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Everyone knows that in 1995, Toy Story

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made history as the first fully computer animated film. But what most people

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don't know is that a full year earlier,

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a little Canadian studio called Mainframe Entertainment released the

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first fully computer animated TV show

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reboot. It was quirky. It was heartwarming. And it was full of

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adventure with each episode exploring exciting new worlds. So then why hasn't

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anybody heard of it? Well, being Canadian, it wasn't as broadly

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distributed. And making matters worse, due to poor media preservation practices

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at the time, the original quality masters were thought to be lost for many

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years. So, in spite of an official release existing, for decades, the best

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way to enjoy the show has been a pirated Russian DVD. Reboot and its fans

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deserved so much better, and they're

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finally getting it. partly thanks to the sponsor of this video, Kioxia. Data

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integrity is their passion, and this project was only possible thanks to

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their support. But what data? Reboot only found a limited audience during its

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TV run and the only means that mainframe had of reading those original master

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tapes with the full quality digital files was discarded years ago.

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Thankfully, in 2023, Jacob and Raquel,

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the creators of the Reboot Rewind documentary, got a brilliant idea of

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asking Mainframe, pretty please, very nicely, if they could try and do

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something with those tapes, cuz you know how companies normally do that, right?

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Except Mainframe said yes, lending them all of the master tapes for reboot. All

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of it. So, huzzah, problem solved,

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right? Well, no. See, it turns out that

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getting any files off of these thick boys is pretty much like pulling the

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data logs from a crashed alien spaceship. So, the Reboot Rewind project

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was stuck with no plan, no budget, and

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no idea where to even look for a machine that could read these tapes. They threw

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up a desperate Facebook post. Does anyone have a D1 deck? As luck would

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have it, someone over in Germany had not one, not two, but three up for auction.

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Huzzah. Yeah. If you thought they were going to

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be cheap and not broken, that's where we

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came in. When our community flagged the incredible preservation work that Reboot

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Rewind was doing, we partnered up with Kyioia to cover the cost of both the

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machines and some of the rare parts and supplies that would be needed to get

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them up and running. And now one of them is and you can actually see the results

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for yourself on YouTube. Reboot is a

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little older and it does show. But hey,

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at least it's no longer held back by mid90s encoding quality and it looks

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beautiful in its own way. As for the other machines, well, they're kind of

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nice to haves now that the first one is working, but because the footage needs

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to be captured rather than just dragged and dropped, having more machines will

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help the process go faster. And with the tapes continuing to deteriorate by the

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hour the clock is ticking. So, our goal

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for today is to pop open this absolute

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treasure of cuttingedge technology from a bygone era and maybe get it working.

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If you want to learn more about the Reboot Rewind team, by the way, they've done a series of documentaries that you

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can check out at the link down below. We, on the other hand, are going to get

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right into the tech tips and talk about a tape format that I'd never even heard

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of before this project, D1. Imagine

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this. It's 1986 and the executives at

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Sony, riding a bubble economy, have told their worldclass engineers that money is

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no object. Make the absolute best video

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format in the world. That's what this is. It's like the McLaren F1 of8s video

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technology. D1 physically is the largest

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video cassette tape ever made. And like DVHS, which would arrive in home cinemas

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over a decade later, it is purely

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digital. But unlike DVHS, it was

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intended for professional use. So it was completely uncompressed. No codec, just

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bitmapped images written directly to tape. That is why Kyokia's help was so

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critical. Remember guys, I said we needed to capture this uncompressed

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video. So, their CM7R drives were an essential part of the entire workflow

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because they can easily handle the 40 GB

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of raw video from each of these 30-year-old tapes safely and without

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bottlenecks. And that's essential because with the state of these tapes,

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they might literally only get one shot at a good transfer. By the way, if you

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thought the tapes were big, the decks are on a whole other level. These

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behemoths are 250 lb of metal and glass,

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draw 650 W of power, and inside each

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one, you will find six or seven Intel

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80186 processors communicating on an internal Ethernet network. This is no

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compromise design at its absolute best,

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but almost no one has ever seen one because to buy one new adjusted for

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inflation would be a cool third of a million. So, I guess the 15 grand we

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paid was a deal even though they were all broken. I should probably

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acknowledge, by the way, that we are not on our normal set. Welcome to

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Disappearing Inc., a local company that's dedicated to not only rescuing

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classic computers, but also repairing and restoring them to their former

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glory. And the place really is glorious,

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isn't it? Almost as glorious as the skill set of the man who runs it, Mark.

