Comment on Porygon Was Innocent: An epileptic perspective on Pokémon's “Electric Soldier Porygon”
zabadoh@ani.social 6 days ago
What a great article!
I always thought the random dimming was some kind of copy protection scheme, like the old Macrovision from back in the days of VHS.
wjs018@ani.social 6 days ago
Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. I am old enough to have messed around with lost of VHS tapes in my day, but I was still too young to know what was going wrong with the picture. Reading how Macrovision screwed up the picture through desyncing the scanning explains why some of the “non-authentic” tapes I got never played right for me.
zabadoh@ani.social 6 days ago
To get around Macrovision, you had to have a gadget called a genlock or time base corrector that repaired the video’s frame signal so that a VCR could record it properly.
Genlocks and TBCs were also very helpful when dubbing unprotected anime tapes.
They didn’t entirely solve the video signal degradation to the copy, but they did make the copies much clearer.