Film: the reason some of the past was in HD

The Kallax King

I have lots of video tapes that my Grandpa had taken when he visited various places in the world, South Africa, Itaoy, Egypt, Syngapore,etc. can you help me out regarding how I can convert the tapes in modern 4k video formats?

Even regular 8mm film will benefit from 2k.

Cinema paradiso

I totally get what you mean, these video seem to be very detailed but in a clever way, skipping to whatever is clever to skip to , HD whatever can be HDed .

Twilight Zone was shot on video for a few, select episodes though film for most of it. The difference in quality is stark.

Video tape always look like a live television broadcast to me and was never as warm as film.

Its funny when I can watch anime from the 70s in 4k quality but anime from the early 2000s is stuck in low quality 480p

I have seen I think the music video is 'Teenager' from My Chemical Romance or it could also be 'Welcome To The Black Parade', those also got an upgrade too. I have to be honest, plenty of music videos back then should get a touch up. Plenty of them have not aged very well. I almost prefer listening to the song and never knowing about potentially a music video of them, because some of them are not great.

Since November5th, can we please dispense with ludicrous content warnings?

People really need this spelled out for them? Every day, I just lose more faith in people's intelligence.

You could still capture a tape in 4k, so that every Bit of Video noise is captured perfectly!
This will not make it look like folm or digital, but at least all the noise is captured perfectly= less/ no pixelation.😇

SD television is limited to 480 lines vertically, but there is a less defined horizontal resolution thats bandwidth limited and trully analog. This becomes important because SD video doesn't all have the same horizontal resolution, particularly when digital gets involved. The resolution of analog tape is going to be different than DVD or an old game console, for example, even if all of the above are limited to 480 lines.

There is also 240p which is essentially taking a 480 line interlaced signal, except instead of drawing half 240 lines on one pass and then drawing the other half of the 480 lines on the next pass, they are drawing the same 240 lines on each pass which means those specific lines are redrawn twice as often but your vertical resolution drops to 240 lines instead of 480 while your horizontal resolution remains untouched.

My first HD TV there wasn't much content yet. Flipper the TV show was filmed on film and was amazing being outdoor shots in Florida.

Holy heck dude, that Carousel of Progress quote is some next level referencing

Seems like definition could be enhanced algorithmically. It would be an estimate of what was supposed to be there, so less "real" in some sense, but there are so many ways that film doesn't capture "reality," even when it's intended to, that I don't really see using an algorithm as any less real than the limitations of any other technology.

I heard that Paramount lost money on the TNG redo project, going back to all the camera film and adding all new effects. Cost like $16 million dollars? Because of the loss, Voyager and DS9 are now not even being considered for this restoration. I could be wrong about this though.

35mm film has an 8k resolution as a minimum. If it has a good optical set up the image will be clear. TV did not look blurry in the 1980s as the CRT sets had amazing colour processing and the pixels were small enough that they could not be seen at viewing distances.

bro, you said a 16mm scan thats higher res than 720p is overkill?! An ARRI 416 camera with ARRI Master Primes can resolve a WAY finer image on 16mm than 720p. you can get 2k out of that easy. how dare you?! lol

Video wasn't fuzzy back in the 80's/90's it was only smaller. SD resolution video (720 x 575 @72dpi - Phase Alternating Line) looks very good on SD resolution monitors. It only looks soft when played back on HD monitors. Also, most music videos were shot on film. They only shot the cheap ones on tape. Back then it was well understood that everything looked amazing on film and tape looked cheap.

Thanks for the video, very enjoyable. Best bit. 'But the number one sign of something shot on tape is, it looks like it was shot on tape!'

With AI we will be able to transfer lots of movies and shows to 4k I believe with upscaling even fuzzzy stuff that only exist on a home tape. Your statement of it will always be SD I think might be wrong with how AI video/photo upscaling is going, technically could even upscale frame by frame with current ai tech probably.

You mention Next Generation but the original series was also taped on film

Probably still cheaper to remaster DS9 and VOY than making whatever they call those new Trek shows

The Problem with film is that the higher the ISO the more grainer it gets thats why film sucks in low light although technically film can ISO go as high as twenty thousand which would be great if only it didn't get super grainy

With audio, during the transition period of analog (tape?) to digital (CD initially), weren't there codes printed on the CD disk to tell the consumer if the original recording was ànaalog or digital?

We should always be able to have the best quality. But we HAVE TO demand it, and make sure the rights holders and print holders do their due diligence.

Well why didn't they just use AI enhancement to upscale the 525 resolution tapes to 16K resolution and generate additional frames for 300 FPS?

I think The Lucy Show from the 1950s was shot on film due to Desi and Lucy's insistence. And it still looks great today. The Original Star Trek, also a Desilu production looks great today for the same reasons you point out. Tarantino is a big proponent of film as well. Great video, you covered a lot of ground!

You forgot about Paramount’s Vistavision, which DID run through the camera sideways, just like your negatives.

