Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants

One of Ricky Jay’s– or anyone’s- has finally gone public and now James Redd can share it with ILX.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/arts/design/ricky-jay-magician-collection.html

One of Ricky Jay’s best anecdotes

Tomorrow (Feb 25) brings the next sale of items from the Ricky Jay Collection, via Chicago’s Potter & Potter auctions. (https://t.co/zRO7eJVN6Y). They’ve done a wonderful job cataloguing and describing the items, but I’ll try to single out a few in this thread.

— Dan Chariton (@DanChariton) February 24, 2023

https://archive.org/details/ricky_jay_and_his_52_assisstants_rf

download the full mkv file. someone sourced an official HBO VHS tape (unfortunately not a master) of the 1996 HBO special and Chris Person of the Aftermath website, among other ventures, did a quality rip of it. great stuff

Cheers. Might be some excellent Xmas day viewing

Someone made an upscale remaster of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0gW03zWnnU

Chris Person of the Aftermath website, among other ventures

I haven’t seen it in ages, some of the card reveals are cut off in the framing. Widescreen edit issue or was it like that originally?

I thought Chris Person of the Aftermath website ripped the VHS master. This is a apparently an upscale, which should look better, but I haven't compared the two too closely.

Domesday Duplicator rip of Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants, from an HBO Production tape. Video was deinterlaced in Vapoursynth using QTGMC and upscaled for YouTube using Spline36

I think it was always full screen, iirc.

i showed this to my little kids a few months back and they had their heads blown.

Chris also did this upscale, per his social media.

Ah! I think I saw it via something else.

whether it looks better is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
but YouTube does all kinds of wonky shit to guess the most optimal way to format/transcode based on some archaic rules so starting with a higher res version might help