CED Digest Vol. 2 No. 8

CED Digest Vol. 2 No. 8 • 2/22/1997
From: jim
To: ceds@teleport.com
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 04:54:40 -0500
Subject: CED' to trade

I've got the following CEDs for trade or sale.  Not much, but if
anyone's interested, let me know.  

LOVE AT FIRST BITE
48 HRS
THE SPY WHO LOVE ME
THE PRODUCERS (some water damage on label but plays fine)
TOM JONES (2 Disks)
BANANAS
THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH

I'm looking for things like:

ALIEN
EARTHQUAKE
KING KONG ('76)
JAWS
AIRPORT '75
SOMEWHERE IN TIME
THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE
or other fabulous 70's movies.

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Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 00:24:20 -0800
From: Tom Howe 
To: ceds@teleport.com
Subject: RE: 60 Minute Limit and Shortened Media

Recent questions were about exceptions to RCA's 60 minutes per side limit and
whether some media was shortened to get it on a single disc. RCA actually
raised the 60 minute limit per side to 63 minutes in 1983 after the
introduction of the J-series players. Some long discs will enter locked groove
around 61 minutes on the early players designed before this longer play time
was instituted. The test discs have 65 minutes of video per side to test arm
travel limit, and the longest side I've seen on a released title is Side 2 of
"My Dinner with Andre" where the movie ends at 55:51 followed by the trailers
for "Koyaanisqatsi" and several other movies until it finally ends at 62:12.
Elimination of end credits and time compression were two methods used to get
movies longer than 120 minutes on a single disc. Examples of time compression
are "Star Wars" and "The Empire Strikes Back" which were respectively shortened
by 3 minutes and 5 minutes by speeding up the 1" recording tape during
mastering. I'm not aware of any discs with cut scenes, but haven't investigated
whether this is the case with "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or any other titles.

--Tom Howe

------------------------------------------------------------------------
To: Tom Howe <ceds@teleport.com>
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 10:36:16 -0500
Subject: Digest Entry
Reply-to: zachd

Hi Tom -

Here is an entry for the CED Digest when it comes out again:
------------

Fellow CED Collectors -

I've revamped the CED section of my web site again and have all my 
lists looking nice and current.  So please take a look at my wanted
and for-sale/trade lists!  If you don't have WWW access, I'd be happy 
to email the lists to you.

The direct URL is:

http://users.HUB.ofthe.NET/~zachd/flea/zach/ced/ced.htm

I have a longer list of wanted disks on the page but here is the most 
wanted list:

Clockwork Orange, A (2) {76476031213}
Blade Runner** {42995138061}
Pee-wee's Big Adventure** {25757115234}
Lolita (2) {27616100689}
Return of the Jedi (2)** {24543147893}
Rosemary's Baby (2) {76476006211}
Warriors, The {37757011225}
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn** {47897400452}
Yor, the Hunter from the Future {76476030728}
Breathless {76476019136} (Is this Goddard film or 80's?)
King of Comedy, The {76476021702}
Hard Day's Night, A* {76476607012}
I Spit On Your Grave {28485000162}

TTYL,
ZD
 ------------------------------Cut Along Dotted Lines----------------------
The Net's Best Virtual Flea Market: http://users.hub.ofthe.net/~zachd/flea1.htm
 - 19 Dealers and growing!  All used goods, all low prices!  Visit NOW. -

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 20:14:43 -0800 (PST)
From: Jesse Skeen 
To: Tom Howe <ceds@teleport.com>
Subject: Re: CED Digest Vol. 2 No. 7

