Trout Grass - The Revival Edition

I reviewed the DVD Trout Grass back in 2005. It has become the documentary about the journey Tonkin bamboo making from their source in China to bamboo rod makers all over the world. The video was co-produced by the late bamboo trader Andy Royer and the video included footages of musician Hoagy Carmichael, writer Thomas McGuane and rod maker Glenn Brackett.

The original supply of DVDs sold out and the master video tape was lost with the floods caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012. This summer Joshua Moro, co-producer of Trout Grass, started a Kickstarter campaign to revive the lost video using modern technology to upgrade the video quality from a digital Betamax tape and to preserve the video for the future.

As a backer of this campaign I got to watch the final digital version of the video today. The video quality is indeed an upgrade from the original DVD quality (480p), but obviously one can't expect pin sharp HD (1080p or higher) quality from a source that dates pre-blu ray era.

Update August 12, 2020:

The digital remastering certainly results in a much crisper image. The option to watch the documentary with commentary track with David James Duncan and Glenn Brackett is amazing. This is new. For this this DVD is worth the price. I’ll have to watch it with this track in its whole. Bonus scenes: Deleted and unused scenes are a nice addition too.

A nice gesture is seeing the names of the backers at the end credits of the revived video. $20 for this new edition is worth it in my opinion, even if you got the original DVD. For bamboo fans it’s a must buy. Get it before it sells out!

For more info and to buy the DVD go to the website of Trout Grass.