I’m Lenzu Le Looney and I’m currently on a hunt for the highest quality video and audio sources to various CEC Showtapes in every era.
As of right now, my focus is on the Avenger era and I’d like to reach out to anyone who could help with locating HQ sources not found elsewhere. I know Brian Hagan has the digital masters, but I wasn’t sure how to directly contact them, so I decided to reach out via Chuck E. Pedia, since 64th Gamer (the individual that interviewed them years ago) runs the place from what I’ve heard, I could be wrong.
Highest quality is not very well organized in the fandom as there is not really any central repository for every single showtape rip. The wiki and its archive.org page do contain every known rip that includes signals, but this disregards quality. (Though any of the newer PTT rips are very solid as we’ve never had proper archives of PTT signals, and such every current one are from the 2020’s)
Brian’s digital masters have all already been uploaded, he has confirmed with us multiple times he’s given all he has now.
Atleast for Avenger era if you manage to source DVD rips of the shows those will be of closest to best or the only copies of the shows. VHS versions of these shows were given up to the late 2000’s so arguably if a good rip is provided it may have better video than the compression of the DVD rip.
Gabe (Pizzacam) stole many copies or rips of masters from Corporate a long time ago, and his channel does contain a few uploads of these. Notably there are only in DVD quality as has only ever used one method to rip them, and this will usually disregard Showroom audio or signals for completeness as he did this for ease of watching. People have commissioned him in the past for rips of these masters, so you may find through some sources a compilation of rips that contain basic DVD start menus which give away its one of his rips.
Outside of digital DVD rips everything else is very scattered, and a lot of things have only been ripped once (in bad quality). A lot of things have been reuploaded and recompressed many times. I’d avoid YouTube rips wherever possible.
You may find some good starts here, and also I know CEC Columbus has a decently complete collection of shows. If you ask around I’m sure many others also have various archives hand-compiled.
Regarding the avenger era there was a CD released in 2009 for guests to purchase that was various live shows are all stereo. Regarding everything else the studio c copies of the show are the highest avaliable copies of those shows.
Video quality is going to what 64th said. Studio C on average is higher quality (except September 2011). Since we have some footage of masters from Brian and the quality is largely the same. All studio c uploads are basically master quality
“Brian’s digital masters have all already been uploaded, he has confirmed with us multiple times he’s given all he has now.”
About this, while yes he did give you and the team audio masters to April ‘97, 99, and September ‘00 to D³ to upload on Archive. org and uploaded the video masters to his YouTube channel, they’re heavily compressed due to YouTube’s handling of 480p media and the only other option he gave is AI upscaled (not to mention deinterlacing them to 30 when half the live action footage is actually 60 when using more proper deinterlacing). Plus, he never uploaded the uncompressed audio masters to the Studio C premiere, August 1999, and December 1999 to archive. org either.
I’d prefer if he lended a copy of those video masters uncompressed to Archive. org as I can see them being an upgrade to the Studio C DVDs, but that’s up to him really. I wanted to reach out to you specifically about it since you managed to interview him.
Why do uncompressed masters matter? Well, outside of having the best sources preserved, I believe everyone deserves listening to these songs losslessly and watching the videos without MPEG-2 compression or YouTube compression in their original, authentic quality. Take September 2000 for example: While the audio masters uploaded are mono (despite the CEC Video Hits versions being stereo), they were lossless and shown notable improvements over their Studio C DVD counterpart.
You’re welcome to try with Brian as we mainly focused at the time on getting him to release new stuff, didn’t wanna bother him too much by refocusing on older stuff. Most of the flacs were from me begging specifically though.
His email is brianhagan@me.com (for anyone else reading this please don’t bug him unless its something nice or important)
Hello, CyberSnout. Apologies for not replying to your message sooner, but I believe I’ve heard of that very CD release you’re referring to, Chuck E. Cheese’s Greatest Hits Volume 1? If that’s the case, its been years so I might wanna refresh my memory.
As for the Studio C DVDs being higher quality, I don’t exactly doubt that, that’s what I’ve been going off of before making this thread, I can’t help but want to go further then that. I’m currently looking over various Studio C DVD showtapes for whenever they reuse footage or songs for the highest quality variants of them, so far the results varied. The only official release where every instance of reusing footage I feel is undeniably higher quality is the CEC Video Hits #1 DVD.
While obviously everyone is aware of that specific DVD due to containing stereo mixes not found elsewhere and the bonus features included such as the Stranded featurette, the included music videos that originated from 2000-2002 all contain superior encoding compared to those showtapes they came from. I was pleasantly surprised over how clean the Humpty Dumpty music video looked when played onto MPV with Lanczos and I felt should be the video standard for all CEC showtapes within that era.
By the way, if you don’t mind elaborating, how is September 2011 the rare exception of not being higher quality then the existing stages versions? I’m curious to hear whenever I tackle to the 2010s showtapes eventually
September 2011 just had terrible encoding for the Studio C copy. I’m not sure why it was done, but I’d imagine someone screwed up when the final mastering of it.
Quick update: As I look over more Showtapes, the more I realize the footage reusage in a handful of them, which give me a lot of material to stitch and Frankenstein into one another. For example: in September 2007’s version of Turn The Beat Around, footage from September 2001’s Do You Love Me is reused, though I’m unsure which looks better in terms of image quality.
As for January 2000 (Chuck E.'s Variety Show), the king of reused songs and segments, while I’m glad it reused materials from January and April 1999, thus giving us DVD quality footage, what I’m disappointed on is the excessive compression artifacts on them, as common as it is in other early Studio C DVDs. Even for the songs that were reused from August 1999, they look worse than how they initially did in the August 1999 DVD somehow, which I didn’t expect, but should’ve with the smaller file size.
And then there’s 2000 Summertime. So far, when I did comparisons between that and 2001 Summertime, the former contained superior encoding and slightly better audio. The latter showtape contained some of the lowest video bitrate I’ve seen in these DVDs so far where it goes as low as 2.6 Mbps, the average being 3-4 Mbps while the former was as low as 3.1 Mbps with the average being 4-5 Mbps.
While I doubt they’re still around, probably destroyed for all I know, it’d be nice if copies of the Studio C Laserdiscs were found so someone can do Domesday Captures on them.
Apparently Franchize is holding onto some form of the AAM showtapes, though its not been said if they contain video or signals or anything. Bare minimum audio
