meaning there could be even earlier works.
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I was commenting on that because the headline inaccurately says ReBoot was "The first"
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max headroom also might want a word ...
Re:The Quarxs were before (and they were amazing) (Score:5, Informative)
max headroom also might want a word ...
Or not: "Max was advertised as "computer-generated", and some believed this, but he was actually actor Frewer wearing prosthetic makeup, contact lenses, and a plastic moulded suit, and sitting in front of a blue screen. Harsh lighting and other editing and recording effects heighten the illusion of a CGI character."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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good point. then again i think they invented cgi before cgi was actually feasible, and faked it.
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To be fair, Quarxs did 12 episodes and the longest was 3 minutes. They were more like a pilot of the technology, and didn't attempt to do humanoid characters with complex movements and facial expressions.
Reboot was the first to try to produce a complete season of full length 25 minute episodes, and the main characters were all humanoids. The supporting cast were greatly simplified though.
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I found this interesting website with a list of CGI dating back to the 1950s https://computeranimationhisto... [jimdofree.com] The timeline is impressive: first computer animation 1958, first wireframe 1962, first human figure 1965, first motion capture 1967, etc.
Jason Scott suggested where to go (Score:4, Informative)
https://mastodon.archive.org/@... [archive.org]
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Can the original digital data actually be extracted with the existing equipment though? Do they put out a digital signal that can be transferred to a file on a computer? When introduced they would have output analogue video because the HDDs of the day could only store a few minutes if the uncompressed video at most. The tape was the only way to store it in most cases.
By the time computers caught up, D1 had been replaced by newer formats like digital Betacam.
In other words to get the best quality they might
Re: Jason Scott suggested where to go (Score:5, Informative)
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That's all doable though. Once you find the bus with a logic analyser, you can capture it to a computer with a high end USB streaming LA.
You only need the digital signal off the tape, which is one signal that embeds both data and timing. There is very likely to be a test point somewhere that can be used to capture it.
People have been doing something like that for old HDDs where the controller is dead, or even doing analogue capture before the digitisation circuit when the magnetic flux is degraded.
Re: Jason Scott suggested where to go (Score:2)
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The two video signals are 16MHz and 8MHz, plus PCM audio. A few hundred bucks will get you a USB LA that can sample at 1GHz, which should be enough for that signal - maybe 250mbps. It's only 8 bit sampling.
Or find someone with a faster LA, at a university or something.
Agreed that using the original machine to read the tape is the only way to go.
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Can the original digital data actually be extracted with the existing equipment though? Do they put out a digital signal that can be transferred to a file on a computer? When introduced they would have output analogue video because the HDDs of the day could only store a few minutes if the uncompressed video at most. The tape was the only way to store it in most cases.
Preservation involves multiple steps.
Before you can extract, read, interpret, or otherwise do anything at all with the original data, the very first step is to ensure you HAVE data with which to do any of those things.
A high sample rate analog copy of the original tapes from 30+ year old media onto new media will both help to prevent further data rot and give a less-fragile media to work with in future steps.
D1 is real-to-real tape, so there is no special or proprietary cartridges involved.
The physical magn
Re:Jason Scott suggested where to go (Score:5, Informative)
I have a friend who has a Sony D-1 deck and a friend who's limping it along so they can recover some old tapes.
The D-1 decks always had digital video I/O of some sort, and I believe the one I've laid hands on had SDI [wikipedia.org], so they should be to recover the video data stream from the tape fairly directly.
Part of the point of the D-1 was using a digital format both on tape and in the signal paths. That frees you from generational losses, losses along the signal path, and so forth. Plus, it's 4:2:2 uncompressed video, so while the chrominance is subsampled, it has no compression artifacts. That's what made it a great mastering and archival format. What it was was insanely expensive, both the equipment and the tapes.
Of course, these days, almost all video is digital video on a disk or solid state storage medium, but back in the day, the quality of the video on that D-1 was jawdropping, especially viewing it on properly calibrated studio monitors.
Re: Jason Scott suggested where to go (Score:2)
The problem is that these bozos have no idea what they are doing. Why ask for a Bosch when Sony made them as well and parts of a deck can be found and assembled from ebay. Tapes in that condition have many problems, from solidified grease to weakened springs to signal and data loss issues. Before you know it, the recorder eats the tape and your history with it.
