I listened to, what to my untrained self whom admittedly doesn't pretend to know a whole lot about professional level digital transfers, sounded utterly crazy. But, what I heard being said had me questioning if I was stupid or if the guy earning a six figure income was BS'ing his way through his career.

Not going to name names, there's sadly no video to link to as it was a live stream, and the publisher in question never makes their livestreams available for public access when over. But, some stuff got said that to me sounded utterly stupid.

To give the perspective of what this was about. This licensing publisher's guy who is in charge of disc & digital media authoring was discussing a 1980's movie they recently licensed to do a HD release of. And he was discussing that the film masters have in more recent years sadly been destroyed (unintentionally).

The process he is using, and I have watched videos made by this guy in the not so distant past where he openly admits he's a one man operation that does all the digital remastering work solo. He claims the company has purchased five copies of the movie on LaserDisc. He then rather arrogantly blasted the LD format by saying that they had to buy five copies because "all LaserDiscs" have disc rot so it's not possible to watch an entire movie on a single LaserDisc anymore. And yes he really did make that ridiculous claim. So he goes on to say that he's made a "RF capture device" (freaking why!?) using a RasberryPi computer (again why!?), and that he's in process of digitally recording all of the video from each of the five LDs. After he's done recording he will then time code match up all five end result video files and use some feature of Adobe Premiere to frame by frame analyze and compare each frame so that every frame looks as good as it possibly can. The single end result video file from that process will then be digitally remastered and upscaled to HD.

Am I crazy, or is this man out of his mind for not capturing the video using a superior output from the LD player like S-Video or RGB from the onset?

Oh, but this gets even better! The movie in question was last licensed and released on DVD back in either 1999 or 2000 by another company (now long out of business), who I can only assume either made their transfer from the then still existing film masters, as from what he was saying the film masters were only ruined within the last ten years. But this guy with this new licensing publisher didn't even bother to address that a previous DVD of this movie release exists. And more confusingly, he didn't even note that his own employer did a digitally remastered DVD release of this movie last year, which I even remember him discussing handling in one of his personal videos a year ago.

Am I crazy for thinking his method of digitizing this movie off of LD using RF output is wrong though? Or, is their some element of video output technology that I am blissfully unaware of that makes the RF output the superior output to digitize video from?

And worth noting, he actually showed briefly on the stream the alleged RasberyyPi he's using with some custom looking circuit board attached that had a RF-BNC (twist-lock) connector.

S-Video does not mean it is better. Laserdisc video is an RF modulated composite video signal. When you use S-Video from a player, you are essentially relying on that player's ancient hardware to be better than what is in your TV.

It sounds like this individual might have added an RF tap (not the same as what is coming out of the factory installed coax connector) and is using a Domesday duplicator: https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978

Yes! That's the circuitboard setup he had in his hand!

Is this Day of the triffids?

I personally don't think you can get a better master off of LD than you could from a remastered DVD.
Hell, you could even just rip the DVD if you own the rights and sell that as your copy and its 100% digital to digital without any loss.

Anyway while I've seen some nice rips off of LD I would never buy any film knowingly ripped from an LD to make a new master, I'll just keep the 4 LDs they used
and enjoy them.

Wonder if its eraser that he had to buy 5 discs of?????
Is it possible to pm me the title???? Really want to know how hard it is to find on DVD from ebay.

Well, having not seen the video in question...

It seems likely he’s saying that he’s capturing the total RF of the LD, not that he’s capturing the video from a players RF (VHF) output. This would require a modified player and Doing this x5 could for sure be part of a very high quality capture system, potentially the best ever.

So it’s possible that you have no idea what you’re complaining about. It could also be a combo of both. Obviously not even %10 of LDs are rotted...however there are some movies on LD where more or less %100 of them are rotted so when it comes to restoring a particular movie this way he’s as good as correct.

Unless its a destroyed film they are all out there in better quality than LD if you need to get 5 partial rotted copies.

Even Fellini's Casanova is out there in both English and Italian dub that are better than the discovision copy.

I can't even imagine anything other than star wars that someone would have a hardon to capture straight from LD.
80s film that was also released on DVD 1999-2000 this has got to be the most obscure film that someone has the rights to very cheap to get stroked
by fanboys for years.

And like 100 different anime at least.

Discotek is using the Domesday to make blu rays of Project A-ko. I'll be pre-ordering those.

Thats sort of sad to hear, the DVD wasn't very good and I sold it rather than own it.
If I liked it LD would be my go to for ako.

You could see right away that it was a rip from an LD, was very disappointed, yes I know its supposedly lost but still.

My DVD copy of Amazons vs Supermen is a rip off the Japanese LD, just can't find the LD cheap enough or I would dump the DVD too.

Yeah it's lost. The thing about the LDs at this point is the price, these Blus will probably be cheaper. Hell you can't even always find the US LDs for sale.

Another thing about blu-ray is that making a backup copy is easy and doesn't require expensive hardware or technical knowledge, time and effort.

So if a decent enough LD to BD transfer is made, then make a backup copy of the BD.