Talk:Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl

Wafers with it

Is there a particular reason that we have some mangled epithets in the "adjustments to the Albatross sketch"? Considering that in the Hollywood Bowl Cleese says "of course you don't get fucking wafers with it you cunt", why draw attention to it in the introductory paragraph and then misquote? VonBlade (talk) 22:10, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying

Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying redirects to this article. I don't get it. Aidfarh (talk) 06:24, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Technical history

It should be relevant to note the film's technical history, particularly the analogue High-Definition Image Vision system by Image Transform from Universal City, California, that was used to film the show. It was originally recorded with German Bosch Fernseh KCK-40 cameras that were custom-modified to output a 24fps, 10 MHz video signal at circa 1,000 lines to 16mm (for today's standards, the transfer worked poorly in that it was blurry, grainy, and had a milky black value/bad gamma), and the 16mm was then blown-up to 35mm for cinematic release.

For circa 25 years, all sources used for home video releases were those poor 35mm prints, until in 2008, they went back to the original 1,000-lines video recordings and digitized it to create a much better PAL copy released on Region 2 DVD. AFAIK, this restored version hasn't been released on Region 1 DVD (or BD) so far. --2003:71:4E3F:3332:38D4:8FFD:A55D:34FF (talk) 04:31, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Do you have a source for any of this? Because the cited American Cinematographer article disagrees with some of it, namely:

• 655 scan lines, not 1000.
• There was no output to 16mm. The film was edited on videotape and a 35mm negative was struck from this.

I've also heard from a source that has actually seen the videotape in question that it is 2" tape, not 1". And that the tape is currently unreadable because none of the original equipment survives. It therefore seems unlikely that a DVD was created from this tape in 2007 (N.B. not 2008).

I'm going to update the technical details with only the information supplied in the AC article. Any other details will need further references.

Barry Wom (talk) 08:06, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

It was recorded to fairly standard video tape of the day in size and width, so the physical format was never a problem for playback, especially since you can easily digitize any tape signal since the mid or late-1990s and then write a program to properly interpret the signal in the same way the video hardware did back around 1980 (see Phonovision for the same digital process applied to a much more outlandish analogue format than regular 1" or 2" tape). The actually *HARD* part was that it had been recorded to notorious 3M scotchtape, which was why the tapes had to be cooked in an oven for half an hour to become playable again. Millions of 3M tapes exist in the world from that era that have that issue. --2003:EF:1713:878:1101:411:844C:591D (talk) 01:04, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Are you claiming that the master tape for Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl was baked, digitized and had bespoke software written to retrieve the image? That's a highly unlikely scenario from a cost vs benefit standpoint. And surely if the company had gone to such lengths they would have advertised this on the 2007 DVD release?

The comparison with Phonovision is hardly valid. These were recordings of unique historical importance which justified the time and effort involved in their recovery.

Barry Wom (talk) 11:20, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

As for a source, here you have a print source: Miller, David (2015). Professional Photography Explained (page number a bit hard to locate in this format), verifying both the use of custom-modified "24-frame Bosch Fernseh KCK-40 cameras", as well as the fact they were used for MP Live at the Hollywood Bowl, and that they were outputting a signal that had "twice the resolution of NTSC". As back in the day, TV resolution was only measured in lines, that means above 480 * 2 = 960 lines. --2003:EF:1713:878:1101:411:844C:591D (talk) 02:33, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

You'll forgive me if I'm a little sceptical of unreferenced claims made in a badly written, self-published book. The mentions of the camera system appeared in this article in 2015. This book was published in 2015. Coincidence? Maybe. It's more likely that the author either obtained the information from the article, or perhaps added the content themselves (it was an anonymous contribution).

Besides, as I've already pointed out, the American Cinematographer article specifically states that it was a 655-line system. A contemporaneous article in a respected journal is obviously a better source of information than an author whose only other works would appear to be Essential Oils: What They Do & How to Use Them and Baby Names: Your Guide to Selection & Meaning

Barry Wom (talk) 11:20, 23 March 2021 (UTC)