Release: Operation Desert Snow (EF15 / 2009)

Hi everyone!

The making of this video has been both blessed and cursed. I started this project in 2017, and it took me the best part of three years to finish it. 

You might ask yourself why did I choose this show, and none of the better AND more popular ones, like "The unlucky 13" or "Dreamcatchers"? And what the hell took me so long? 

I chose "Desert Snow" because at the time I began with this project, it was the earliest complete recording I had to work with. I'd love to have done Dreamcatchers or the unlucky 13 first, but there simply wasn't enough footage of any of those shows available to me to work with.

The recording of Desert Snow was a heavily degraded divx capture of the original EF Prime analogue signal. I thought it was a nice challenge to try and restore it into a watchable state.

If someone asked me what the EF Pawpetshow is about, this is not exactly the show I would pull up on youtube. To be fair, it hasn't aged very well, and it has obvious flaws in the pacing of the dialogues. If you'd manage to sit through the whole thing, I'd be surprised! (Not even our most popular show on youtube "Keepers of the Light" manages to capture more than 1% of the audience for more than 10 minutes.)

However, these old releases are more about preservation. It's a piece of subculture history, and both the team and myself have put so much blood sweat and tears to make these shows, we simply don't want them to be lost forever.

So even a blurry version of this show would have been better than nothing. I figured I could learn a lot about novel methods of upscaling, color correction and noise reduction. I had already gained some experience with the remastering of "The Phantom of the Pawpetshow" and "Songs of the Old Ages.".

The whole thing could have been finished in a few months, working on it every now and then. But when I just thought I was on the home stretch, new footage appeared. At first it was Eisfuchs who reminded me that he actually had his own camera running. Just a single angle showing the full stage, in good old analogue PAL format, but hey, it was complete, and it looked immensely better than what I had!

So I began to overlay his footage over the restored footage whenever it was appropriate ... which required me to go through the entire project, and watch every scene and decide which cuts to replace with the wide angle shot. 

(For more details about this I recommend you check out my video Restoring "Operation Desert Snow")

Then the curse of the pawpetshow began to show its ugly head. Or was it a blessing? I still can't decide. Anyways, when I was just about half way done, more footage appeared. I don't know who made it, but I got a pretty decent recording from the audience in 720p. So I had to go through the entire project again, and overlay MORE new shots over the already augmented restored footage. 

By this time, the project got really confusing. The bottom layer had the original cut, then it had the wide shots overlaid on top of it, and now the new footage whenever it looked better than what I had. 

But guess what happened next? Just when I was about to get ready to release, MORE FRICKING FOOTAGE SHOWED UP. One one hand, that was great! I now had access to a large part of the original tapes that were in the cameras when the whole thing was shot on location, and all in full HD!

But now I had to start all over again, superseding the material I had on a shot-by-shot basis, and at this point it retroactively became clear that having every revision based on the revision before, and ultimately still being tied to the original cut from the live broadcast, had been a REALLY bad idea. I mean, I couldn't possibly have known this when I started, but had I just taken the footage I have and done my own cut of the show from scratch, I would have been finished months earlier. 

But now it's done, and I'm so glad I can finally get it out of my system. I'm very fond of our early work, but even I can only re-watch it only so many times before going crazy. The end result is not perfect. There's still some of the blurry restored divx copy showing through every now and then. But it turned out so much better then I had anticipated when I started, and at last we now have a release that preserves the show in a worthy manner! And who knows, maybe some crazy guy like you IS going to watch it from start to finish after all :)