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Hello. At the peak of the D1's run,

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there were maybe 100 people who were

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qualified to work on these machines. 30 years later, he might be the only one

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left who can fix them and definitely the only one under the age of 40. How'd you

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um how'd you learn that? Uh local community college course.

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>> No, no, no, no. I was accidentally training myself for this job from a

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young age because I grew up with a fascination with video equipment, but I

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couldn't afford any of this stuff. So, everything I got was broken. It was all castoffs and old computers generally no

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one wants to talk about them at HP and Dell and things like that. So, I just kind of had to figure it all out. So

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sourcing some test sacrificial tapes and recapping the shoe box size power

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supplies back here was no problem for Mark. But what was a problem was the

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brakes. >> Yeah. And it didn't look like it originally. We got these errors from the

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machines about the clock signal being somehow too fast and spent way too long

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trying to figure that out. And finally at the end of it discovered that the same board that sets up the clocks is

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also the one that runs the brakes. So when it saw something was wrong with

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him, >> it just stopped working. >> Yeah. It just gave up. >> So if you'd known the brake was the

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problem, you could >> have saved months. >> And that was exactly in time for another

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huge problem to raise its head or heads

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as it were. The tape heads to be precise.

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>> For you younglings out there, the tape head is the part of the machine that

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actually reads the zeros and the ones from the tapes. And the D1's heads are

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remarkably precise. So much so that they

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are only rated for 500 hours of use. 500

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hours. I thought this is supposed to be a professional standard. After that

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time, they're intended to be replaced.

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And the most workingest of the three machines we bought. Yeah, that tape head

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was already at 650 hours. So then what

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did we do at that point then? >> Well, uh, we panicked and we despared.

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And then a miracle happened. Herbert Han, a man in Germany who has been

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incredibly helpful to us, said he knew a technician from back in the day. He was

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an elderly gentleman now, long retired, but he might still have a couple of spare parts for us. And boy, did he. In

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fact, he had not one but two brand new, never used BTS refurbished heads still

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in his garage. >> Wow. >> It was just a cool $8,000 to buy them.

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>> Right. but wasn't our money.

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>> That was actually one of the points in this project where it could have all

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gone completely south because those parts, my understanding is ended up all

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getting kind of parted out and shipped off shortly after we made our offer. So,

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if we hadn't gone in and taken them, >> yeah, within weeks those were sold off

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to other companies who still have to maintain these crazy things. And we've

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spoken to a couple of those companies and they're not fond of sharing parts.

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>> Makes sense. >> So, we had one shot and we took it and

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it's all thanks to you guys. >> Well, we we do our best. As far as I'm

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concerned, uh if we can get the show restored, then mission accomplished.

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>> Well, I am so happy to say that it's because of these opportunities. We got

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some big news to share. >> Oh, is this Are we dropping something on

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you? >> No, wait for later in the video. >> What? >> Yep.

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>> Wait, you're not going to tell me? >> No. No. >> Okay. I guess we're getting to that

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later. For now, we're going to try and repair the brake on this one.

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>> We are indeed. >> Okay, let's do it. >> So, are we doing this for real?

