Seeking to preserve a rare and valuable French documentary by Jean Luret: Comme des Bêtes

The purpose of this blog is to talk about preservation & non-commercial archiving efforts for the film Comme des Bêtes (1990) by Jean Luret.

This film exists on a few rare SECAM-L TV video format VHS cassettes from France.

The VHS version was apparently captured from regular film. Thus there may be a regular-photographic-film version of the film in some archive somewhere, but if that's the case no efforts to my knowledge have been made to archive or release a DVD or higher resolution version.

Thus for now, and perhaps for in perpetuity, all we have available are a few rare VHS cassettes from France to work with.

In 2015 a lower quality SECAM-to-NTSC VHS version was uploaded to archive.org.

In 2019 efforts were made by myself to obtain the last remaining SECAM VHS copies of the film from France.

I also had shipped to my home three SECAM video access recorders (VCRs), plus a Diamond VC500 capture USB device, and an Avermedia AverTV 507 PCI capture card.

With fresh copies of the film on French-sourced SECAM tapes (instead of an old SECAM-to-NTSC copy obtained years ago), I began new capturing.

The Diamond VC500 capturing initially looked promising. However I found that there were movement-artifacts with every scan line. The artifacts probably came from interlacing not being filtered by the capture device. For the VC500 capture: When examined closely, I found that each scan line is shifted compared to the line below.

The best capture solution came via an $8 AV507 AverTV card I obtained from Russia via ebay. Must better results than the much newer VC500 USB device. Had to install Windows XP on an HP 8300 CMT tower, and use the software that came with the card for XP. With all that, I was able to obtain some captures.

The first captures with the AV507 card had dropped frames. But here's two captures which reportedly did not have dropped frames during capture:

1. Regular capture using a Pioneer DVR-RT602H VCR and the AverTV 507 card, with no dropped frames as reported by the AverTV software in Windows XP. Audio captured to a the built in sound card that came with the computer, as opposed to piping audio capture to the AverTV card. I found sending sound to the build in PC sound card resulted in less audio distortion:

Internet Archive version (lossless capture file available):
https://archive.org/details/commedesbetes20200122origaudioav507

Youtube version: https://youtu.be/PyF1Qhz-x1c

2. Regular capture using a Pioneer DVR-RT602H VCR and the AverTV 507 card, with no dropped frames as reported by the AverTV software in Windows XP. Filtered high pitched noise on the audio:

Internet Archive version (lossless capture file available):
https://archive.org/details/commedesbeteslowpassaudio

Youtube version: https://youtu.be/YkNKCMlF7io

With one of the VCRs I have, a Pioneer DVR-RT602H, it will allow VHS to DVD copying. I engaged that mode, but with that mode there was more frame tearing.

I also tried a newer Avermedia C725B card. It had more frame tearing compared to the AV507 card.

Perhaps Mr. Jean Luret has somewhere tucked away the original actual-film celluloid version of this film. But as of today, all we have are a few very rare French SECAM format VHS cassettes.

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Keywords:

Cinemadis, Claude Pieplu, Claude Piéplu, comme des betes, film preservation, jean luret, comme des betes, jean luret, mating, animal mating, animal reproduction, reproduction, behavior, sexuality, behavior, sex, habits, animal sex