Jump to content

Block's Box Auctions - VCR Tapes


Al Oregon

Recommended Posts

I had gotten these tapes some years ago (probably 10 or more).  I looked at a couple and just set them all aside.  There are 13 tapes.  They all fit in a Medium Priority Flat Rate box so shipping would be the $13 or so that USPS charges.  If someone is interested, just pay $14 to cover shipping and you can have them.  Here are the following auction numbers that were included - 6, 7, 7A, 8 9, 11, 12, 13 Session 1 (4-22-94), 13 Session 2 (4-22-94), 14 (7-15-94), 15 (9-23-94), 17 Part 1 (3-2-95) and 17 Part 2 (3-3-95).  I have shown the dates after the #'s.  The first 7 tapes did not have a date but they would be prior to April 22, 1994.  Good piece of history.  If someone can copy to DVD, that would be even better.  No guarantees on the tapes but they have been sitting on a shelf in my office so no weather, dampness or other possible problems.  First person to message me that they want them can claim them

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On Sunday, February 26, 2017 at 2:47 PM, bumblebee said:

I have a Sony VHS to DVD converter. If nobody else has claimed these I will just to upload them to archive.org to be preserved for the collecting community.

What a nice jester! Thank you!  Once they are uploaded to the archives will you be posting a link to them?

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, budwas said:

What a nice jester! Thank you!  Once they are uploaded to the archives will you be posting a link to them?

 

I will upload them and provide a link when I am done.

My main concern right now is I didn't realize each tape was so long. First one is approaching 2 hours and I don't think my DVD recorder can hold much more than that, so if I have to stop and continue on a new disc it might be tricky patching them together into one file.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

About a year ago I lent a buddy of mine my Grateful Dead collection of 167 master tapes from various shows I taped and he's slowly working his way through converting them and putting them on archive.org. I think there's 65 or 70 auctions that I produced tapes for. I can feel your pain.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wow, that's a lot of tapes to make. They aren't short but luckily the first one ended literally a minute before my DVD ran out.

There are quality/color issues on the tape so here's what I did:

1. Ripped to DVD

2. Ripped to digital.

3. Uploaded to YouTube and ran entire video through "auto-fix" using YouTube's tools. This helped with color and contrast.

Here's the result here: https://archive.org/details/BlocksBoxMarbleAuction17Part11995March02

Let me know what you think can be improved in terms of color intensity and contrast. I can dial those in manually on YouTube and retry it and probably the same settings will work well with most of the tapes.

I prefer putting them on archive.org because it's a non-commercial endeavor and you get options for downloading etc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You will definitely find color issues and general resolution issues on these things. They were made back in the 80s and 90s and the consumer video cameras were low resolution and the white balance feature was not well-developed back then. In addition, they were never intended for archival purposes and were reproduced on bulk videotape resulting in random noise issues.And depending on how they were stored you will likely find all kinds of base matrix tape issues as well as dropouts, etc. You might want to try baking them before ripping them and that might improve the performance.

I have the masters for all these tapes, so I can save you a generation on the copying if you want to borrow them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, BobBlock said:

You will definitely find color issues and general resolution issues on these things. They were made back in the 80s and 90s and the consumer video cameras were low resolution and the white balance feature was not well-developed back then. In addition, they were never intended for archival purposes and were reproduced on bulk videotape resulting in random noise issues.And depending on how they were stored you will likely find all kinds of base matrix tape issues as well as dropouts, etc. You might want to try baking them before ripping them and that might improve the performance.

I have the masters for all these tapes, so I can save you a generation on the copying if you want to borrow them.

It wouldn't be worth the effort for me to do the master tapes. Somebody with better equipment would be best suited.

That being said, I think these are good enough to start with.

Interestingly, YouTube detects the classical music on these as copyrighted and that restricts some devices they can be played on. Also puts ads on some of them. I still may move them to Archive.org for that reason but for starters I'm putting them on YouTube because of their color enhancing features.

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...