gamehistoryorg

Restoring Craig Stitt's portfolio VHS

Added 2025-05-09 00:04:11 +0000 UTC

We're wrapping up our work on a collection from Craig Stitt, an artist who worked for Sega Technical Institute and Insomniac Games. The last piece we're working on is his collection of VHS tapes that contains samples of his artwork.

Craig uploaded these to YouTube a while back, but we're going back through the tapes using the extreme-quality VHS capture system we used for the Sonic 2 video in 2023. This method (using a piece of hardware called the Domesday Duplicator) gets a raw read off the magnetic tape, then processes it digitally rather than going through AV cables.

The quality difference is pretty enormous! For comparison, here's a mockup from this tape for Treasure Tails, a game that Craig was proposing at Sega Technical Institute. This first capture is from his YouTube upload:

...and here's the recovery we did from the original VHS!

Whoa! The level of detail we got from the tape is a huge step up, and the colors are much more pronounced. Look at how much better those tiles look.

This process is a little bit overkill, so we don't do it for every VHS tape we get. We're giving Craig's tapes an extra level of attention because they contain original digital art which doesn't exist anywhere else, and we want to reproduce it at the highest quality possible.

As with everything else Craig loaned us, these videos will be freely available for anyone to watch once we launch this collection in the near future!