Easily one of my favorite videos on the internet. Absolutely bizarre to see something from that long ago in such high fidelity. 5 stars.

youtube comment from some dude who helped make it:

"This is the secret story behind the production of "Metamorphosis".

This Sony high-definition demo software "Metamorphosis" has been tried and errored for about a month, and it was this "Metamorphosis". Metamorphosis is a plural form of "metamorphose" which means change or transformation.

So what kind of demo software content do you want to express? We decided to make it a composition that "ordinary girls gradually change with makeup and styling, and finally become a dance star." The technique is how to show this. Believing that, I also inserted various other changes in the middle of this flow of change, aiming for a kind of montage effect.

First, use the 16: 9 screen effectively to capture the changes from the dawn of Yokohama Bay Bridge in Japan so that you can see the scale. This changes every moment at 520x speed (time-lapse), and the change in the flow of clouds and the brightness in the background is quite interesting to see. Please note that the change in brightness means that the aperture (iris) on the camera side must be stopped down accordingly, and the change from midnight to daytime is recorded with a high SN ratio. This location went several times to do. The background changes from moment to moment, so you can only take one image once a day. In other words, I had to try many times until I could record the video I imagined. Changes in clouds flowing over the clear Yatsugatake (a mountain in Nagano Prefecture, Japan). As many of you may know, it is difficult to take beautiful pictures of this mountain located in Nagano prefecture due to the drastic changes in the weather, which causes gas to disappear immediately and a large amount of cumulonimbus clouds to occur in the summer. It is said to be a mountain. Looking at the weather chart, we chose the day when the typhoon passed on August 21, 1990, and took on the challenge of shooting Yatsugatake. Perhaps the wish came to the heavens, the rain until the day before had completely stopped, and the refreshing Yatsugatake was photographed from the morning.

This cut was shot for a long time, and at a later date, frames were cut out in fixed frame units with VTR so that the image would be 30x speed, and it was once stored in the HD frame memory recorder (HDDF-500) and 32 frames were accumulated. By the way, I did the work of discharging it to the VTR (Sony HDD-1000) at once. Also, as you can see from the actual video, the upper half is moving violently at 30x speed, but the grass on the edge of the lower half is fluttering in the wind at normal speed. This is a composition unique to HDTV.

In this plan, there are ups of the girl's face and hands, but it was difficult to find someone who could withstand this ups of high definition. In addition, I have to be able to dance to some extent, so in order to clear this matrix, I auditioned to narrow down from around 50 candidates. In order to have each person dance and to see the condition of the skin on the face, we bring the face closer and check each person with the naked eye. It seems that he became a strange old man, and it was strange when I thought about it later.

Eventually, Catherine (14 years old) from Hawaii will be selected to give special training in dancing and explain the concept. However, for her still innocent in the second year of junior high school, I think it was a pretty hard schedule from now on. The music is an original song composed for this software, and the title is "Heven is the place in your heart".

The female vocalist "Eve", who used to sing commercials for Sony tapes, is singing. In the shooting studio, sing and dance to the sound played on the PCM-1630, and then insert the time code into the HDVTR (1 inch digital HDVTR "HDD-1000") from 1630 so that the image and sound are synchronized during editing. Considered. The lyrics are all in English.

However, HDD-1000 was a monster VTR that could record uncompressed baseband 30MHz (Y signal) and made a sound like a vacuum cleaner. It was the crystallization of Sony's technology that Japan is proud of. I am grateful to the senior Japanese engineer who created it 30 years ago. However, in Japan today, the technology was stolen by China, and the electrical industry was wiped out. Sony has no momentum in the past.

I just pray that it won't go bankrupt.

Camera: HDC-300 (3-tube type) resolution 1200 lines, S / N 54dB

VTR: HDD-1000 (uncompressed HD-VTR) 3x speed running of BVH-3000"

Throw in some space marines, and the first half could be any 3D graphics card benchmark test.

What I love about this is that even though it's HD, it still has composite video artifacts in it. it's so weird to see analog HD.