ED1 Elite Entertainment Raw Footage Tapes

[EvilDeadChainsaws]

This was a 2018 DVD project to transfer a set of nine VHS and BetaCamSP tapes, probably created in the mid/late 1990's, containing 3h 25m 41s of raw ED1 film footage. It's unknown how many duplicates of these tape sets exist, but one nine tape VHS format set is owned by a French Evil Dead fan & friend. He got in touch in July 2014 mentioning he had the set of VHS tapes and we paid to have them transferred to DVD between the two of us.

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In April 2016, president of Elite Entertainment Vini Bancalari sold a number of Evil Dead items to UK Evil Dead collector Michael Witchy, which included eight BetaCam SP tapes as well as two DAT tapes and a Digital Betacam tape. The BetaCam SP tapes were labelled identically to the aforementioned VHS tapes and look to be their source, although tape seven was missing from that set.

In September 2018, Michael's eight BetaCam SP tapes were captured & transferred personally to DVD. They're a slight step up in picture quality, but are frame-for-frame identical to the VHS transfers, save an additional 4m 50s extra on the end of tape one, which isn't on the VHS set. The missing tape seven here, was added in from the previous VHS transfers to complete the set of nine transfers. You can see some screenshots taken from across the set of tape/DVD-transfers further down, and the personally created DVD disc artwork below that.

Michael's Digital Betacam tape mentioned above was also transferred. This looks to be the master tape for the 1998 US Elite Entertainment Laserdisc (Catalogue Number: EE7263). The film is split into two parts, with a trailer at the end and runs around 100mins. There is nothing new here, and it's a slight step down in quality from Elite's 1999 DVD release, so it's of relatively little interest beyond a having a DVD copy of the tape. The two DAT tapes contained the audio commentary tracks by Sam Raimi & Robert Tapert, and Bruce Campbell, featurette on the 1999 US R1 Elite Entertainment Special Edition DVD, but to date have not been transferred.

Each raw footage tape ranges from 15-27mins in length, probably containing the contents of one or two 16/35mm film reels each; accounting for the short length. This primarily seems to be a random assembly of alternate and longer shots that specifically aren't in the film. To clarify, there are a number of shots where there is a gap/jump at a certain moment, such as the light bulb exploding in the cellar, the actual explosion is missing in one take, same for one of the takes chopping up Shelly's leg for example, because what was in that gap was cut into the in the film, leaving a blank space in this raw footage.

Six of the nine tapes have no audio. While much of the shooting was indeed done without sound, there are some shots where the clapper board is visible with a sound number, so sound would have been recorded at the time but it's just missing on the tapes. This set was never meant for the public to see in its entirety, so it probably never mattered to anyone involved. It was just created for Elite to assemble the raw footage featurette. You can see screenshots from all the tapes below;

[GraveShift]

That’s amazing!