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tldr: Promotional videos of Fragility 1.0 and Big Day Out 2000 have been liberated from dusty shelves.
Here's the backstory of how that happened.
Back in December of 1999, a press release went out announcing Nine Inch Nails' first-ever television concert special, to be aired on MTV, featuring footage from the recently-wrapped concerts in Europe - the first (aside from a secret rehearsal in Los Angeles) in support of the newly released double album "The Fragile." I actually had been in contact with Interscope at the time, and I remember talking on the phone with someone in PR there who offered to send me the concert on VHS. As the cliche goes, I was young and naive, and declined. I would make a trip back to my parents house - I was in college and didn't have cable - and would tape the special as it aired. If memory serves me, Scared Straight was on (and uncensored, oh my!) just prior to the show. Without much warning, notes from The Way Out Is Through are playing while blocky projections bubbled across a screen in front of the band that I barely caught on tour some four years earlier.
But the colors in the footage were a little bit blown out. The audio was compressed (dynamically, not compressed-like-MP3s), and at least in my market, was mono. There was an MTV logo superimposed in the lower corner throughout all of the playback. I was disappointed in all the post-processing. At some point not too long after all this, nincollector.com posted a photo of the promo VHS of the concert. I took this to be a good sign - Interscope cut a lot of promos. Surely it wouldn't be too difficult to find one, if I kept my eyes peeled.
The concert was re-aired a few weeks later on MTV. Some years later, it would be broadcast on MTV2, this time an intrepid fan captured the audio in stereo, and the colors were a bit better, but where the original broadcast was padded by footage of Trent playing piano in his New Orleans home, that had been completely excised from the M2 broadcast.
All the while, I kept looking. I posted to The NIN Hotline, asking any readers if they had a copy they'd sell or trade. I'd hit message boards, collectors forums, constantly scanning eBay. There was a rumor about some guy in Russia who might have a copy. But it wasn't until a dozen years later that I heard the news - NINcollector.com was selling his collection. Even though I'd contacted him the same day the news broke, I was afraid I might be too late - "How much for the Fragility 1.0 tape?" It was more than I'd paid for pretty much anything else secondhand, but I'd been looking for twelve years.
At first, there was a delay. The seller said it was actually in a box at his parents' house, and he wouldn't be able to get it for another week or two. If it was anyone else selling, I would have been (more) worried, but I had no reason to think this was a scam, and my patience paid off when some time later, a box from England arrived at my house, containing the tape in the picture on nincollector.com
I broke out the VCR that I'd kept, solely for the purpose of having a stereo VCR from which to rip this tape should I ever find it, and... I put another tape in it, and hit play. Through my capture card, a 1991 Video Bar bootleg played on my monitor, and everything looked alright, so I pressed eject - and nothing happened. I pressed it again, to no avail. Play, fast forward, rewind, all worked fine. After opening the VCR up, I had to physically remove the cassette, and still-deployed tape, from the device, slightly mangling the tape in the process. Those of you who've never had to interact with VHS, consider yourself blessed.
Rather than hunt for another VCR, I sent the tape to my partner in crime, ItsJustDave, who had much better capturing equipment anyway. I finally get it in the mail and not long after, I get a file in my dropbox. The audio is great, the color's better, but to my disappointment, there is significant visual shearing. It's not so noticeable while the band is on stage, but when the titles show up, or when the credits roll, the slightly squiggly distortion was very distracting. It was kind of a let down, but that's analog, magnetic media for you.
There was something else this tape had though, something that never gets aired - anyone familiar with promo videos knows that there's typically a title card at the very beginning, with information about the video production company that either handled the duplication, or edited the tape together. This tape had such a title, and it wasn't from a shop in New York or Los Angeles - it was from New Orleans. Some quick Googling yielded the website of this company was still up - although it hadn't been updated in a while. More sleuthing found that the proprietor was still active in video editing forums. I don't know much about sports, but I think what I did next is analogous to a Hail Mary pass. I contacted the company and asked if they had a copy of the tape they had edited together 13 years ago.
And I got a response.
Shortening an already long story, I asked very formally and nicely if they would please check, and if they would be interested in loaning me the tape, as I would find someone who could do the conversion. The answer certainly caught me off guard - the tape was found, as was one marked "Big Day Out." Not long after, I got a box in the mail with two BetacamSP tapes, but the Hail Mary pass wasn't a touchdown yet. The shop I'd planned to go to had since closed, and I had to call around before I found a place in Philadelphia that could rip Beta SP. I dropped the tapes off, and a few days later, picked them up along with the hard drive I'd left for the ripped files.I doubt that I have it on anything but Beta SP or Digital Betacam if at all.
I no longer have either of these machines.
Excitedly, I went home and opened the files in Vegas Pro 12, which should be able to handle pretty much anything, aaaaaand I got audio, but no video. The files were MOV files, but that shouldn't matter, right? But even Quicktime on my PC wouldn't play them. Thus begun an arduous re-education on the complicated hell that surrounds video codecs. I took the drive downstairs to my Mac Mini, and on there, Quicktime played the files, and they looked great, except everyone was blue. In the Big Day Out footage, the sky was kind of pink. I've been to Sydney, I know that's not right. Quicktime told me it was DVCPRO50 video, but given the odd colors, I figured I'd be 100% sure the mistake wasn't on my end before I went back and told the video shop they fucked up their cables. I installed trial versions of everything from Avid Media Composer to Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro X. Final Cut pro opened the audio, but not the video, just like Vegas. Premiere? Same thing. Avid was able to view the video and the audio, but even in Avid, everyone was all smurfed up. One of the tapes had NTSC color bars, so I took a screenshot of them and opened them up in Photoshop, where I confirmed that indeed, the red and blue channels had been switched. This is very easy to undo in Photoshop, and when you're working with analog video, you fix this by unplugging two RCA cables and flipping them. The closest approximation I could find for that in the digital domain involved opening the videos in Avid, rendering them to a format Premiere could read, and then using the Color Channel Mixer in Premiere (or maybe Aftereffects), and then rendering down from there. And every time I tried to export from Avid, my Mac Mini crashed hard.
So I took the tape back to a very embarrassed video shop. What's worse, once they ripped the video with the corrected colors, even they were not able to open the resulting file in anything they had other than VLC. Oh but I had spent many nights reading up on my problem, and so long as I knew the correct footage was there, the rest would somehow fall into place.
I tried several different free converters, but ultimately dropped money on a professional codec so that I could open the files unfettered in Sony Vegas, my weapon of choice. I liberally borrowed from the menus that nin.com was using at the time, and condensed the 24gb of standard definition interlaced video into a DVD and a couple of de-interlaced MP4s. I set them along an internet river that eventually empties out into The Pirate Bay, and I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor.
The moral of this story: If someone at The Record Label asks you if you want a free copy of something, just fucking take it.
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Originally Posted by sheepdean
