From: (Neil Wagner) - CED Magic

King of Comedy, The {76476021702}
Hard Day's Night, A* {76476607012}
I Spit On Your Grave {28485000162}
TTYL,
ZD
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Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 20:14:43 -0800 (PST)
From: Jesse Skeen
To: Tom Howe
Subject: Re: CED Digest Vol. 2 No. 7
Mime-Version: 1.0
I know that an early practice with both CED and laserdiscs, and even a
few tapes, was to "time-compress" movies that ran slightly over the
alloted time, 2 hours in discs' case. This meant the movie was run at a
slightly faster speed, "Star Wars" runs about 121 minutes so the CED and
first laserdisc versions were done this way, the letterbox reissue on
laserdisc is on 2 discs so it won't be time compressed. Empire Strikes
Back is very obviously time-compressed, you can tell just by the opening
music! I have heard a few movies were slightly edited to fit on one disc,
usually brief scenes where nothing really happens, like when they show
someone getting out of a car or walking into a room. They told me they
did this with "Saturday Night Fever" but I haven't run my tape along with
it to see if this is true or not (I also have the laserdisc which has the
end of the credits shortened!) The most recent letterboxed laserdisc of
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a single disc, and my old tape is on a T-120
so I don't think it ever ran over 2 hours. I read somewhere the original
VHS tape of Superman: The Movie was horribly time-compressed to fit on
the longest available tape at the time, that must have been something to
see! I also heard that the first Thorn/EMI VHS tape of The Terminator was
time-compressed to fit onto a T-105 length tape, I don't know if this is
true either. Thankfully video companies have seemed to stop this
deplorable practice, especially since laserdisc started being marketed as
the "purist" format. I think HBO still does this to fit movies into
even-amounted time slots however, but they do so much stuff with their
movies now that there's simply no point in subscribing to them at all.
Opening credits on a lot of old videos were letterboxed to fit onto the
screen, and had often interesting borders. Besides the orange on Up in
Smoke, 3 Days Of The Condor has a funny 70's line design, The Dark
Crystal has a weird medival pattern, and others have other colored
borders. Again, thankfully almost every current laserdisc release is
entirely in letterbox format, I often watch my old CEDs JUST to watch how
bad the pan and scan is!
I've never worn out a needle (but fear the day I do), I've tested a few
that produce a snowy picture however so this is probably what happens. I