The Ofra Haza Video Project

Why an Ofra Haza Video Catalog?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ofra Haza, you may wonder why the people involved with this project have dedicated so much time, effort and resources to creating and distrubuting so many videos of the same artist.  I’m sure each of the members involved with the project has their own reasons, but much of it comes down to a heartfelt appreciation of the artist and the woman.

• Ofra Haza died on February 23, 2000. Her passing made all of her fans realize just what a blessing her life and music had been.  Partly out of mourning, partly out of celebration, we want to keep her music and her spirit alive in our daily lives.
   
• Ofra Haza had one of the finest voices ever recorded.  I don’t have the proper training to describe her voice technically, but it was clear and powerful across a wide range of both pitches and emotions. Listen to the acapella version of Love Song, Jerusalem of Gold, or Kol Haneshama and you’ll understand immediately why Ofra Haza’s voice has such international appeal.
   
• Ofra Haza came from humble beginnings and throughout her life remained appreciative of her family, friends and fans.  By all accounts, Ofra Haza was a wonderful person.
   
• Ofra Haza’s songs are rooted in her own culture while reaching across cultures as well. At a time and place when understanding is important but difficult to come by, Ofra Haza’s voice united many.
   
• It’s difficult, if not impossible, to find out more about Ofra Haza’s musical legacy.  In the United States especially, little is available besides her most popular albums, and even those are difficult to find. 

The generous efforts of a few people have made these videos available to everyone. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to seek out more of her music after seeing some of these videos.  Perhaps you’re already a fan and want to see the artist in concert in addition to listening to her music. Perhaps you saw Ms. Haza in concert and these videos are just a reminder of her great performances.

In any case, enjoy the videos.  We enjoyed bringing them to you!

Video Production Notes

There have only been two commercially released video collections of Ofra Haza. The first, called From Dusk 'Til Dawn, was released in 1984; the second, called Fantasy, was released in 1986. Neither of these tapes were released with Hi-Fi Stereo sound, and both are out of print and no longer available. A very small number of isolated MTV-style Ofra videos have been released on various compilation tapes in Hi-Fi Stereo, all of which are out of print but occasionally turn up on eBay. Only a couple of the videos here come from such a source. In general, Ofra videos have been pretty scarce and hard to come by. Until now.

This video collection stems from the dedication of several Ofra Haza fans around the world, especially one fan who collected various broadcasts from Israeli television for over a decade and made them available to a couple of Ofra fans in the United States, who fortunately had computers with video capture cards!  Many of the videos had been copied many times, some are incomplete, and all had to be converted from PAL to NTSC -- in other words, the picture quality is often not too good.  We could only work with what we had.

It is especially fortunate however that many of the Ofra performances shown on Israeli TV were lip-synched with her studio recordings.  This made it possible using computers to substitute the original Lo-Fi Mono sound track with sound from her CDs, resulting in the World Premiere of over 100 Ofra videos in Hi-Fi Stereo sound that have never before been heard in this manner. This is a monumental achievement for Ofra Haza fans and is a whole new way of experiencing Ofra and her music -- as well as a good excuse to upgrade your computer sound system!

Rendering the videos in Hi-Fi Stereo sound was not always an easy task.  The video tapes had been copied several times with VCRs that vary ever so slightly in speed, so the timing of the video sound track was in almost all cases different than the timing of the CD recording, and if the two were simply recorded together, the stereo sound would be out of synch and very annoying to watch.

To properly synch the sound, at least two things are necessary -- to perfectly match the starting points, and to perfectly match the duration.  Using a good audio editing program (in this case Sound Forge), it is possible to vary the duration of a WAVE file without changing the pitch.  To get a good synch, the total start-to-end duration of the original and the substituted sound track need to be identical to within a tenth of a second.  Before editing with Sound Forge, the difference in duration was usually off by from one to five seconds, which is not nearly good enough, so editing the duration was necessary. Once the proper duration was achieved, the peaks in the audio waveforms of the two sound tracks could be precisely lined up. This process could take anywhere from five minutes to an hour depending on how recognizable the audio waveforms are.

Using this technique, perfect sound synchronization was achieved.

There were two exceptions to the above "easy" scenario.  In a few cases, the speed of the VCR apparently varied during the time a copy had been made, so the above method would result in a sound track that went in and out of synch as the video progressed.  To handle these videos, it was necessary to vary the duration of the stereo sound track independently for multiple segments of the track. Some segments were lengthened, and some segments were shortened, until a perfect match was obtained.  In one especially bad case, every 3-second interval had to be independently edited for duration. This process could take an hour or more for each minute of video, but it worked and could fix most of the worst cases and still obtain a perfect sound synch.

But there were a few exceptions even to this.  In a very small number of videos (about 3 or 4, to varying degrees), the sound was out of synch in the original mono version. In that case, nothing could be done to fix it, since the process only matches the stereo sound with the original sound, and if the original was out of synch with the video, then the substituted sound track will be out of synch in exactly the same way.  In all such cases this happened in only a portion of the video. We will leave you to identify on your own which videos these are -- the minor ones you might not even notice.

Note that this whole sound-synching process is only possible because the original Lo-Fi Mono sound track is from the same studio recording as the substituted Hi-Fi Stereo sound track.  Sometimes there are instruments or backup voices that are obviously not present in what you see. This is not the result of substituting the sound track -- the same effect would be there on the original Lo-Fi Mono tape. In other words, don't blame us!

Of course, any performance that was not available on CD could not be rendered in stereo and these videos remain in mono.

In the case of the Fantasy video, a fan loaned an original tape for capturing to this collection, so those videos are the best quality.  The original tape was only released with mono sound, but 9 of the 10 videos on it have been rendered here in Hi-Fi Stereo sound for the first time. The one remaining track (Emmene Moi) was never released on CD so it could not be rendered in stereo.  Fortunately the mono sound on that one is pretty good.

This amazing collection was only made possible with the assistance of numerous Ofra Haza fans around the world.  If you happen to have any videos of Ofra that are not represented here, or that are better quality than what is here, please contact us and let us add them to the collection.

Sincerely,

The Ofra Haza Video Team