Winds of Change (continued changes) (Patreon)

The past week or so has been pretty crazy, though in this film's case I may need to back up a bit further...

After already spending the past couple of years trying to combine the American, Japanese, and French versions of Winds of Change, back in August I'd learned that there was another version out there, released on VHS in Sweden. I received a sample clip via Facebook a few weeks later, which immediately got my attention. I didn't think I could be surprised, but was proven wrong - the Swedish version had the entire Cinemascope image squeezed into a 4x3 frame! Now I had to find a copy of that tape!

Back in January, one finally turned up. There was just one problem - the seller would only ship within Sweden. Lucky for me, a friend in Sweden was willing to bid on it for me. A week of suspense followed. What if someone outbid us right at the end, like on Ebay? After we won, it was another week before the seller could ship it. But then once my friend received it, I was headed to Arizona the following week. If he'd shipped it then, would it arrive soon enough so that I could capture it, and work on processing those captures while I was away?

...We went with the more sensible option, of waiting until I was on my way home before sending the tape.

It arrived this past Monday, but as much as I'd wanted to dive right in, I couldn't. A short, rush contract came my way just last week, and I needed to finish my work on that, first.

Once I was able to turn my attention to the tape, I quickly ran into problems. The seller had neglected to fully rewind it... and I found that I couldn't. For whatever reason, it just would not budge. Rather than try to force it, I tried swapping the outer shell. That worked, but only so much. My tape rewinder would get it part-way (my VCR can't rewind at all), but the rest needed to be done manually.

After decoding the first capture... I don't think there was any possibility of not being disappointed. I'd built this tape up so much in my mind, there was little hope of it actually meeting my expectations. The full image is there, yes, but the overall quality makes me think this tape is a 3rd or maybe 4th generation copy, or at the very least that it was well-watched.

Quality aside... the full image is THERE! Overlaying the Japanese and American versions, I'm amazed again at how much of the original image was lost (and now found).

Looking back at the prior sample clip, I noticed some things - the timing of the subtitles is different, and the borders were transparent, where on my tape they're solid black. The image also looked brighter in that sample, but since it was recorded with a phone, the compression made it impossible to truly judge to quality. In either case, I may keep looking for additional copies. Until I find one, though, I'll work with what I have.

After capturing the video signal a dozen times, I put the tape back into its original cassette. I was done with it, so now it could rest on my shelf, next to the others.

...except I'd forgotten to capture the audio.

I didn't want to swap the shells again, so I took a chance on the tape having loosened up enough to where it would play and rewind. First I'd record a sample from the beginning to help with alignment, then I'd rewind to get the full audio track. Before rewinding, I'd also recorded a few more samples from the first 20 minutes, to use as reference for color correction. What I was seeing from the conventional capture device wasn't as harsh or as saturated as the decoded RF signal.

When I placed the tape in the rewinder, once again it wouldn't budge. By now I'd gotten used to rewinding it manually, only this time it was further in. I managed to rewind it about halfway, before it came to a complete stop. No matter how hard I tried, it just did not want to go any further. Now I had no choice - I had to swap the shell.

It was only when I'd removed the top half of the cassette, that I'd realized what had happened - that extra effort I'd put into trying to manually rewind it had stretched the tape nearly to the breaking point. I was at least able to get the audio from before and after the damage, but a few seconds from 10 minutes into the movie are just gone.

...But not impossible to recover. One of those samples I'd recorded earlier accounted for over 90% of the gap. The rest I'll have to fill in with audio from the American version (the Swedish release is still in English).

As I type this, all 12 captures are being stacked together. I'd stacked 6 of them together the other day, and while the quality is much better than any single capture, I don't expect 12 to be as much of an improvement. But I have them, so I might as well use them!

All of this processing takes so much time, I've been itching to draw to pass the time. I haven't made much progress on the one image I'd started, though, because part of this contract means providing support whenever it's needed, and it's been needed all week.