Yes, these decks back then had a digital output, you also need a probably DOS or XP era computer or perhaps something more esoteric, compatible plug-
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And a short search took me here:
A recent addition to the Greatear digitising studio is a BTS D-1 digital video cassette recorder.
https://thegreatbear.co.uk/vid... [thegreatbear.co.uk]
Long term storage (Score:2)
This is why for any long term storage video media should be stored on 70mm film in a controlled enviroment as well as copied to the latest lossless digital formet. However digital formats come and go but analogue will always be around. Even if there are no 70mm players left in 100 years it wouldn't be hard to build one (especially of 3D printing tech continues to improve).
possible solution (Score:2)
To What End? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone know what exactly Weldon and Lin are hoping to accomplish with the master tapes? It's cool that they've found them, but at first blush, they don't seem to be all that valuable.
All 4 seasons of ReBoot received good-enough DVD transfers back in the early 2000s. The show was mastered to D-1 tape to begin with (as noted in TFA), so the DVDs are full-resolution releases with standard 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. The D-1 masters are uncompressed at 4:2:2 chroma, which is technically better, but by human visual standards not immensely so. That kind of detail is normally only needed for intermediates, since anything going out for release today (download or broadcast) will still get compressed and reduced to 4:2:0.
Are they doing something that actually requires the masters? Or are they just geeking out (as we all love to do)? A simple documentary wouldn't require D-1 masters; the DVDs would be fine for that.
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Purely and fairly uneducated guessing, but I'd speculate they want to re-release in higher definition, and just want the best possible signal to start working with. References say D1 was 720 x 480 format (https://optiviewusa.com/cctv-video-resolutions/ [optiviewusa.com]), but the high for its time sample rate of 173 Mbit/sec should contain (much) better signal quality than the 720 final display.
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> Purely and fairly uneducated guessing
Yes you are guessing. ReBoot on DVD is a blurry mess. The US DVD was created from inferior NTSC copies that chopped the resolution down to 640x480 vs the full 720x576 it should be.
Watching it makes me feel like my classes need cleaning :D
https://www.reddit.com/r/ReBoo... [reddit.com]
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There's an extra quirk not mentioned in the summary, despite being produced in Canada the show was rendered out at 25fps 576p PAL not NTSC. These D1 tapes are the original PAL masters. I'm sure there are plenty of TV stations across the continent with a dusty old D1 machine sitting in a closet somewhere, but it's specifically finding a such a machine in North America that supports PAL that's the problem. Every DVD release of the show that I'm aware of has been sourced from NTSC tapes, and in fact I remember
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Re: To What End? (Score:3)
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This sentiment is profoundly ignorant. If you're attempting to preserve something due to historical value you want the original, not the "good enough" home video release. They're also presumably intending this to be presented on a large movie screen in a dark theater for film festivals, not on some dopey TV and DVD player.
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Film festivals?
No, DVD mate. They are intending to release a full quality DVD and not the mess we currently have. For the US market they would have to release it on SD bluray as US DVD players are only 720x480.
The UK can have a DVD or SD bluray, likely DVD as I havnt seen any SD bluray over here yet.
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The American DVD release was transferred from far inferior NTSC tapes that cause a significant amount of damage to the video. ReBoot is a native PAL title with 625 lines of resolution, digitally speaking that is 720x576. We have higher resolution video in PAL land with NTSC land chucking away details loosing nearly 100 lines of resolution (720x480). In the case of ReBoot it is even worse as the resolution used to create the DVD's was further cut to 640x480!
With the PAL masters you can now have a decent t
Cowboy Bebop Anime (Score:1)
This reminds me of an episode where the Bebop crew needs to find an old VHS player. :D
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This reminds me of an episode where the Bebop crew needs to find an old VHS player. :D
That was a fun episode, but is predated by a "Heavy Metal" (the magazine, not the movie) in which the protagonist enbarks on a quest to get a phono cartrifge (i.e. needle) for his phonograph to be able to keep plaing their favourite music. The exact name of the cartoon escapes me.
Not Hard to find (Score:5, Informative)
Most big names in TV have a working D1 deck specifically kept alive for archival purposes. Transfer houses do too. Hell, even entities with lots of archival footage like Nascar have working decks all the way back to film scanners and 2" tape. It's not hard at all to find one, it just costs some money to use.
I guarantee your local PBS station either has a working D1 deck, or knows of another PBS station that does. I know mine does (WTVS Detroit).
WTVS (Score:2)
Aren't they moving to a temporary studio over at Lawrence Tech as they sold off their huge HQ in Wixom? Hopefully they are hanging on to their old gear.
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They need a PAL one, not an NTSC one, and the ones in North America will all be NTSC. The 25fps of PAL was closer to the film FPS of 24, so they used a PAL D1 when they recorded the series, despite being intended for NTSC broadcast. Ya, it's somewhat strange, but it saved them a lot of time/money in rendering.