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>> Yeah. Yeah. So, we'll just put a super cut down version in the YouTube video,

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but at LMG.gg/flatplane, people can get the whole video of us

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going through and giving it our best shot. >> Well, in that case, let's do it. These

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machines need a lot of service, and you can tell that the Germans put some

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thought into it. So,

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It goes like that. >> So, the Germans can make a thing

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serviceable when they want to. >> Someone should tell BMW. The work I'm

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going to be doing is mostly from the top. Okay. >> So, we're not actually working under here. I do need you to warn you, there's

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a chance the power supply explodes while we're working on it. >> Sick. >> Cuz um haven't rebuilt this one yet.

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>> Sick. >> So, if smoke starts pouring out the back, that's good content.

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>> This guy knows YouTube. Right. >> Big thing on these decks is that because

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the tape is moving so fast, there has to be a really good, reliable way to speed

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it up and slow it down and stop it on a moment's notice. What if something goes wrong with the machine? What if the

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power goes out? What if you just get to the end of your scene and want to stop

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it? So, they've got these brakes like a car that like clamp down on the spools

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and stop the tape and the machine checks every time it turns on to make sure

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those are working. Like, it spins it up and it clamps it on

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>> and they just wear out like anything else, >> right? The brakes do.

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>> They do. They're mechanical. So, every time you use them, plus just when you let them sit for 30 years, there's these

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big springs inside, they kind of get loose. So, we're going to go in there and do a very non-German repair to these

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things. It involves grabbing some springs with a pair of pliers and like kind of twisting them a bit and, you

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know, causing some people to roll in their graves and putting a little fresh

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grease in there and crossing our fingers and with a little bit of luck, it'll get

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that error cleared. >> What are you doing right now? >> We're borrowing the control panel that

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works, which is to say, we're returning it to the machine we borrowed it from before.

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>> Sick. So, we have two out of three. Unfortunately, as you saw inside,

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there's a lot of custom chips in these things. And one of the custom chips, and one of the control panels has gone dead.

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So, we have three machines, but only two of them that we can actually talk to at

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the moment. So, we simply put it back on over here. And this machine has what

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looks like a serial port, but is in fact something incredibly German and

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proprietary. Uh, and the control panel will go, "Oh, hey, you're a 500."

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>> Okay. >> Some of these people did go on to work at BMW then.

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>> Yeah. Yeah. I suspect >> this I guess goes here. >> If you can get it in there for me,

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that'd be great. >> Small hands power activate form of small

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dainty hands. >> That's perfect. I got these big man hands. I can't get that thing in there

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without 5 minutes of swearing. Fantastic. Look at that. So, that's

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enough that we can control this machine. >> I helped. >> Yeah. Don't let anyone tell you Lionus

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was instrumental in this project. So, the brakes on this thing are deep inside

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here. They're underneath these sort of brown spindle looking things,

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>> right? >> Because they're the spindles, you see? Right. >> And we need to get in there. And the

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only way we can do it is if we take the entire part you put the tape into out.

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>> Brilliant. >> So, the good news is it's surprisingly serviceable.

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>> We're going to once more raise this thing up

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>> and then we're going to start unscrewing things. We need to loosen a couple of

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screws that hold the mechanism together.

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Oh, this is the real pain in the ass one cuz when this raises up, it kind of

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blocks this. So, I need to kind of brace

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the mechanism a bit. >> Oh, well, I can hold it. >> Um, it's if you do that, it might break.

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>> I need you to hold on to this as tight

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as you can and try and prevent it from turning. And I'll do the same over here.

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And then we get to do the opposite. There it goes. When we go to put this

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thing back together. >> And I helped. I think if we're very

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careful,

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>> it feels like it should run in a clean

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room, >> right? >> Like it looks like something that should

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only work in a completely sterile, perfect environment, but like you had it

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just open there and it was just working. I don't get it. >> Well, the good news is that once the

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thing gets spinning fast enough, it kind of flings the dust out of the way.

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>> Oh, genius. >> Yeah. So, in a way, it's not quite as

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critical as you think. The other half, though, is you just clean the thing constantly as you're using it because

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more than the dust that comes in from the outside is the bits of tape that get

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flung off every time you play the thing. So, I spend more time cleaning brown

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junk out from the inside than I do about the dust in the room.

