Dragon Ball Z Marathon VHS recording w / commercials - YTV channel - Canada (1997)

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05 Mar

Written by SkinnyV

What we have here is a block recording of a few Dragon Ball Z episodes as broadcasted on YTV in Canada around 1997, with all the commercials intact! You can thank my younger self for recording this and safely storing it for all those years. I am by no mean a Dragon Ball Z expert but they seem to be using the Ocean dubs. This come straight from my childhood era and it is very nostalgic for me as it is rare I can find canadian TV recording with commercials anywhere so hopefully this will make some other peoples happy and encourage them to upload and share whatever contents they might have! There is also many cool toys commercials from the era, including some for the Nintendo 64!

This tape acted essentially as a test subject for me to come up with some sort of work flow for my future tapes transfer and it took me a quite a while to come up with something I am satisfied with. It is not perfect as some part of the tape can still subtely jump a bit but I figured I can't go on forever trying to fix everything considering the kind of material it is and I unfortunatly can't justify purchasing a proper hardware timebase corrector or frame synchronizer that would fix that kind of transfer issues considering this is just one of my many hobbies. But I think I have finaly came up with a combination of capture card settings and post processing steps that seem to produce a nice video that should be pleasant to watch on modern system. Some of the things that I worked on was properly de-interlacing the video, reframing and removing VHS bottom bar artefact/side tape distortion, de-noising the image a bit and sharpening the lines, slight color correction of the image to bring back color vibrance and, last but not least, cleaned up and de-noised the audio (original had a constant tape hum in the background that was very annoying).

I love VHS TV recording that include the commercials as they act as a true time capsule of the era they were recorded in and showcase things that are otherwise locked into people's memory. In fact, a big part of my original idea for this website was to digitize and share VHS transfer and this will be the first of hopefully several more tape transer I will be sharing here. I wish I could also share those on YouTube to reach a wider audience, but its draconian automated copyright protection system unfortunatly prevent me of doing so for most tapes as it get flagged right away for most content and require heavy editing to the point that it is not worth it. Even worse is that most cartoons now get flagged as "made for kids content" and automaticly disable commenting and such which is one of the fun part of having video like this on YouTube. Fortunatly, archive.org has been, up until now, a good place to have many kind of content and material preserved and made accessible to peoples. Let's hope it continu to be this way in the future as it hold so much treasure and great content.

  You can download the full high-resolution video of the tape by clicking on the link bellow!