The current “Funky Winkerbean” comic strip is featuring some panels where Les’ daughter, Summer, took the video tapes her mother made before her death to a place to digitize them, and the guy who did it said he found some “Easter Eggs” on a tape.
I’ve heard of strange things being found after the official recording, but I thought the tape was “erased” when something was recorded over it.
I’m guessing he found footage on one of the tapes that was after the intended footage. Like if you watched 20 minutes of blank scree you’d find the movies.
“Easter eggs” kind of fits here, but “finding a movie underneath another movie” does not.
I know some old CDs contained a “secret” track if you waited a couple of minutes after the end of the last track. (I.e. the last track was extra long and contained two songs with a longer-than-expected period of silence between so that most people would stop listening before the second one came on).
Of course, “Easter Egg” can also mean something in the film that people probably wouldn’t notice the first time around, rather than just something “secret”. If Stan Lee made a disguised and uncredited cameo, that would be an easter egg, too.
The way I read it, I don’t think the guy was implying any kind of technical, or hidden message. I just think that he found something recorded that she didn’t intend for him to see.
Others has a secret track before the 1st track. When you initially played the CD if you “rewound” you could hear the secret track. David Gray’s White Ladder had this feature.
On a VHS tape, the information is recorded on a series of short diagonal tracks on the tape.
It might be possible to record nartower tracks and interleave an entirely different set of tracks between them. You’d get one or the other set of content depending on the millimetre placement of the tape when starting. I expect if this is even possible, it wouldn’t work in every player.
The packing is just way too tight. Even as it was, there was bleeding between scan lines.
You could put small amounts of data in the blanking interval of VHS tapes. This is where MacroVision copy protection coding went. (Betamax ignored the blanking interval which is why the original MacroVision crap wasn’t used on those.)
There could also be some tricks about using the sound tracks, either analog or later digital (“HiFi”).
There were some systems for recording other kinds of stuff on video tape. E.g, using them for data storage. One consumer system allowed you to record something like 24 hours of digital music on one Beta tape. But these weren’t part of ordinary VCRs.
Another possibility is to have a very brief image on the screen, a la Chuck Lorre’s vanity cards. Not easily noticed, especially if it’s a single frame.
Packing was tighter than “way too tight”. The tracks actually overlap slightly, and rely upon the different head azimuth of alternating stripes to reduce crosstalk enough that it doesn’t matter too much.
May I mention that there were similar ‘trick records’ on LP? They would have two separate recordings on the same side.Where you put the needle down would pick up one recording or the other, but it was completely random which one. A Monty Python LP had this.
Not exactly an Easter egg, but I have a collection of old Disney Cartoons on VHS. One of the cartoons is Steam Boat Willie. It’s been a while since I watched it and I don’t have the tape handy, but I don’t think it’s mentioned on the front or back cover of the box. Definitely a neat bonus either way!
Since there are always two types of audio tracks, linear and Hi-Fi, you could easily add an Easter egg there. Most modern decks would default to the Hi-Fi track, if present, so it would make sense to add the hidden message to the linear track.
I take the comic to be referring to some video after the main video, the remnant of something else that was recorded over.
As in, I fill a 2 hour vhs tape with me talking about gas prices, then I decide that’s worthless and decide to tape over it. I record a 60 minute video message for my mom, and just to be sure I record 20 minutes of static at the end of my video. Well, there’s still 40 minutes of me ranting about gas prices after all that static, should anybody decide to sit through it.
The character (is his name Crazy?) seems to think that what he found was meant to be discarded, so it sounds very like something that she meant to tape over, but didn’t get all of it.
(Yes, back in the days of VHS tapes I really did intentionally record static to form a definite buffer between shows or movies and/or to wipe out whatever had been there before. Then I got a VCR that would do a blue screen when tuned to no channel, so I recorded that instead.)
Backstory to comic, at least as far as I can see it.
Guy doing the digital copy is called Crazy Harry. The kid with the tapes mother has died some time ago. His father is called Les, his mother was Lisa. His father had/has a g/f.
The two easter eggs were put on separate DVDs, the titles reveal all: “For the other woman”, “For Les”. As Crazy Harry says - she could have just been practising…
When I was a kid and VCR’s and video rental were just becoming popular, we’d sometimes rent kids movies that would include old, probably public domain, cartoons after the named feature at the end of the tape. I don’t think these were ever listed on the box, but we’d be so excited when we would find them.
The weird thing is, it was released by Disney. It’s possible it was advertised somewhere, but you’d think it would be listed on the box in giant gold letters.
“I am not sure if Lisa was just making some practice tapes”…
This means she might have intended to record over them…
Anything secretly embedded by some complicated trick would be the actual message. like a message from one spy to another.
The messages may have been recorded after many minutes of static., or after a number of endings of shows/movies… (because VHS tapes were used to record from TV channels…)
Crazy knows that Lisa may have assumed the end would be recorded over at some stage, and its just luck that he found it still there.
But Crazy also knows that perhaps Lisa had intended to hand over the content somehow… (by duplicating it to the start of tapes.)
How would Crazy find it ? well he may have a tape player that can fast forward past static, “blank”, and stop at signal… Or he might just do that because he knows stuff may be hidden after a period of empty tape, or after the junk ( like ends of shows…adverts, The start of a 3 hour movie when there’s 30 minutes of tape left…)