LaserDisc: The Forgotten Future

[@rickshawjr73]

Just started collecting Laserdisc last year. Just posted collection video on my channel. Love the format even though it's 40 years old and still going strong.

[@jefffan171]

This looks like a great idea. I contemplated a similar idea, with a pipe dream further down the line to see if the Laserdisc community would ever like the option of backing some kind of kickstarter & get past directors to give a few minutes to add to the project, Cameron, Fincher, Stone to name a few, on their box sets, the transfers and what it ment for them at the time to have their work presented in Laserdisc. The success of your time and effort will be interesting to see. My congratulations to you. Well done

[@msgeek703]

I'm into this. I never got a LD player...went right from VHS to DVD and BD without any pause in LD land. Considering that I live in Los Angeles which was ground zero of videophilia, it just shows how uncool I was. One missing item in your story was the arcade games that used interactive laser disc. Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, Cliff Hanger which used video from Hayao Miyazaki's Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro...those were part of the history and deserved mention. Another thing which is vitally important for some of us: the international nature of LD allowed for importation of Anime titles that did not get released on VHS officially here. LD's golden era in Japan also coincided with a great creative explosion in Anime. The 90s were to Anime what the '60s and '70s were to American comic books: a period where you had great creative and artistic minds working in the medium and pushing what it could do. Regardless, I think you should do this documentary. It's needed.

[@collegeman1988]

MsGeek703 I remember Dragon’s Lair, which came out about 1983-4. At that time, it was a cutting age animated video game in arcades.

[@djhenyo]

Anime on LD is mentioned briefly in this doc. Would have been great to see arcade games like Dragon's Lair also included, though.

[@johngriffiths4373]

I remember the early days of dvd when i got a player in 1999 a couple of discs were double sided. Where you had to get up to turn the disc over. Looking at the ld format fascinating as it may have been it would have put me off buying one with those limitations. Maybe im narrow minded, but im glad i missed the boat.

[@berbel2]

Really enjoyed this. Thanks a mill for making this and sharing.

[@DaisukeBeppu]

This is a great documentary. Thank you for your excellent work! Best regards from Tokyo. --Daisuke.

[@evicerator666]

This is just epic and excellent.

[@video99couk]

15:08 Betamax was not a "failure" in the sense that huge volumes of machines and tapes were sold. Absolutely huge compared to LD. And as LD brought forth CD and DVD, so Betamax gave us the very successful studio formats BetacamSP, Digital Betacam, HDCAM which went on to earn Sony a great deal of money. Funny how people consider this to be a failure. (VHS derived studio formats nearly all flopped miserably.)

[@Edubarca46]

Neither was Laserdisc. It was a good success. Not as big as VHS but good enough to last 30 years and having more than 25.000 titles. For me it is THE format, just like music is VINYL. Original executives at Philips, MCA and DiscoVision were dumbs and didn't know how to take advantage of the best movie format of all. What a pity.

[@scottstrang1583]

Sure can’t tell which ones had analog soundtracks.

[@ViewpointProd]

Nice to see a snippet of good ol Ben from THE ODDITY ARCHIVE

[@KeithTheGuitarist101]

Great Documentary, would love to see your "more legitimate" version!

[@johe1500]

0:41 "If the music don't sound good who cares what the picture looks like?!" Amen!

[@hubzcaps]

so awesome dig the docu

[@demonicgrinch]

16:06 what's young Jackie Chan doing working at LD?

[@quatz1981]

Really fascinating the part where it shows how films are recorded onto the discs.

[@el4174]

Too cool! (or so sad)...Audio Video Plus in Houston has shut down but the building and signs remain unchanged from this video...I believe it closed down in the early 2000's

[@lemonlimestiv]

41:08 Kenny Powers!!!!

[@robbridges5020]

Leonard Nimoy as the sales pitch. Logical.

[@laserdiscingoldba2005]

Best WORK!!

[@GeoNeilUK]

Lovely compilation of clips. It would have been nice to have seen in-vision acknowledgements to Oddity Archive and Techmoan during their first clip. I know they don't appear in-vision (unlike the people you do credit) people who don't know better might think either one of those is you. I know you listed them at the end, but it doesn't feel quite enough.

