BRUH, the Discovision logo on FILM. Now there's something I'd PAY to see.

Yes, to the best of my knowledge, Discovision LDs were mastered using 2" Quad videotape (I noticed the head-switching notches too :) ), but earlier releases when Discovision made its debut in 1978 were mastered on the 2" helical format used by the IVC 9000 VTR, which they initially used (as well as the broadcast industry, a few TV shows like "Barney Miller" used the 9000 format for the final on-air masters). The 9000 had extremely high video quality and performance, possibly the best of any analog videotape format ever developed, thanks to it being able to record a max raw analog bandwidth of 8 MHz(!). Discovision switched to Quad shortly after, since IVC was on the verge of going out of business mostly due to the 9000's manufacturing cost and lack of sustainable sales, leaving parts and support for the 9000 in uncertainty. After Discovision got acquired by Pioneer around 1980-81, most LDs by then were mastered from 1" Type C videotape instead, a rather new format at the time, and also gaining use in the broadcast industry then.

@@RyanSchweitzer77 how about tv commercials on film

The original film master would be the best quality (lol), but nowadays you'd expect it to be faded so some restoration would be in order. Also it probably doesn't exist. The Quad masters are worse quality, and are even less likely to exist given tape reusage of the time. After that, you're reduced to capturing early laserdiscs, and if you're serious about doing it right, nothing comes close to the Domesday duplicator.

A. Test mode isn't for "the best quality of logo captures". It mainly disables some of the player's automation and safeguards giving you greater control over it. It's better to not use test mode if you don't have to, as you can fuck things up if you're not careful. B. To access test mode, you can either buy a specialized service remote or open up your player and jump the two contact points labeled "Test Mode", but do so at your own risk.

@@WOSArchives From what I understand you have to use test mode when playing back these early Discovision LDs because they are mastered weird, the first 12 seconds of the logo don't have a frame number and the rest of the frames of the logo are all labeled as frame 0. If you try to play one of these discs in normal mode on a newer LD player, it will start at 0:15, because that's where it thinks the beginning of the disc is (frame 0) because of the mastering. I don't know why but it seems like the Discovision LDs didn't just suffer from laser rot, but also from stupid mastering errors. Like the 5th side of the movie "Frenzy" having every single frame encoded as a stop/still frame so it's literally unplayable on newer players without test mode.