On & off over the past year, I’ve been combining the different releases of Metamorphoses/Winds of Change, in an attempt to restore as much of the original widescreen presentation as possible. It won’t be pretty, it it’ll arguably be more “complete”. So far I’ve given the most attention to the Perseus segment… and soon may need to start over, at least partially.
Recently I’ve been able to get RF captures of the French version of the film, using my Domesday Duplicator. Previously I was limited to traditional captures, which aren’t quite as sharp. In either case, though, the tape needed to be captured multiple times to improve the image quality.
The biggest downside to RF captures, at the moment, is that the VHS-Decode software isn’t able to decode SECAM color signals. It’s being worked on, but it’s anyone’s guess as to when it’ll be ready. When it is ready, I won’t need to re-capture the tape all over again, I can just decode the existing captures. But each capture takes over 12 hours to decode, so I’m not looking forward to that.
One last way I might increase the quality, is if I obtain more tapes to capture from. It’s highly unlikely that there would be a dramatic improvement, but there could be a 50/50 chance of it being the differently-cropped version of the film. Regardless, it’ll cost a fair penny, as shipping from France isn’t cheap…