I know that an early practice with both CED and laserdiscs, and even a 
few tapes, was to "time-compress" movies that ran slightly over the 
alloted time, 2 hours in discs' case. This meant the movie was run at a 
slightly faster speed, "Star Wars" runs about 121 minutes so the CED and 
first laserdisc versions were done this way, the letterbox reissue on 
laserdisc is on 2 discs so it won't be time compressed. Empire Strikes 
Back is very obviously time-compressed, you can tell just by the opening 
music! I have heard a few movies were slightly edited to fit on one disc, 
usually brief scenes where nothing really happens, like when they show 
someone getting out of a car or walking into a room. They told me they 
did this with "Saturday Night Fever" but I haven't run my tape along with 
it to see if this is true or not (I also have the laserdisc which has the 
end of the credits shortened!) The most recent letterboxed laserdisc of 
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a single disc, and my old tape is on a T-120 
so I don't think it ever ran over 2 hours. I read somewhere the original 
VHS tape of Superman: The Movie was horribly time-compressed to fit on 
the longest available tape at the time, that must have been something to 
see! I also heard that the first Thorn/EMI VHS tape of The Terminator was 
time-compressed to fit onto a T-105 length tape, I don't know if this is 
true either. Thankfully video companies have seemed to stop this 
deplorable practice, especially since laserdisc started being marketed as 
the "purist" format. I think HBO still does this to fit movies into 
even-amounted time slots however, but they do so much stuff with their 
movies now that there's simply no point in subscribing to them at all.
Opening credits on a lot of old videos were letterboxed to fit onto the 
screen, and had often interesting borders. Besides the orange on Up in 
Smoke, 3 Days Of The Condor has a funny 70's line design, The Dark 
Crystal has a weird medival pattern, and others have other colored 
borders. Again, thankfully almost every current laserdisc release is 
entirely in letterbox format, I often watch my old CEDs JUST to watch how 
bad the pan and scan is!
I've never worn out a needle (but fear the day I do), I've tested a few 
that produce a snowy picture however so this is probably what happens. I 
have however had 2 stylus cartridges short out on me, once on my 
Sears/Hitachi player which uses the funny long thin cartridges, and once 
on my SGT 250, which uses the more common large cartridges, this was when 
I was watching for the first time a disc I had gotten new in the 
shrinkwrap! Both times, the sound and picture appeared to "freeze" for a 
second (more often experienced on old early-80's laserdiscs, the sound 
effect is also similar to a CD stuck on one part, repeating the same 
fraction of a second over and over.) After this the sound and picture 
dropped out entirely into a series of white horizontal lines on the 
screen. I often hit Pause for a second when strange problems come up and 
that seems to cure it, but these times the player would not do anything 
else after I tried to return to play mode, playing other discs brought 
nothing.
New question: Does anyone know of any program material that is available 
ONLY on CED? Besides the opening RCA logos, and instore demos, I have a 
few discs that I haven't seen on any other formats. The NFL highlight 
discs are actually each composed of 4 separate films that look like they 
were distributed on 16mm film. I just got the Wimbledon 79/80 disc this 
week, and that also appears to be taken from different 16mm films (I 
haven't watched all of it yet.) I don't think the 1980 Olympics "Miracle 
of Lake Placid" disc is available anywhere else either. One of my 
favorite CEDs, and among the first load I ever picked up, is Family 
Entertainment Playhouse, which is 4 Learning Corporation of America 16mm 
films shown in schools telling "stories with a message". The "Mr. Gimme" 
film is especially hilarious! I have an animated Hansel and Gretel 
full-length movie done with animated figures, made in the 1950's and put 
on disc by RCA, which I have not even seen listed in any video movie 
guides, so this film may be pretty rare too. The MysteryDisc interactive 
discs were originally produced for laserdisc, but "A Week At The Races" 
was made for CED (I like how the old guy on it says the word 
"videodisc"). Although Jane Fonda's Workout started as an RCA Videodiscs 
production, it's still available on VHS, and I have seen Dr. Spock's 
"Caring for your Newborn" on VHS as well.
One final note, I just saw a DVD player at the Good Guys yesterday, all 
they had was a Panasonic demo disc, there aren't any movies out for it 
yet. The claims of "Superior to laserdisc" are as false as the first RCA 
promo's claim of it having "clear, beautiful pictures." The demo disc 
includes a slow camera pan across the front of the player, with shadows 
on it that have that awful "pixelated" appearance that has plagued every 
other digital video format I've seen. It doesn't look as awful as DSS but 
it is still completely unacceptable and I will never give up my 
laserdiscs for it. I do look forward to DVD's becoming an even bigger 
failure than CED, then I can get a $10 DVD player at a thrift store and 
watch the demo disc at home and laugh at it all the time.
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