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Twilight Audio

My TiVo catches a lot of the old “Twilight Zone” episodes. First of all, I didn’t realize there were still so many of them that I hadn’t seen. It seemed like every time The Sci-Fi Channel showed a marathon, they would always be the same old classic episodes.

A few months back it seemed they were running nothing but 1 hour episodes. Again, I had no idea there were so many of those as well.

But what I really wanted to talk about is the audio on the episodes I’ve seen. You see, right before an actor yells a line or there’s a loud sound, I can hear it faintly before it happens.

That whole thing seems very weird to me. I could see having it happen after, but it makes no sense to me that you can hear things before they happen. It makes me wonder about the way audio was recorded back then.

My understanding is that the video is recorded with a camera and the audio is recorded separately and then they are edited together. Does this mean that the audio is slipping forward and getting out of sync with the video?

Maybe it’s a playback thing. Maybe in the old days the equipment worked one way and now it works a whole other way (not speaking of digital at this point). Maybe the equipment they used to use no longer works and they had to use new equipment that doesn’t work as well.

I think the real story has to do with the transfer – converting the old film strip to current video technology. Something somewhere has to be messed up and out of sync.

Or maybe I’m just psychic and I know what’s going to happen before it does.

Wow, Twilight Zone kinda stuff…

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