today i watched a youtube video where a dude took a microscope with a digital display and looked at multiple laserdiscs, as well as a ced. he looked at both CAV and CLV laserdiscs. someone in his chat had challenged him to attempt to find an actual picture from the content contained on the disc ON the disc. like, seeing individual frames on the disc. both the CAV laserdisc and ced actually contained frames of the end credits visible on the discs themselves, which for me is very mind blowing. and confusing... how!? ceds are basically video vinyls, and laserdiscs are just massive analog dvds. they don't work like film!! the guy explained something something about lines reflecting, the way he was portraying information was a little hard for me to grasp cause i'm one of #Those special people who need you to speak a certain way to understand. he also went and posted them on wikipedia, and from the ced page i think what he was trying to explain was the actual signal engraved on the disc was reflecting in such a way that the credits wre visible? uh
albeit, the images were originally flipped backwards and he had to do post edit flipping, but this is still very fascinating.
maybe i've been thinking the wrong way about laserdiscs this whole time... maybe the content on the disc is encoded a certain way so that the reflection that the laser reads is what's put on the screen directly, rather than being data that's decoded? and because it's encoded that way that it's able to physically reflect the image to your eyes if you look hard enough? same with the ced, just with a needle? is that what he meant?
my mind doesn't get blown at all. very rare occasion. this is something that deconstructs how i've understood technological storage mediums. when i was little, i used to think you could look at a vhs tape and see an image, like film. but as we all know, vhs tapes are a magnetic tape medium. everything has to do with electron charge. for the longest time before i had access to the internet (unmoderated), that's how i thought all video mediums worked. then i got the internet, figured out how things worked, and dismissed "wow what if i can see the picture of the movie on the disc itself" as a foolish childhood wonder. now i'm like What the fuck but it's so cool dude like this is really fascinating to me