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Cyberpunk is a 1990 documentary that explores the world that William Gibson invented with his book Neuromancer. The bulk of the documentary consists of interviews with Gibson, Jaron Lanier, Timothy Leary and Michael Synergy. A few industrial bands have their music featured as well.
From the original distributor's description:
"Since the 1982 publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, the first in a groundbreaking series of science fiction novels, many of his fictional concepts have been realized. Moreover, a segment of Western youth has dedicated itself to living in Gibson's fictional world made fact.
The cyberpunk movement embraces artificial reality, bionic medicine, "smart" weapons and drugs, and industrial music. But most notably, cyberpunks are associated with computer hacking, piracy and crimes. These are young people who fight fire with fire, pitching their ethos, "Information wants to be free," against those who would control, restrict, or direct high technology. Their agenda is similar to that of the Sixties counterculture, yet their means are very different, and to some, terrifying. Cyberpunk tells how this phenomenon began and explores its implications.
Included are interviews with Gibson, Jaron Lanier, Timothy Leary and Michael Synergy. Cyberpunk is futuristic "edutainment," whose production values mirror its content. It features animation as well as live-action, and "guerilla image processing" techniques that were once available only to large production companies that could afford expensive generators. The filmmakers' declared intent was somewhat subversive: To create such density of audio-visual stimulation that even the itinerant viewer would be engaged and entertained, hardly suspecting that the results would be education and thinking."
While this video is already on YouTube in various forms, this particular version was run through my videotape restoration process, which performs the following:
- Removes most helical-scan tape head noise, while retaining detail without ringing artifacts or motion bleeding
- Converts the original 30i interlaced material to 60p progressive material, enhanced using motion-directed analysis of each field (via QTGMC)
While no conversion process can add detail where none exists, I am confident my process retains the detail present in the original, and that this version is (as of 2015) the very best version available on YouTube.
If you'd like me to convert one of your videotapes, DVDs, or other 30i interlaced video footage with results similar to this video, contact me. If your conversion material is of interest to me or my hobbies, I'll do it for free.
