Day: February 27, 2024

Dear Temple Of Goo readers,

Contributor Christina, who recently joined us, would like to make a few clarifications in terms of video quality related to her VHS rips. Below is her message to the community:

This is just a little ramble in case people have questions about the quality of these clips, or if you’re ever posting about the technical side of this stuff… I know you know all this but some younger folks might not. 🙂 I just happened to notice I had two recordings of the same event and thought it made for an interesting illustration.

Here are two screenshots of the Goos performing at a hockey game in 2003. One of these is from my own first generation VHS tape — I sat in front of the TV 21 years ago, popped a tape into the VCR, and hit record. The quality isn’t as perfect as it would’ve looked in the actual TV broadcast, but it looks pretty good! The other copy came from a tape trader. I have no way of knowing if this traded copy is second generation (the trader recorded the performance off the TV herself, then made a copy of that tape) or third generation (copy of a copy of an original,) or fourth generation, or so on. Every time the tape gets duplicated, the quality on subsequent copies degrades in various ways — in this case we can see the picture is much noisier, features are less defined, and colors are more muted.

It really was a different era for sharing media, and I think that’s just something interesting to keep in mind with this old analog material… lots of people might have a copy of something, but the best version will almost always come from an original source. Let’s hope more of those folks who were recording things in the old days still have their collections and step forward to share.

I concur with her analysis and will also add the following: Because here at the Temple we strive for authenticity, one of the reasons I never doctor any of the video and audio releases I come upon is exactly what Christina mentioned. Every time a file is modified, in terms of audio-visual doctoring, something is lost along the way. A good habit would be to try and preserve the file’s original state as much as possible, as each new encoding brings along further deterioration.

I also want to mention that Christina has been working hard on her VHS rips, she even bought some new equipment to try and optimize ripping sessions. I’m sure you all deeply appreciated her efforts. Ripping stuff for the whole fan base to enjoy is no easy tasks indeed.

As a reminder, you can check all of Christina’s releases by browsing the dedicated Category.

–Temple Of Goo staff