What tape formats was MST3K shot/mastered on?
Oct 6, 2018 10:15:56 GMT -5
Treadwell, nectarsis, and 1 more like this
Post by Udvarnoky on Oct 6, 2018 10:15:56 GMT -5
Dry reading though it may be to some, I kinda want to revive the discussion about MST3K's tape formats. There's always been a degree of murkiness on this topic, and I think it's relevant because it contextualizes what Shout! Factory has had to deal with in digitally archiving this 200-episode show, which was after all produced on a standard-definition tape format throughout its entire Eden Prairie run. This topic has sprung up in various threads over the years, usually in response to tape hits on the commercial releases, and I thought it was time for its own dedicated thread.
I do not presume to have arrived at the unimpeachable facts, but as near as I can tell, here is what we know on the subject, supported by the best sources I could muster.
Shoot format: The KTMA episodes were almost certainly shot on U-Matic, a 3/4inch tape format (Mallon refers to it here) typical of the era and the context of a low-budget TV station. Once the show went national, it seems the shoot format moved to Betacam SP (aka Beta SP). Here is an incredibly useful article from 1991 where Betacam SP is referred to as the format Best Brains both shoots and “off-lines” the show on. It is possible that Season 1 predates this format switch, I can’t be sure on that, but we can be sure the switch to Betacam SP happened, at the latest, early in the Comedy Channel/Central run, and that it remained the shoot format for at least the remainder of the Comedy Central run. For the Sci-Fi era, it seems they moved to both recording to Digital Betacam (aka DigiBeta) and outputting to the same format. Here’s Brad Keely saying so during somebody’s home movie of the final BBI tour in 1999.
Movie format: The 1991 article states that the movies to be riffed were provided by HBO (parent company of Comedy Central) on 1-inch tape. Brad Keely’s comments here suggest little ever changed about that. No idea about the KTMA era.
Master tape format: For KTMA, the assumption is that the episodes were U-Matic in and out. (I don’t believe the unveiling of the masters for K01-K02 has done anything to contradict that.) For the rest of the series, my conclusion is that the master tapes are DigiBeta. I base this conclusion off the Jordan Fields MSTieCase interview in which Jordan states that for DVD releases, Shout! would receive the masters from Jim Mallon in DigiBeta format. This shakes hands with Brad Keely’s comments from the BBI tour home movies. I’m not completely confident that DigiBeta was the mastering format going back to the earliest seasons, but even if it wasn’t, we can surmise that those episodes were at some point dubbed to DigiBeta, given that Jordan only cited that single format as the one Shout! received the masters on for transfer. As an added wrinkle, it’s worth noting that the Jordan Fields interview took place shortly before Shout! Factory had the Best Brains archive shipped over to them. This means there is room for ambiguity over whether they were actually receiving the true master tapes. (They would have had to take BBI’s word for it.) Following the acquisition and Shout! physically obtaining the BBI library – literally thousands of tapes, Jordan estimated – who knows what epiphanies resulted.
Delivery format (aka broadcast master tape format): For the Comedy Central era, we can conclude that BBI eventually delivered the episodes to the network on D-2 tapes, per the opening slates everyone is familiar with. Again, we have to leave room for the possibility that the earliest seasons might have been a different situation – I don’t know if the practice of dubbing to D-2 went back as far as 1989. For the Sci-Fi era, the episodes were delivered to the network on DigiBeta. Again, you can hear that straight from Brad Keely’s mouth here, during a 1998 Best Brains tour.
Editing Tools: Brad Keely stated that the show was edited using Avid Media Composer 8000 from Episode 819 (which he incorrectly identified as Space Mutiny, so he may or may not be off by one episode) to the end. He seems to be implying that the format was DigiBeta both in and out, at least during this last production era. What editing software they used immediately before Avid I am not sure, and they certainly could have changed tech more than once over ten years, but that 1991 article linked to above gives a pretty detailed overview of all the post-production tools they were using at that time.
