Came across
this really cool post by user EPCOThistory on reddit.
"Recently a reel of 1” tape came up for auction on eBay. All the reel said was “Disney Spaceship Earth HD Clone Of Edited Master” with a run time of 7:59:10 and a date of 12/22/94. I was intrigued, because I love Spaceship Earth and 1994 seemed very early for anything to be HD, especially on a 1” tape format, so I bought it.
I reached out to the amazing group of people at Futureport 82 and they were able to determine that it was an HDVS tape. HDVS was an experimental pre-HD format developed by Sony in the mid 80s. Even more amazing, they were able to connect me with the a video archiving group called OP Workshop run by
u/ReelyInteresting . They had the exact model machine needed to transfer this 3 decade old tape! That is no small feat considering this format was very rare, and this particular machine was very expensive and had a short shelf life.
As soon as OP Workshop received the tape we found out what was on there. It was the virtual classroom scene from the 1994 descent in beautiful uncompressed HD! The video is about 32 seconds long and loops for 8 minutes. The reason for this is the master tape was most likely pressed on to an HDVS laserdisc for use in the attraction and that format had a time limit of 8 minutes.
I’m so glad the stars aligned and we were able to connect with the right people to preserve this small piece of EPCOT history!"
Here's
the video backed up on internet archive.