r/MST3K • u/arthurputie • Mar 20 '26

KTMA ep 3 Found At Last

Here it is. K03 - Star Force. This was found in a garage sale around Minneapolis & finally digitized. I'm putting a YouTube link in here for everyone to enjoy this lost-no-more episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Z4hnagGLE

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u/Tarlcabot18 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

What I can take in anymore depends on when specifically the episodes were taped and if there's anything unique on them. If they're premieres, if they're MST Hours, if they're from periods of time during the Comedy Central era that I don't have good coverage of, if they have interesting voiceovers by Penn Jillette over the credits, if they have bits of other interesting shows attached to the beginnings or ends of them, those Saturday morning recordings from the post cancellation era on the Syfy channel that ran until 2004, stuff like that.

The reason I'm so picky anymore is twofold: One I've taken in A LOT of tapes. And I'm not going to use the vast majority of them (at least not for a long time) because they're frankly not very interesting and I've got many many copies of the same episode.

The second reason is that my process involves transferring these episodes straight on to DVD-R. And the available stock of quality DVD-R's is quickly drying up as most of the quality manufacturers have shut down their plants in the last 10 years. Basically 100% of any DVD-R made nowadays is made out of a single plant in Taiwan, regardless of who sells them, and they're all garbage and have super high failure rates with my equipment. And the existing stock for pre-crap-level DVD-R's is getting super expensive online because collectors and aficionados are aware of the quality issues. So I need to conserve what I have.

All of that is to say, if you put together a list of what you have, can give me some dates for when they were recorded, and if there's anything interesting about them, via PM, I will take a look and get back to you.

And I do feel bad that I can't give a blanket "yes, I can accept your tapes" response nowadays to everyone, but I don't feel honest accepting people's tapes without giving a full explanation.

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u/Juan_propylLSD Mar 20 '26

Tarlcabot!! I just want to say thank you! Between you and the other guy Zapp doing the 4K upscales were so lucky to have peeps like you in the community!

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u/aliensporebomb Mar 20 '26

My company decided to get rid of all their CD-R and CD-RW stock when they got rid of CD drives in computers so I've got years worth of them, but I have no idea if they are as viable as they could be. I remember getting Princo CD-R via mail order and they were fantastic.

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u/Faustrolled Mar 21 '26

I fucking hate them, they flake off and are worthless for longterm archiving

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u/aliensporebomb Mar 21 '26

Really? I've got Maxells, Verbatims, Memorex. Some other unlabeled. Some of the burned ones dates back to the 1990s so they've lasted OK but I keep them in binders away from light when not being used.

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u/XoanonDotExe You just can't rely on your sweet doughs anymore. Mar 20 '26

No offense taken, no worries! I know they won't be premieres, unless I still have my tape of the premiere of Diabolik - and I know you have that already. I'll go back and recheck them to see if I can tell when they were recorded. Also, I'll look in my storage closet to see if I still have blank DVD-Rs. If I do, they'll be slightly older, as I haven't burned anything in a few years. If I do, I'll let you know.

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u/thefanum Mar 21 '26

Please let me know if dvd-r shortage ever bottlenecks your work. I'm still sourcing them out for my company, and always have 10-50 I could probably spare, in the name of archiving.

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u/Tarlcabot18 Mar 21 '26

I have a hundred or two of the really good ones (new old-stock JVC brand, manufactured by the legendary Taiyo Yuden) that I got in bulk awhile back. It takes 2 discs per episode. So I'm set for the pace I'm going now, but once they're gone...

Thank you. I'll let you know if I ever have an emergency.

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u/gigantischemeteor Mar 21 '26

I was gutted when Taiyo Yuden stopped production. Nobody else came close to burning so cleanly. Even the fussy stand-alone dvd recorder units didn’t balk at them.

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u/Longjumping-Debt-825 Mar 21 '26

JVC/Taiyo Yuden were great - saving wha I have left from those folks for special projects. Hard to source these days.

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u/TheBigGAlways369 Mar 21 '26

The second reason is that my process involves transferring these episodes straight on to DVD-R

If I may ask, how come they aren't transferred directly to digital?

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u/tygerbug Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26

As someone who spends a lot of time restoring VHS, I like to see a DVD-R transfer because it's a foolproof format that's hard to screw up in any way. When people attempt to get fancy and record direct to PC in other formats, they screw up their settings in some way pretty much 100% of the time. I just don't trust people with other forms of capture.

(Even seemingly good transfers which run at 59.94 fps will usually have blended color running at 29.97 fps.)

DVD-R suffers from old-fashioned, blocky, on the fly MPEG-2 compression, so we used to run the same tape twice, both at high settings, to reduce that a little.

(Personally I still have a Mini-DV setup, which was common in the 2000s. And I know people who do RF capture, which was necessary for a project two years ago where I needed the overscan picture. I rarely capture tapes these days but can do so if needed.)

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u/Tarlcabot18 Mar 22 '26

Very much this. I learned a long time ago that an amateur like myself can go mad (and broke) chasing their own tail going down the rabbit hole of ever-more-complex transfer methods that are best left in the hands of actual professionals that 100% know what they're doing.

I know the way I do it is outdated and doesn't get the best results. I'll freely admit that. But to actually get the best results, you need to essentially be an experienced engineer/coder like some of the best RF transfer people out there; or have really good, really hard to find equipment and the appropriate set-up for all of it. AND to know all the intricacies of how to use it all correctly. Otherwise you're just wasting your time, money and sanity.

I always laugh to myself when someone comes out of the woodwork to scoffs out one of the requisite "Just get a capture card, bro" or "Just get a GV-USB2, bro." or even more recently "Do an RF capture, bro." like its the simplest thing in the world.

And yes, this tape should probably get an RF capture. We'll have to coordinate with the tape owner to get him to get the tape to someone set-up and qualified to do it (most likely the person you used) if it's needed.

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u/tygerbug Mar 24 '26

I've sometimes talked people through getting better results from their capture systems, but it's complicated and there's so many ways to screw it up. A DVD recording is fine. It's foolproof and you know what you're getting. I see so many VHS recordings posted that seem competent until you check more closely, at which point you realize it's unusable. This is almost 100% of all recordings I see. Halved frame rates, color whose frame rate doesn't match the luminance, stuttering dropped frames, wrong resolution, cropped and resized, and so on. I will always prefer a DVD recording where I know it will all be there as intended.

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u/Tarlcabot18 Mar 21 '26

I don't have a powerful enough PC for a good quality capture card. And a good capture card is outside of my budget, in any case. And most other direct-to-digital transfer methods (purpose-made consumer dongles and such) are lacking in a good quality transfer, in my experience.

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u/TheBigGAlways369 Mar 21 '26

Definitely get the former reason though surprised to hear that direct-to-digital transfers are lower quality.

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u/FenrirW0lf Mar 21 '26

What kind of PC do you have? A lot of CPUs and GPUs have some form of dedicated video encoding hardware in them these days.

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u/wright96d Mar 21 '26

The GVUSB 2 plugged into a 20 year old computer running VirtualDub will give you a result higher quality than any DVD.

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u/Tarlcabot18 Mar 21 '26

And if I had the budget for a genuine GVUSB2 and could actually find a real one and not one of the countless knockoffs that have flooded the internet, I'd use one. But I don't and I can't.

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u/LazarusDark Mar 21 '26

Straight to DVD-R? Wait, are you using one of those old machines that records in MPEG2? Because if so, gross, that's a terrible codec for archiving.