Well, I DVRed the inaugural offering of The New Yankee Workshop on DIY
this morning (Jigs, Part One) and just finished watching it. I think
I'm going to be sick.

Most of you know that I've put a fair amount of time into chronicling
the tools Norm has used in 19 years of TNYW. That has entailed
watching (and timing) a lot of TNYW episodes (243, so far). I didn't
start video taping episodes until around 1999--ten years into the
show--so I had to rely on HGTV rebroadcasts for all of the early
years.

As I viewed all of the episodes I learned that while the original PBS
content totalled 24 minutes and 18 seconds (I'm not sure why the odd
number, but it's been consistent over roughly eight years of actual
PBS content that I have), HGTV edited their airings down to 21 minutes
and 45 seconds--also consistent over twelve years worth of
programming, or 156 episodes (all that HGTV ever aired). I had an
overlap of a few episodes in the late '90s for which I had both PBS
and HGTV versions and it was interesting to see what they cut out--it
wasn't a lot, mostly setups and an occasional orientation shot--but
generally not a lot of meat. Of course I can't really say how much had
been cut from the earlier years because I had no comparison
recordings.

This morning marked the return of supplemental (to PBS) airings of
TNYW since HGTV ended their contract several years ago. I eagerly
anticipated it, since I've been transferring all of my VHS recordings
over to DVD. Although the VCR tapes were done from fresh, SP
recordings of either original PBS broadcasts or HGTV broadcasts of the
earlier years, I had to re-record them in EP in order to get all 13
episodes of a season onto a single two hour tape. Consequently,
there's a lot of noise (and jitter, due to different VCR machines
involved) on my archive tapes. I was hoping to be able to get pristine
transfers from my DVR to the DVDs with the new DIY offering. Here's
what happened:

The DIY version (at least for this first program) totalled 19 minutes
and 43 seconds of content. That's 4½ minutes out of the original 24+
minutes. I don't think it possible to find enough non-critical
material to take out of a 24½ program to get to where DIY apprently
feels they need to be, but I thought I'd at least check against the
PBS version I have. So I pulled out my archive and watched. Quelle
horror! Sure, there were a couple of minor cuts that I noticed at
first, but after building the panel cutter, panel raising jig, and
circle cutting jig, they stopped. They cut out one of the items
entirely--the finger boards. I was shocked enough when I looked at my
stopwatch on the first viewing and saw 19:43, but as I viewed the
original and found one fourth of the projects missing I was simply
stunned.

I think I'm going to be sick. I know I said that already. I don't
think I can say it too much. If that's the standard to which DIY is
going to air TNYW episodes, I'll recommend you not bother to watch. In
order to make that number, there will simply have to be significant
content excised which will render the program virtually useless. And
I'm stuck with putting my noisy, jittery, EP recordings onto DVD. Or,
I can buy 200+ episodes from TNYW at $15 a pop...probably not.

What a disappointment.

--
LRod

Master Woodbutcher and seasoned termite

Shamelessly whoring my website since 1999

http://www.woodbutcher.net

Proud participant of rec.woodworking since February, 1997

email addy de-spam-ified due to 1,000 spams per month.
If you can't figure out how to use it, I probably wouldn't
care to correspond with you anyway.