Let me know if you guys can fill in any gaps or set me straight on any false assumptions. I find this stuff all pretty interesting and would love to eventually get only the facts. I know that the appearance of what some have confidently identified as purely analog tape defects on Shout!’s releases – Sci-fi episodes included - would seem to directly contradict the claim that the masters (much less the shoot tapes) are in a digital format, so there is definitely room for continued arguments about what the story is there. And we just as soon have those while waiting for Susan Hart and Wade Williams to reunite with their sanity.
I do not presume to have arrived at the unimpeachable facts, but as near as I can tell, here is what we know on the subject, supported by the best sources I could muster.
Shoot format: The KTMA episodes were almost certainly shot on U-Matic, a 3/4inch tape format (Mallon refers to it here) typical of the era and the context of a low-budget TV station. Once the show went national, it seems the shoot format moved to Betacam SP (aka Beta SP). Here is an incredibly useful article from 1991 where Betacam SP is referred to as the format Best Brains both shoots and “off-lines” the show on. It is possible that Season 1 predates this format switch, I can’t be sure on that, but we can be sure the switch to Betacam SP happened, at the latest, early in the Comedy Channel/Central run, and that it remained the shoot format for at least the remainder of the Comedy Central run. For the Sci-Fi era, it seems they moved to both recording to Digital Betacam (aka DigiBeta) and outputting to the same format. Here’s Brad Keely saying so during somebody’s home movie of the final BBI tour in 1999.
Movie format: The 1991 article states that the movies to be riffed were provided by HBO (parent company of Comedy Central) on 1-inch tape. Brad Keely’s comments here suggest little ever changed about that. No idea about the KTMA era.
Master tape format: For KTMA, the assumption is that the episodes were U-Matic in and out. (I don’t believe the unveiling of the masters for K01-K02 has done anything to contradict that.) For the rest of the series, my conclusion is that the master tapes are DigiBeta. I base this conclusion off the Jordan Fields MSTieCase interview in which Jordan states that for DVD releases, Shout! would receive the masters from Jim Mallon in DigiBeta format. This shakes hands with Brad Keely’s comments from the BBI tour home movies. I’m not completely confident that DigiBeta was the mastering format going back to the earliest seasons, but even if it wasn’t, we can surmise that those episodes were at some point dubbed to DigiBeta, given that Jordan only cited that single format as the one Shout! received the masters on for transfer. As an added wrinkle, it’s worth noting that the Jordan Fields interview took place shortly before Shout! Factory had the Best Brains archive shipped over to them. This means there is room for ambiguity over whether they were actually receiving the true master tapes. (They would have had to take BBI’s word for it.) Following the acquisition and Shout! physically obtaining the BBI library – literally thousands of tapes, Jordan estimated – who knows what epiphanies resulted.
Delivery format (aka broadcast master tape format): For the Comedy Central era, we can conclude that BBI eventually delivered the episodes to the network on D-2 tapes, per the opening slates everyone is familiar with. Again, we have to leave room for the possibility that the earliest seasons might have been a different situation – I don’t know if the practice of dubbing to D-2 went back as far as 1989. For the Sci-Fi era, the episodes were delivered to the network on DigiBeta. Again, you can hear that straight from Brad Keely’s mouth here, during a 1998 Best Brains tour.
Editing Tools: Brad Keely stated that the show was edited using Avid Media Composer 8000 from Episode 819 (which he incorrectly identified as Space Mutiny, so he may or may not be off by one episode) to the end. He seems to be implying that the format was DigiBeta both in and out, at least during this last production era. What editing software they used immediately before Avid I am not sure, and they certainly could have changed tech more than once over ten years, but that 1991 article linked to above gives a pretty detailed overview of all the post-production tools they were using at that time.
Let me know if you guys can fill in any gaps or set me straight on any false assumptions. I find this stuff all pretty interesting and would love to eventually get only the facts. I know that the appearance of what some have confidently identified as purely analog tape defects on Shout!’s releases – Sci-fi episodes included - would seem to directly contradict the claim that the masters (much less the shoot tapes) are in a digital format, so there is definitely room for continued arguments about what the story is there. And we just as soon have those while waiting for Susan Hart and Wade Williams to reunite with their sanity.