[@gustavofigueroa2.030]

HI-VISION LASER DISC VS LASER DISC / LASER DISC (1978) PIONEER / HI-VISION LASER DISC (1993) PANASONIC. NOTE: HI-VISION LASER DISC IS BETTER COLOR & SUPERIOR PICTURES QUALITY HD STANDARD. IS MUCH BETTER THAT REGULAR LASER DISC FORMAT👍

[@futureshock7425]

They made them a lot smaller nowadays

[@Yakov916_]

I blame wine and whiskey for me watching this. It's also neato

[@mikedelgado8888]

Awesome

[@them2002]

Laser disc was cool.

[@temetnosce6192]

Nice :-)

[@Knightmessenger]

11:46 what the guy is saying is not true. Laserdisc didn't look better because it had more lines of resolution. All tv (before HD) was 480 horizontal scanlines, interlaced. What laserdisc (and better videotape formats like Hi8, S-vhs and Betacam SP) offered was more detail preserved on those 480 lines. If you had a chart of vertical lines, the higher resolution formats would be able to show more of them on screen. An easy way to demonstrate this is to take a picture resize it to 640x480 and then make duplicates squished to to 640x200 & 640x400, then resize them back to the regular 640x480 size. The ones that have been resized will have less detail yet be the same size.

[@Knightmessenger]

I don't think vhs could get up to 250 lines. It's a very junk format that's hard to get a clean picture out of. But I think I goofed on the resizing numbers. The 480 should stay the same height vertically but the picture should be squeezed horizontally. So resizing a 640x480 image to 200x480 and then stretching it back to normal shape would simulate the best vhs could possibly do. But it would probably look better than an actual vhs image because vhs has a lot of flaws and quality issues such as blur that often prevent it's already low capabilities from maxing out. Betamax footage I've seen appears to be much better in this regard. Laserdisc would be like a 425x480 image but it can look almost as good as dvd if you have a high end player.

[@GeoNeilUK]

"So resizing a 640x480 image to 200x480 and then stretching it back to normal shape would simulate the best vhs could possibly do." Actually, in the crudest possible terms, shrinking a 640x480 image to 320x240 and back would be a better demonstation. VHS had reduced vertical resolution as well as horizontal resolution. "Betamax footage I've seen appears to be much better in this regard." Really? Because from what I've heard about Betamax vs VHS is at equivalent speeds, Betamax was better (B1 vs VHS SP, B2 vs VHS LP, B3 vs VHS EP) but B1 was pretty much never used so practically VHS and Betamax were about equal (as in VHS SP == B2, VHS LP == B3) Seems the consumer valued recording time over quality (hence why only older Betamax VCRs record in B1, most newer stuff can only use B2 and B3)

[@futureshock7425]

I have quite a few...

[@plushifoxed]

yeah that's chocolate all right

[@neilforbes416]

Having Philips behind this product.... NO WONDER IT WAS SUCH A FAILURE!

[@Kit_Bear]

Yeah, it wasn't much of a failure if it lasted over 20 years.

[@pHD77]

@@Kit_Bear but it never became a true mainstream item. It became a niche format for those, who appreciated the pros rather than focusing on the cons - higher quality, but at the cost of convinience. But prices probably also scared people away. "Why bother with a expensive format, which can't record? The same movies are also available on VHS *and* can be rented, so why bother with an expensive player, which plays expensive movies, you most likely will only watch once?"

[@henrys3629]

Leonard Nimoy with a mustache?

[@alritedave]

Spock on an undercover away mission.

[@drunkensailor112]

It took me a while to realise the bearded glasses guy was not from the 70s.

[@neilforbes416]

The samples cobbled together for this project illustrate perfectly the gimmicky, over-hyped presentation style so typical of America, Leonard Nimoy with that chirping "thing" that he's interpreting as to be speaking to him, that's a prime example of the stupid gimmickry that totally robs American presentations of ALL credibility!