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>> All right. So, brakes. >> Yes, they are under here. And you can

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feel if you try and turn that, it turns easier one way than the other. >> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's super easy

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clock counterclockwise and then it's really tight clockwise.

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>> Yeah. And it should be even tighter than that. So, it should really clamp it

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hard. But it's not doing that anymore. So, we need to go in there and make some

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adjustments. >> Okay. That's the spring we're adjusting.

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>> That underneath this little piece of foam or felt, I should say, that is the

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brake. >> Seriously? >> Yep. >> Well, how the hell are we supposed to

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make adjustments to that with any degree of precision? >> We're not. We're going to use pliers.

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So, this here is a brake. Doesn't look like much, but this is the entirety of

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the core mechanism. This is the part that actually grabs it together. Pulls

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it apart. >> Yeah. So, we go grab. >> Yep. >> Brakes are on.

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>> We go apart. >> Breaks her off. >> Breaks her off. Easy peasy.

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>> Right. Unfortunately, it's not squeezing it quite hard enough. And when it does,

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sometimes it gets stuck. And oh yeah, there was originally some sort of grease in here. I have no idea what, but it's

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kind of sticky now. So, we're going to replace that. So, we just tighten the

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whole thing like that just a little bit. We don't need much. Just a little

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dabble, do you? >> Thank you.

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>> I knew I was here for a reason. >> And there's a little piece of felt whose

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job is basically to stop that grease from getting thrown out into the machine.

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>> Mhm. >> You know, if it starts flinging around at high speeds, it'll go in here instead

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of onto a tape. Then we need our magic piece of brass that holds everything

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together. And I look at the other one to figure out how I have to reassemble it.

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See, real technicians still have to look at the instructions sometimes, too. But

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in lie of that, we leave one of them assembled so we can look at it and see

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how it goes back together. That's a real important tip. >> A tech tip even you might say.

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>> You might say you would see how it engages sooner. It pulls a little

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farther. >> All right. >> And so Oh, yeah.

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>> Brakes on, brakes off here. Here we go. >> So brakes on.

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>> See how tight that is now? >> Yeah. So that's pull that >> here. You can actually really Oh, no.

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No. Here. Don't pull it. Don't pull it yet. This is really great cuz you can

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really see that that is not moving. Get

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the rod. Now she spins. Oh, and she stops.

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>> We fixed the thing. Lus, can we get a vending machine to work?

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>> You want a vending machine? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Oh, just like for the fun of it kind of

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thing. >> I mean, they're not expensive.

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>> Yo, root beer.

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>> This is a good surprise. Now that you've seen some of it for yourself, you may

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have a concept of an idea of how hard Mark has been working not only to get

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these machines up and running, but to keep them that way throughout the

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capture process. And the most fun part,

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remember how I said the condition of the tapes ain't too great? Yeah, that was an

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understatement. These are suffering from something called sticky shed syndrome,

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which basically means that the glue holding the magnetic particles to the

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tape is literally turning into gunk with

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every passing day. So, if you guys want to support this project, make sure you

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donate to their cause at the link in the description. Are you guys selling these

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shirts, by the way? Cuz they're super cool. I wish. Oh, okay. Apparently,

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there was some, you know, IP complications. I guess you'll just have

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to buy our shirts then at ltstore.com. Now, our focus today has been on the D1

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decks and on the tapes, but that's just part of the puzzle and it would be a

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crime to not also acknowledge the work that this man has done. Thanks to Brian,

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the team has a solid capture workflow that includes custom software to manage

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the decks, track errors, and make sure that the restoration process is moving

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efficiently. They can currently transfer up to a dozen tapes on a good day with

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the end goal being capturing all 260

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tapes, which is the 47 episodes plus multiple edits, unfinished copies, and

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bonus content like the cutscenes from the PS1 game.

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>> How's that progress going, Brian?

