Well, this is cool. Akemi has been obsessively and meticulously cataloguing my immense toy collection over at the newly created instagram account: Toys My Husband Won’t Throw Away.
Today, while going through the endless storehouse of items, she came across THIS –
Back in the Stargate days, the producers would receive their very own copies of the previous day’s dailies, all the the raw footage shot that day. The editor would use all this footage to assemble an editor’s cut which was forwarded to the director who would use it – and his knowledge of existing footage – to put together his director’s cut. At that point, the episode’s producer would take over and work off the director’s cut to create their producer’s cut.
Every day, we would sit in the writers’ room, eat lunch, and watch the previous day’s dailies. When we were done, we would toss the VHS tapes (eventually discs) into a bin for recycling. For some reason, perhaps old times sake, I ended up holding on to a few of these tapes from some memorable (to me) episodes: Window of Opportunity, Wormhole X-Treme, Revisions, It’s Good to be King – and, for some reason, Small Victories and The Warrior. I’d forgotten I’d even had them and so they remained, stacked away in deepest storage, until Akemi’s amazing find this morning.
So, the obvious question is Now what? There must be easily 150-200 hours of unseen footage on those tapes – alternate takes, outtakes, deleted footage, maybe even the occasional blooper. But there’s no way to know for sure until I check them out. Of course easier said than done since I haven’t owned a VCR since, oh, 1999. Fortunately, however, there are video transfer services that can digitize the contents of old cassettes, storing them onto equally obsolete discs and USB’s. The average cost is about $15/hour of footage. Since this could all get very expensive, I’ve decided to start with two episodes – Window of Opportunity and Wormhole X-Treme. Apparently, the quality of video cassettes degrades after 20 years (and it’s been closer to 25) so there’s no telling what we’ll get, but I’m curious to find out.
It’ll probably take me about a week to get organized enough to get over there and drop off the tapes. Then, the process takes about two weeks. So tune in late February for an update. Hopefully I’ll have interesting news for all you Stargate fans.
Maybe more like this?
I’ll look forward to the dailies rewatch!
Wow! Wow wow wow wow wow.
Yes, I want to know what you find!
WOW amzing find of stargate treasure x wud be so good to watch online xx
I definitely think you should shoot a message to Brad Wright, string if he’s interested in helping you get the tapes transferred to an updated medium. There could be an auction to raise money (and press) for the reboot? I guess that’d depend on licensing rights & all that, hm? Still, maybe worthwhile to check that out.
I of course would love to hear/see more about the dailies. Hope the tapes are in good shape!
I’m in the process of doing that right now with home vhs. I was able to find an old vhs/dvd writer. Quality might be the best but at least they are on disc instead of tape
Fantastic! Yay for Akemi! You could crowd fund that project.
That’s an incredible find!
A sweet scene between friends. Such a shame when they get cut for time.
Really exiting find!! Can’t wait to see what comes of these.
Change of subject but with all that talk about sauerkraut a few days ago, you got me craving it. It was great on my hotdog today. Thanks!
Whoa seriously!?! I can’t wait to see some of the footage!!!!!!
RELEASE THE TAPES!
Wow, this is incredible! Let us know at /r/stargate if you need some funds to support this project, I think a few of us would be happy to contribute to this effort and see more Stargate moments come to life!
I’m a mod on the subreddit, so I can pin a crowfund to the subreddit if needed! 🙂
ps Thank you Akemi!
Although it comes with an expensive upfront cost, it may be better to find a high quality VHS player with 4 read heads and a decent output. Preferably something with an output like S-Video, but composite works as well, so long as you can get a capture device that won’t do any upscaling. Then plug the player into the capture device, the capture device into your computer, and use OBS to record the output. It would be best to look on forums related to this for help with capturing interlaced footage in OBS. It would definitely be a treat to see some of this someday
O’Neil: The VHS collection was going to one of you! But Siler, he gets it!
yes yes dailies please pretty please with a cherry on top!!!
I’d gladly pay for copies to help offset the cost….
Really hope you manage to get some good footage from these tapes, I’m sure these will be some hidden gems amongst them. Looking fwd to seeing what you find.
This is incredible, I’m looking forward to seeing more!
That is a very wicked cool find.
If you want a contribution to cover the conversion costs if I can have a copy of what you get?
Would be cheaper and more enjoyable to buy a working VCR, you can see it all instead of some machine just copying it. Plus any you don’t want to get transferred aren’t going to hit your budget…
I’m in the process of digitizing a stack of home videos from late 80’s. Some are terrible, some are perfect. Good luck!
I’d love to see the extra footage added to the orignal shows to watch on streaming, if whoever owns MGM woudl put these out it would be cool!