The Velvet Forum

Hi, this is my first post here. My name is Jonas, I discovered the Velvet Underground in 2019 and they have been my favorite Band ever since.

The Andy Warhol Museum has started making Andy's Films available to the public last year, including Chelsea Girls(!) and the Velvet Underground 1966 Jam Session Film. https://stream.warhol.org/for-rent

It's all in full HD and looks amazing. Chelsea Girls is a good watch too.

Welcome! Thanks for posting!

On one level (as Steve Sesnick might've said), this is great news. On the other... $15 a pop for streamed content created nearly 60 years ago, that cost virtually nothing to make and has been exploited for years through screenings and expensive licensed releases? Who are they trying to kid?

Still, hopefully they'll release Hedy and ****.

Agree. It only gets interesting when u released unseen VU footage like in ****, Tarot Cards, and other movies becomes available. The ones up there of th3m now can be seen for free on YouTube, and it's not like the quality of the original footage was particularly good quality to begin with.

I'd post some stills but I don't have bbcode privileges... The quality is really worth it imo

Is there a way to download it? Not interested in only being able to watch it for 3 days. I have the RaroVideo DVD. Is it better quality than that? Is it 24fps or 25fps?

It says it's powered by Vimeo, so you can probably use a Vimeo downloader browser plugin to grab a copy. Not that I'm advocating such behaviour, you understand.

Does this mean access to upgraded soundtracks for the VU film and Chelsea Girls?

@rnranimal

It's 29.97fps
Stream #0:0[0x1](und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p(tv, bt709, progressive), 1440x1080, 3770 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 30k tbn (default)
Stream #0:1[0x2](und): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 253 kb/s (default)

@iaredatsun

Maybe, here's a waveform and a spectrogram: https://imgur.com/a/uPTbnzI

and here's the stills as a link, along with a couple of photomerges of multiple frames: https://imgur.com/a/WcaEE6M

Chelsea Girls also has subtitles, which were very helpful

iaredatsun wrote: ↑08 Feb 2023 14:11 Does this mean access to upgraded soundtracks for the VU film and Chelsea Girls?

Maybe but maybe not. I'd like to know if this is really a new 1080p transfer of the film or if they just grabbed it from the Raro DVD. They don't have a trailer for the VU film and Vinyl, which is the other film on the Rare DVD, doesn't appear to have any extra detail when I switch the trailer between 540p and 1080p. Also, 540p is more associated with PAL, which is the forma the Rare DVD is. If these were new 1080p film transfers, they should be 24fps, not 25fps, which is how they issue them in Europe. But I'm not saying that's the case here. I just have some suspicions.

But back to the soundtrack. If these are sourced from the Rare DVD, then we wouldn't have an upgraded soundtrack, of course. It would just be the lossy DVD audio with another lossy generation. If these truly are new hi-def transfers from the prints in the Warhol archive, then I'd expect the soundtrack to be a upgrade unless there is wear/damage or something was off with the transfer. However, either way, it's still going to be lossless audio with these files.

For Chelsea Girls, I really wish they would do a stereo soundtrack with the split screen audio isolated to each channel. Seems a no brainer. That way we'd get the VU music without the talking over it. But also just seems an obvious way to treat a split screen film which has separate audio for each screen.