The format which anime was brought from Japan to America

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Fireminer
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Re: The format which anime was brought from Japan to America

Post by Fireminer »

Valand wrote: Thu Aug 30, 2018 1:48 pm Unfortunately this was well before my time, so I don't know much. They used an Amiga as well, much like Dave suggests to be the common way to do it. There's actually a recent video where the founder of our club talks briefly about it (after talking about which anime series became the biggest hits in various European countries and how licensing used to work back then), unfortunately it's all in Swedish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLDndwP-BNk

He begins talking about it around 4:23, though you'd probably want to jump to 6:20 where he briefly shows the last of the devices of this type they were using. It seems to be this one: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/supergensx

Basically the difference from the method Dave described above seems to be that in our case the video signal came from a Laserdisc player and was fed directly into this device, rather than into the computer - which was only generating text on a tranparent background and fed into the same device separately, ending up sumperimposed onto the video picture which is otherwise just passing through without any quality loss (as our founder also states in the video). This is also why they needed to time and start both simultaneously as there was no permanent edit of the video.

This is also what I seem to gather from the specs on the page I linked to. Hope that helps.
Thank you so much for that information. I am interested in the fact that your club used Laserdisc - wasn't it only a hit in Japan? Was it available widely, and was it expensive to other format at the time?
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Valand
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Re: The format which anime was brought from Japan to America

Post by Valand »

No
Fireminer wrote: Tue Sep 04, 2018 6:37 am
Thank you so much for that information. I am interested in the fact that your club used Laserdisc - wasn't it only a hit in Japan? Was it available widely, and was it expensive to other format at the time?
I believe it was mostly used here by early hardcore home cinema enthusiasts back then. But yes, it was a bit more mainstream and a whole lot more popular in Japan. Our founder who had studied Japanese at the university made several trips to Japan and I believe he picked up the discs and possibly the player there (he also took care of the subs). The extra resolution certainly made sense for projector screenings in any case.
I don't think LDs were that much more expensive than VHS in Japan.
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labsenpai
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Re: The format which anime was brought from Japan to America

Post by labsenpai »

My college club seniors handled the subtitling projects, and they were always trying to record the best "product". Our OSU group was called Killer Nuts Anime, and we circulated our own oddball SVHS masters generally sourced from LD. Unusually, the computers being used for the timing and such were Apple Macs, AV-compatible hardware that may have been "loaned" from the university. Of course, the projection room and early internet we used were part of OSU lab facilities. By the mid-90s, buying import discs or tapes was pretty easy. You could find the sales code in a mag like Newtype, and then just call a shop in CA to order.
The city of Columbus also had a 100% Japanese micro-shopping district that rented TV VHS tapes as well. I was always amazed that the ladies at the counter didn't blink an eye when we showed up for monthly magazines and "kid shows". ;)
runesaint
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Re: The format which anime was brought from Japan to America

Post by runesaint »

[

Thank you so much for that information. I am interested in the fact that your club used Laserdisc - wasn't it only a hit in Japan? Was it available widely, and was it expensive to other format at the time?
[/quote]

Actually, a number of clubs got laser disks as it was less expensive to get laser disks from Japan than VHS tapes (I vaguely recall a Saint Seiya short on VHS costing $85 at the time). At the time I lent my LDs to subtitling groups and they would give a special copy right off the disk.
Fireminer
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Re: The format which anime was brought from Japan to America

Post by Fireminer »

labsenpai wrote: Wed Sep 12, 2018 11:00 am My college club seniors handled the subtitling projects, and they were always trying to record the best "product". Our OSU group was called Killer Nuts Anime, and we circulated our own oddball SVHS masters generally sourced from LD. Unusually, the computers being used for the timing and such were Apple Macs, AV-compatible hardware that may have been "loaned" from the university. Of course, the projection room and early internet we used were part of OSU lab facilities. By the mid-90s, buying import discs or tapes was pretty easy. You could find the sales code in a mag like Newtype, and then just call a shop in CA to order.
The city of Columbus also had a 100% Japanese micro-shopping district that rented TV VHS tapes as well. I was always amazed that the ladies at the counter didn't blink an eye when we showed up for monthly magazines and "kid shows". ;)
Say, was your universary okay with their students using their computers and facilities for hobbyist/club works? Also, were VHS and Laserdisk being taxed when they were imported from Japan to America?
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labsenpai
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Re: The format which anime was brought from Japan to America

Post by labsenpai »

Our college club was official, and the bi-monthly meetings in a Math/Sci lecture hall were approved. Club membership did cost money, which supported the production of a subbed tape library and event advertising. Our use of lab computers to host the "Venice" archive was likely unsanctioned. Bear in mind this was in the mid-90s when only programmers knew what content was really out there or buried on hard drives. I can't really answer the tax question; I guess vendors/importers rolled it in to their pricing.
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