Over thirty years ago, ReBoot started airing as one of the first 3D-rendered television series. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original season, an 8-part documentary was independently released in September of 2024, named ReBoot Rewind.
During filming of the documentary, the crew found that the original studio still had the original master tapes of the episodes, but they were stored on a medium that is no longer easily viewed. The masters are on large magnetic tapes, but encoded digitally to retain full resolution of the original renders and composites.
Unfortunately, because the technology to view the tapes is no longer easily accessible (the few remaining legacy decks to read the tapes are prohibitively expensive and have a limited number of read-hours before needing maintenance), all existing copies of ReBoot are actually just lower resolution versions of the masters, which were used for airing on TV in the 1990s. Which means that the resolution is 480 vertical interlaced scan lines, a very low resolution. That includes the official ReBoot DVDs (which I own)!
And there is a separate problem: now that the master tapes are so old, they are disintegrating. Even reading the tape once will destroy it. And the longer the tapes sit around, the more damage they will accrue.
So the documentary crew convinced Mainframe (the production company) to let them try and convert the master tapes to full-digital copies. That’s where Linus Tech Tips, a popular Canadian YouTube technology channel, stepped in and provided some funding to help this project move forward, along with one of their sponsors, KIOXIA, a memory and solid state drives company.
Using the funding, the crew was able to purchase legacy decks to read the master tapes and buy extra parts and labor to get them working. And after a lot of work, the master tapes are actually converted to full digital files!
You can watch the entire Linus Tech Tips video describing the technical problems with the master tapes and the solutions to getting full-resolution digital versions of the episodes:
And if you want to watch full episodes of ReBoot in their original full-resolution glory, head over to the Mainframe YouTube channel, where they are slowly releasing episodes! Note: they are only on season 1, episode 5, so converting the raw digital data from the master tapes to YouTube-ready files seems to be taking lots of time.
But rest assured, the raw data has been extracted and preserved from the deteriorating master tapes, so the original ReBoot renders have been preserved for history!