Comment by betamaxc-
1 day ago
It upsets me that so much video was recorded on tapes instead of film, because it didn’t wear well and looks awful today. The only hope we have now are approximations using AI.
Think of all of the 80s TV shows and movies we’d be streaming today if the quality weren’t so poor.
Of course tape isn't the best, but you can actually squeeze more out of tape than you might expect.
One of my latest nerd rabbit holes has been using the Domesday Duplicator, and now the MISRC, to extract higher quality video from old VHS, VHS-C, and 8mm video. Thanks to the vhsdecode project you can now bypass most of the original hardware and use software to reconstruct the video from the raw RF. It's expensive, computationally, but with a proper RF extraction you can now capture better video than the the original hardware ever could.
I haven't tried it yet, but I hear that with dirty tricks like "stacking" multiple passes, or even captures from multiple tapes, you can further enhance it.
Film can definitely wear badly, like there’s some 1970s colour stock that just fades into nothingness.
80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm.
TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.
The end result of a modern film "transfers" looks so good that people massively the amount of effort that went into the restoration.
The color has always faded. They have to color-grade it back to what they think it originally looked like, though it's more common to use artistic license what they it was originally intended to look like. Artistic interpretation always leaks in, and it will never match what someone saw in the theatre (and there was massive variation between prints even when they were brand new).
At least with TV shows like TNG, we have the tapes to use as a reasonably solid reference for what color was actually broadcast.
And then there is scratch and dust removal. They do so much in-painting to get the clean result that we associate with 35mm film today.
The color has always faded - well, not always. The gold standard for movie archiving is to store the movies color separated on three reels, one for red, green and blue, but not use color film, but a special black and white. There's no fading at all on these.
Sometimes the original negatives are in really good condition, but you still have to redo the color-grading, because the original color-grading was done chemically onto some transfer which now has faded or was just pretty bad to begin with, if you even can find it.
In the UK, indoors studio shots were on video, but outdoors location shots had to be on film, so there was an obvious difference in look when they cut between them.
Monty Python lampooned this in a sketch where Graham Chapman goes outside, exclaims "Good Lord, I'm on film!" and then flees indoors to the safety of video
A lot of TV classic shows were shot on tape just because it was so much cheaper, and everything live has either always been tape or just wasn't recorded at all as far as I know.
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> 80s movies would be near universally film
Major movies, yes. But a lot of B films were on tape, and most of the distribution of movies in the early 80s was tape, so as companies went out of business, what was left was tape.
I’m over 50 y.o., but I remember movies from Blockbuster that I can’t find now because they were minor and only distributed on VHS tapes which were dumped over the years. I can find just about anything that was on film.
What are a couple that you'd like to find?
It wasn't. 80s TV shows and movies were overwhelmingly recorded on film. Primarily because it was much easier to edit film than tape.
And we are streaming a ton of them now that they've gone back and scanned the original film in 4K.
It's awesome. Heck you can watch I Love Lucy from 1951 in glorious high definition, sharper than anyone ever viewed it originally. It's basically magic.
If you want 1980's, go watch St. Elsewhere or Cheers. They have cinema detail now instead of the fuzzy TV detail you would have seen in the 80's.
Film needs to be developed to be able to see the content at all. Regular color films after shooting is covered in extremely photosensitive, opaque gray paste, and it needs to be washed and cleaned in temperature controlled acid bath to remove the reactive part and only leave the image on the film.
Tapes, on the other hand... You can just rewind it, play it, and overwrite a few times. Cost differences are significant to say the least.
Just need to take over the TV station:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2efhrCxI4J0
Very few movies were shot on tape, and those that were did it deliberately for the effect of looking awful (Blair Witch Project).
For TV shows made in the US, they were still generally recorded on film, but then editing on tape became common in the late 80s. (In the UK, recording on tape was a lot more common. Not sure about other countries.) If there was enough interest in the show (and the company hadn’t destroyed the film), it would be possible to go back and reconstruct the show from the filmed footage. Unfortunately, I only know of one case where that happened, and reportedly disc sales weren’t enough to turn a profit.