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>> It's a long process, but you know, this is the problem with this technology. You

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know, they put so much effort into editing every episode possible. At the

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same time, this was done on CRT TVs. And for all those youngans, it hurts to say

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that that didn't grow up with CRTs, they're not familiar with, you know,

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video interlacing where persistence of vision makes it look like a full

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picture. But when you're digital now, you get scan lines or, you know,

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>> and it looks nasty. >> Exactly. Right. So, just like VSync,

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right? You know, nobody likes to have VSync off and then see tearing. Well,

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that's exactly what we're seeing now that we're all digital. So, we're actually going back and basically quasi

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re-editing the show while keeping it true to its source. Oh, you know,

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>> good gravy. >> Yeah, you know, 43,000 frames per

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episode and and you know, we're dealing with multiple tapes per episode.

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>> So, I'm sure Kio would love for me to ask how their technology contributes to

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that part of the workflow. >> Absolutely. Yeah, Kioxia has been a huge

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help on this. You know, we've been dealing with spinning hard drives as

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cheap as we can get. It's a lot of data to work through. So Kioxia's drives have

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allowed us to basically work through the files at a rate that is much more real

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time than previous. >> Can you give me like FPS comparison?

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>> Yeah. So when we're doing a pipeline direct from our RAWs over to uh ProRes,

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we're we were getting about 7 FPS on a

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good day if you're splitting across spinning hard drives >> and that's going to wear out your read

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head. That's going to be just bad all around. >> Absolutely. and you know data redundancy

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and the whole project here is focusing on the need to retain that data longterm

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and Kyok says drives are actually offering us the ability to trust that we

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can rely on that data basically being there when we power the systems back up

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>> and what kind of FPS can you do with a high performance SSD by comparison

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>> essentially we are at almost real-time playback so 25 35 frames per second on a

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good time so we can actually go and see all of our edits and play them back in

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real time and not have to focus and see individual frame issues that you really

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wouldn't see frame by frame. And Jacob and I both, we have spent tons of nights

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uh rendering these. And when you spend 2 or 3 hours on an episode, render it,

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submit it over, find a frame issue, go back, do it again, and it's just

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crunching hours on hours, right? So, we've got 260 tapes here. Do the math of

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that offset. I mean, Kioxia definitely saved us massive amounts of time.

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>> Hundreds of hours. >> Absolutely. >> How many episodes are left to capture?

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Well, in fact, as of today, there's only one.

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>> Really? >> There is one reboot episode tape left to capture, and we're going to start it up.

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>> Oh, is that the special surprise? >> That's the surprise. >> Oh, sick.

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>> You get to watch the last reboot episode tape come across.

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>> Let's go. Hopefully, I'm not a bad luck charm. Okay. Well, let's do it.

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>> Let's do it. >> We've got a couple other pretty special people here with us for this final

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capture. Jacob, do you want to tell the people what you're about? >> Hi. Yeah, I co-directed and edited the

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Reboot Rewind documentary. Uh, and I was one of the people that kind of found the

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these tapes in Mainframes archives sort of with the original intention of just

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finding better quality footage of the show for the documentary, but now it's

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turned into a much bigger project. >> Very cool work. And then we've also got

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someone like really special that we hit around in the back here. This is Gavin

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Blair, who was one of the co-creators of Reboot. Uh, wrote, did some voice

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acting. Uh, >> how cool is this? This is very cool. I

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mean, we raised a generation of nerds

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and now they're doing remarkable work, deserving history, which, you know, as

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an old guy who's not long for this world, it's great to see this history

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being preserved. >> Thanks for being here, creating the show and uh just kind of showing showing

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support for what these guys are doing. I I think we can all agree that it is

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tragic when these sorts of things are just lost forever. I mean, not lost, but

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not preserved with the kind of quality that they could be. >> Absolutely. Yeah. We made history with

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the quality of the show we made, and you're seeing it now.

