Where do I talk about a Betamax copy of a movie, and about the letterboxing issue?

[tripletopper]

First of all I posted this here because the DVDs section didn't say older media than DVD was okay like LaserDisc select division VHS and beta and earlier formats.

Second I don't see a particular issue about the debate of letterboxing and creative uses of letterboxing on early media.

If there is a place where this conversation goes, I give the okay to the mods to move it to the appropriate place



When I was a kid when I saw The Black Hole on Beta I could have sworn that there was a text under the titles with descriptions of what would typically show on a computer monitor saying "warning inside gravity well" and similar messages

Someone told me that was only in the preview and not in the movie.

I asked my brother and dad if they remember that part being on the movie, and not just the preview, and they said yes.

Dad said it wasn't in the original film and it was put on the original copy for betamax when it was distributed by fotomat originally before there were home sales of beta tapes.

I sold the fotomat copy but didn't realize that that particular scene was (perhaps) unique to that issuing.

I could have also sworn the graphics were higher up on the 4x3 plane (remember this was before letterboxing was even an out loud issue). The graphics looked full and complete weather was on the the VHS cassette that was printed in original theatrical ratio or whether it was on the beta but the beta one seemed higher so that you could do the whole scene in part of a 4x3 and then put the graphics underneath that was in the preview underneath the title credits.

If so that was a very positive reconstruction of a movie considering the movie was Cinemascope, and they decide to use the bottom portion that would normally be blank and add those "status" graphics which I thought was kind of clever.

The reason why they probably did it like that was because the XY grid would look distorted if the picture was awfully (both in the sense of an adverb modifying a verb and modifying an adjective.) distorted from its 2.35 to 1 and then represented in a 1.33 to 1.

By the time the 90s release was made letterbox VHS was more accepted.

But people don't believe me that the photomat copy had those graphics underneath as a way to "pad" that big letterboxing needed to make that scene work.

Does anyone have a Beta Fotomat copy of The Black Hole. If so could someone post it on YouTube, so that I could prove that three of us were not crazy?

Also I had a lot of distortion on that copy like Fotomat puts a very harsh copy guard system, that a root that ruined the original playback of an authentic movie just to prevent copying of that movie. There were warps in the picture and warps in the noises and music, that was even apparent when you weren't trying to copy it.