Narrated Space: Slide & Cassette entertainment

Slides were a common way to share awesome pictures and tell a story. But they are mute... obviously. Unless when combined with a cassette tape that narrates the story through music and voice, signalling when to project the next breathtaking view of space.

For some time now I have been wanting to bring these embodiments of humble 60's to 80's entertainment into the more easily accessible digital domain. It's rather simple: Scan the slides in high resolution, restore them, digitize the cassette with a good quality cassette recorder, restore if needed. Synchronize the two inertly separated mediums in a video editing program and voila!

I've ordered one to try out as a proof-of-concept. To see if it works.

If anybody would be willing to loan theirs, I will put the end product on YouTube and return the material and high quality scans, audio file and video file.

After some weeks of waiting the first set arrived, and here is the result:

Hello,
Slide/tape presentations were a favourite of mine in the 1970s and 80s, though I would hesitate to describe any of my slides as "breathtaking"! My kit was/is a Kodak Carousel projector with a Sony TC105 reel to reel tape recorder and Philips slide synchroniser that sat in the tape path. All I had to do (after all the hard work of taking the photos, writing the script, reading the script and mixing it with music ..... phew!!) was to sit back and focus as the slides changed and change Carousel mags every 80 slides. By chopping off the '0' tab and loading the slot with a slide it was possible to change mags with no break in the sequence. The only problem I found was print-through of the 1KHz changing pulses that sometimes caused slides to change when they shouldn't. Re-recording was then necessary (or spacing the tape off the sync head with a strip of thin plastic). I "acquired" a cassette slide/sync unit from work before I retired but have never got around to trying it.

BTW, I'm intrigued by your name "dutchsteammachine". Anything to do with the Cruquius at Haarlemeer by any chance?

Best wishes,

Steve

Steve Roberts said:

The only problem I found was print-through of the 1KHz changing pulses that sometimes caused slides to change when they shouldn't. Re-recording was then necessary (or spacing the tape off the sync head with a strip of thin plastic).

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What do you mean by "print through"? Transfer of the signal from one winding on the tape reel to the next? (The techncal term is crosstalk.)
I understand that that such only should happen after long storage of the spooled tape. (The standard advice is to respool the tapea regularly, however the intended effect to displace parts adjacent beween layers at best only works at outer parts of a winding.)

Audio 'crosstalk' is the leakage of a signal between channels.
The problem to which I refer is print-through as opposed to crosstalk. You correctly describe it as "transfer of the signal from one winding on the tape reel to the next".

Thank you for the correction on terminology. As non-native speaker I had to look it up and found crosstalk instead given for this phenomenon too.

Interesting Steve, they sound like very neat devices. Could one of those automatic slide forwarders be made to work with the cassettes as shown here?

Your own Philips made special cassette recorders for running synch with S8 film or controlling and narrating a slide show.
Furthermore there were complete audiovisional set-ups.

dutchsteammachine said:

Interesting Steve, they sound like very neat devices. Could one of those automatic slide forwarders be made to work with the cassettes as shown here?

Click to expand...

You couldn't use one of the Philips sync units with cassettes directly as when used on 1/4" reel to reel tape machines it's an easy matter to take a loop from where the tape leaves the tape transport rubber pinch wheel and pass it around the sync unit before it goes on to the take-up spool. That said, before I acquired the Philips unit I made a sync unit of my own - there's not actually a great deal to it. With cassettes of course you can't easily take the tape out of its path, around a sync head and back again, but perhaps it would be possible to use a head from a car type auto reverse cassette deck. The head could serve to reproduce the stereo sound in the normal way but simultaneously using one of the redundant channels normally intended for playing in the opposite direction for the sync pulses. I presume that this is in effect what a commercial cassette/sync unit does but I've not looked closely at mine to check.

Bearing in mind the very much thinner base of cassette tape, print-through would undoubtedly be an issue, but with an appropriate reduction in the level of the 1kHz tone, I'm sure it could be cured. Of course, the cassette could only be used in one direction and I'd hesitate to use a cassette longer than a C90, but a 45 minute slide show is probably more than enough for anybody. Plenty of time to have the audience nodding off!

Best wishes,
Steve

That was a great show. Intergalactic slides, I don't have. It's good to have really great material like that.

In any case, when my slide projector broke, I scanned them with an Epson V600 and edited with Photoshop ELements. Then, I used Adobe Photoshop Premiere Elements video program to create video slide shows to play on Youtube, and my 4K 75" UHD TV, and monitors, etc. They have title, credits and music. I haven't bothered adding narration letting the pictures speak for themselves.

One thing Premiere does is allow the advancement of each slide to be timed with the downbeat of the music you selected. That adds a certain amount of impact. Here's a show I did without the downbeat cue but with the other elements. The original slides were Ektachromes from a scuba vacation of 30 years ago.