TV-Guide
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The reason these clips look better than anyone remembers has surprisingly little to do with the tape itself. That footage was always this good. What changed is everything that used to sit between the tape and your eyes.
A 70s music show went out through a broadcast chain that composite-encoded the signal, ran it through transmitter processing, pushed it over the air, and then landed on a set with a notch filter for a comb filter and an antenna that may or may not have been pointed at anything useful. Every one of those stages threw away colour resolution and added noise. Playing the master back today with a modern time base corrector and a proper decoder skips the whole chain. You're seeing the original videotape essentially for the first time.
The other half is that live-to-tape studio video, at its best, has an immediacy that film never had. No grain, no telecine, cameras pointed at a real band in a real room. On a large modern panel it can look eerily present in a way that costs nothing in resolution terms, because 480 lines of clean video upscales far more gracefully than 480 lines of dirty video ever did.
Where it falls down is motion. Interlaced 60 fields per second deinterlaced badly looks awful, and YouTube's encoder is not gentle with it, so how good any given upload looks depends heavily on who did the transfer and what they did about the fields.
Has anyone compared one of these uploads to an off-air recording of the same performance? I'd like to know how much of the gap is transfer and how much is just the broadcast chain being gone.
A 70s music show went out through a broadcast chain that composite-encoded the signal, ran it through transmitter processing, pushed it over the air, and then landed on a set with a notch filter for a comb filter and an antenna that may or may not have been pointed at anything useful. Every one of those stages threw away colour resolution and added noise. Playing the master back today with a modern time base corrector and a proper decoder skips the whole chain. You're seeing the original videotape essentially for the first time.
The other half is that live-to-tape studio video, at its best, has an immediacy that film never had. No grain, no telecine, cameras pointed at a real band in a real room. On a large modern panel it can look eerily present in a way that costs nothing in resolution terms, because 480 lines of clean video upscales far more gracefully than 480 lines of dirty video ever did.
Where it falls down is motion. Interlaced 60 fields per second deinterlaced badly looks awful, and YouTube's encoder is not gentle with it, so how good any given upload looks depends heavily on who did the transfer and what they did about the fields.
Has anyone compared one of these uploads to an off-air recording of the same performance? I'd like to know how much of the gap is transfer and how much is just the broadcast chain being gone.
