I think you’re on the money as this being shot on U-matic… and thanks for the opportunity to do a bit of a deep dive on the format which I used in the late 80’s!
The thing that stood out for me was the great colour saturation which would be in part the use of PAL and not NTSC in Japan (the industry joke in Aus was that NTSC stood for Never Twice the Same Colour!).
The sync audio and the fact that this is 18min duration, with embedded visual timecode points to this at least being a U-matic dub as part of the broadcast editing process. This would have been a nightmare of film processing and audio re-syncing if shot on 16mm.
Also of interest is that there is no rolling bands on the game video displays that suggest that this was shot at 25fps PAL and not 30fps NTSC.
Another interesting tech history revelation in the Wikipedia article posted below is that U-matic was used as the first PCM capture device for digital audio and it’s sync rate was 48Mz which is 1/10th of 48Khz today’s standard for digital video audio… not 44.1Khz as used by CD audio.