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>> It didn't do justice for so many years. >> Now, finally, the way we saw it when we

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made it, which is remarkable. >> That's a great final line. It's time to

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press capture. Are we ready, Mark? >> Yeah. Let me pull out the tape. All

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right. Are we ready to do this? >> Yes. >> So, we're going to go ahead insert our

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tape. Watch the magic happen.

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>> That's terrifying the way it just like manhandles that fragile, delicate

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>> tape that's coming apart at the glue. >> This has a little auto adjust menu here

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right on screen. >> Clean, isn't it? >> And it's about to get better. So, here on the screen, we can actually see the

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four different video heads, their signal strengths. This is the uncorrectable

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errors. We're go to the corrected errors. We're going to do an auto

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adjustment. This is looking at the levels of the signals coming off. It'll glitch momentarily on the video. And

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then if there's still an outstanding one, it's got a tiny smidge here. What

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we do is go for the Allen keys and we're gonna just go slightly adjust.

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>> That's insane. >> While it's running, >> that's insane what you're doing right now, sir.

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>> Mhm. Yeah, that's too far. Back it off. >> She But that was that was up to like

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here at the beginning and now it's gone. Now we're going to do another auto adjust to make sure it's settled.

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>> And again, it'll glitch momentarily. That's normal. But there we go. Now

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these are uh correct or detected errors and they're almost gone. we switch over

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to the uncorrectables and there's basically zero. So that's the difference

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between just naively shoving the tape into the machine and hoping for the best

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and tuning it to each one. There's some things where we simply cannot go and get

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another copy of. And what turns out when this thing's in frame by frame slow-mo,

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the tracking has time to catch up to wild changes. We've seen a couple tapes

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where the deck that recorded it must have had a broken roller or something cuz the tape was just doing this the

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whole way through. And so I could tune it and it would work and then it go

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right back out again. All right, let's see it. >> All four channels of audio. We resume

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our data log over here. Uh, we spin you up and from now this computer is in

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control. I click clip and it instructs

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the machine to start moving and it will instruct the machine to stop when it

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gets to the end. This is the real-time error log that Brian developed and that's where I was adjusting it. You see

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those spikes? Yeah, >> that was me tuning it.

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>> Right. >> And now you can see how just flat it is. That's what we want.

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>> And that's it. There it is. >> That's the last tape of reboot episodes.

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We've done it. >> That is so cool. Well, thanks for

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letting me be here for it. This is >> making it possible. >> Absolutely incredible.

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>> Now, this has been a dream come true, I think, for all of us. I never imagined

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little six-year-old me looking at that tiny CRT in my living room that 30 years

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later I was going to be a part of rescuing a show just so incredible. and

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to have gone through this, let's be honest, incredible pain in the ass

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journey. I would absolutely do it again if I had to. This has been a pleasure.

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>> And that's almost the most important point. I think as cool as the tech was,

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the best part of this story is the human side. The incredible outpouring of fan

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support has helped to show Mainframe, the studio that created Reboot, that

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there is still a massive amount of appreciation for both their art and for

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their innovation. Again, I can't emphasize this enough. It was the first

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real 30inute TV show that was rendered on a computer, pioneering a new

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animation standard that is still used by kids shows today. It was so far ahead of

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its time and I'm so impressed by the work that's been done and will still be

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done and I'm so proud to have had an opportunity to be part of it. Massive

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shout out to Kyioia. They have been an incredible partner for us. When there's

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something that we just look at and we go, "Wow, wouldn't that be so cool to

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do?" whether it's getting a pi calculation world record or or doing

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this. If it involves storage, they basically go, "All right, cool. We're

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in." And it makes incredible things like this possible. Check them out in the

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video description. Genuine thank you to them. And a huge thank you to you guys

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for watching. Uh, and hey, if you're looking for something else to watch, why

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not check out Reboot Rewind? If you like videos about older video formats, why

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don't you check out the time that PLF and I watched the same movie on 10

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different mostly obsolete video formats. There were some really wacky ones over