I remember when "we don't even know if TNG's negatives were kept" and some guy is like.....I work in this film vault. I know where star trek is. It's all there!!! I see it every day!" The whole It's all there......maybe maybe not. They couldn't find everything for TNG. But yeah VGR DS9 even ENT it's all still there in that same film vault. I think he said it was like a underground facility in a salt lake or something. This was almost 20 years ago. lol

If i remember was filmed on 8mm and tng on around 30mm

Fuck you with your rewording of the song. God nerds are so annoying yet interesting

What’s your thoughts about the new methods used to capture the raw RF signal from videotape, such as vhsdecode, and the more popular domesday duplicator?

Another advantage of filming on film is that it has a lot of latitude. It can capture greater differences between high and low lights. While the video of those years could not tolerate great differences. What was recorded on film could be corrected by copying and transferring it. hence the exteriors including newsreels were made on film Look at Adams' zonal system 10 stops vs 5 stops for analog video. Today the camaras digital camaras for consumer are really great.🤔

Didn't Tom Scott already cover this?

Very good!!

Some of us can see individual frames at 30 fps, it's like watching something at 15 fps for you normal people
60 fps doesn't float my boat, it's a necessity, that 30 frames per second looks like a slideshow personally

Every time he says "latent" I expect "heat" right after it. I did not expect "latent image."

They did the same thing with Apollo 11 footage, its incredible how it looks like it could have been shot yesterday, yet was 1969. Incredible

Because film negatives are very detailed?

That's also the reason why the Lord of the Rings movies are in such amazing quality in their 4K remaster that was released a few years back. I bought it, watched it, and apart from some small details with some VFX heavy scenes, you couldn't tell that the films were 20 years old at that point. If you like the LOTR movies (which you absolutely should) and own a 4k capable TV and blu ray player, treat yourself with this gem.

Tape and Film was different....

E for effort, but that's not how television works. There is no "480 line" TV standard, for starters. In countries with 60 Hz powerline frequency, it was a 525 line standard, and 625 lines for countries with 50 Hz power. 480 "lines" was the vertical resolution of the D-1 digital recording standard, but pictures have two dimensions. The horizontal resolution for D-1 was 720 or 704 TV lines, which is comparable to the resolution of the best broadcast TV cameras of the time. You don't seem to understand that part. Although the raster limits the vertical resolution, the other picture parameters are not so limited.

The "soap opera effect" is, sadly, just a pseudo-intellectual catchphrase used by people who like to believe that they know more about television than they actually do. There are some legitimate reasons why soap operas look (and sound) much different than feature films or weekly TV series, and that has to do with the daily production schedule with a lower weekly budget, not some misunderstanding about frame rates.

The real story here is that analog television was a lot better than what many end-users experienced. Film is not some magical thing with supernatural powers. But you'll need to actually learn a lot about the technology to be able to tell that story.

Glee was shot on film 🤭🤭🤣😂😂🤣🤭

The new Fawlty Towers BluRay has just been released. Interesting because all of the indoor scenes were recorded to video and have had to be upscaled (not great) but the outdoor scenes were recorded to film and in 4k look amazing. A lot of people are complaining that it's a bad release, but you can't get data where none was recorded.

Wouldn't film degrade over time even if you stored it?

Whoa wait. Go watch Voyager!

OK, here comes a pinned comment about the whole Star Trek thing (and I've edited this to give a little more clarity);
I'm getting a lot of mixed information from commenters about what specifically is preventing Voyager (and Deep Space Nine) from getting an HD Re-release. Some people are saying it's just a money thing, and that Paramount couldn't recoup their investment (as learned from their experience doing the TNG re-release). TNG was, after all, edited on tape so what is the substantial difference?
Yes. TNG was originally edited on tape, not film. I implied in the video that there was a "final cut" on film but this isn't the case. From my research and understanding, as helped along by others, the key difference between TNG and Voyager when it comes to making an HD re-release feasible is that while some of the VFX work on TNG was rendered to tape, this was largely things like phaser effects, planetary orbital scenes, and other minutia. Most shots of the Enterprise were done with models / practical effects, and as such they existed on film from the get go, meaning they existed with the full detail film can capture. So yes, the version we saw upon its initial release came from a tape, but unlike Voyager (and DS9), a much greater percentage of the original effects footage existed on film.
This meant that to re-release the series in HD, scanning the film negatives took care of a large portion of business. It largely needed to simply be re-edited to match the original cuts and timing. The most complicated part of the process was re-compositing some of the film-based effects. But since they existed on film, it was mainly a matter of re-alignment. Relatively few VFX elements were done exclusively on tape, and so it wasn't a monumental undertaking to recreate them for the HD release.
In contrast, for Voyager and (to a lesser extent) DS9, CGI was used heavily. And since that was rendered to tape and composited with the live-action scanned from film, the negatives (assuming they still exist) are just the live scenes and nothing more. If a re-release were to be done in HD, a much greater amount of work would need to be done. DS9 doesn't have it quite as bad as Voyager, but it would still be more complex than TNG. Some of the original computer models have been found which would help with recreating the VFX scenes, but in many cases the production houses that did this work went out of business. Which leaves many, many scenes where the entire thing needs to be re-done from scratch. And given how expensive this would be, it's likely never to happen. So no, it's not impossible that we'd see DS9 and Voyager get re-released in HD, but very unlikely. The extra complexities required would add tremendous cost to an already expensive endeavor.