Re: Not Hard to find (Score:2)
The Sony and Panasonic ones Iâ(TM)ve seen in the past can be switched between PAL and NTSC. This was one of the many promises of digital tape was the ease of releasing your content for international markets.
Good Stuff (Score:2)
Call Techmoan! (Score:3)
More than having a D1 deck, he has connections in the retro-format community, as well as a large fan base. If any YouTuber/Influencer can help, well, he is the guy!
Masters? How about original scenes? (Score:2)
The master tapes just contain the rendering output, but how about the original scenes and objects used for the rendering? Do they have those?
With the original files you could re-render them, likely at a higher resolution/quality using modern processors.
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I'm not sure what they mean by "master" tapes. I took it to mean the original raw camera output. Even if the tapes are a mixdown / processed, D1 has pretty high bitrate so if they can be read out cleanly, it'll be a lot better than the DVD / whatever else is out there.
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This was the first 3D rendered series and nothing really existed before it so it was all custom and pionering work using SGI workstations.
The kind of workflow they created would have been highly custom and unique, so its very unlikely that you could re-render this without a significant investment in rebuilding the workflow.
So Is HD Possible Or No? (Score:1)
"It's original resolution, original frame rate, uncompressed. If we could get a deck to play these, they would look beautiful," Weldon said.
Without knowing what the "original resolution" is, I don't know what this means.
I'd heard a while back that if we could find the original pre-rendered files, an HD transfer would be easy because it was all vector graphics and thus could be upscaled infinitely without any guesswork. But I'd also heard that those files had been purposefully deleted. Do these tapes contain those files, or are these tapes post-rendering? Again, I don't know if "original resolution" means the for-broadcast resolution at the
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I'm pretty sure the tapes contain the raw original digitized camera streams. Not files nor post processing of any kind.
It's easy to search the web for information on D1 tape resolution (720 x 480). But more importantly, as I commented above, is the sample rate (173 Mbit/sec).
You may be confused because you're thinking in terms of "files". The tapes don't contain "files". It's a stream of sampled video (and maybe audio), not files. Physically playing back the tapes you could sample the output, digitally conv
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> I'm pretty sure the tapes contain the raw original digitized camera streams
What cameras? There were no cameras as it's all CG.
The tapes are the fully rendered video and audio broadcast master tapes in PAL 625 line format.
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> Without knowing what the "original resolution" is, I don't know what this
It's PAL 625 line thus 25 fps 720x576.
The BBC have been working hard on upconverting SD DR WHo very well, so yes you could have a decent upconversion but you could just equally just release it SD on bluray and allow the players to upconvert.
> I'd heard a while back that if we could find the original pre-rendered files, an HD transfer would be easy
Without a load of cash to rebuild the highly custom workflow with SGI machines, th
A continuation or reboot seems unlikely (Score:2)
I thought the IP was sold and then completely bastardized into a bad clone of Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad.
It doesn't seem likely anyone who actually cares to keep the spirit of the original will ever have the opportunity to do so, and it's also pretty likely the time for it has passed.
Re: ReBoot. (Score:2)
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NOT RARE AT ALL (Score:1)
This is clickbait nonsense. D1 is not a rare format at all. It was the backbone of the broadcast industry in the USA for years.
TOTAL LIE
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PAL D1 machines are indeed very rare in NA, and that's what they need.
Re: NOT RARE AT ALL (Score:2)
D1 stacks can switch between PAL and NTSC both for in and outputs. These things werenâ(TM)t barebones like a VCR (and even the more expensive VCR could swap), they were machines costing thousands, tapes costing hundreds for professional broadcasting and recording.
But it is streaming... (Score:2)
They're hoping it will help renew interest in the show, introduce it to new generations and perhaps see it get new life on a streaming platform.
But it is streaming.... It's on Freevee and hence also Amazon Prime.
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But it is a shit version based on shit NTSC copies that were messed up when they were made.
Plenty of comparisons online showing the NTSC vs PAL version, the difference is night and day.
Original data files (Score:2)
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> Wouldn't it be better to actually get/use the original datafiles and rerender the whole show.
Yes, if you had:
1. The files.
2. The old SGI hardware and software that can render the files.
3. An understanding of the workflow. Remember ReBoot was THE FIRST CGI show, there was nothing before and no guarantee that what the industry settled on after ReBoot was in any way compatible.
4. The money/time and expertiese to do all this vs simply pull the renders of the master tapes, which is all you need at the end