Why some "remastered" music videos look awful
Dipublikasikan tanggal 17 Mei 2020
This isn't "the way they were meant to be seen". • Join CuriosityStream, including access to Nebula and my original series, for only $2.99/month here: curiositystream.com/tomscott
When ID-tv allowed music labels to "remaster" their original uploads, different videos had very different approaches. Some are in crystal-clear 4K; others are very definitely not. Here's why some of them look terrible.
Animation by William Marler: wmad.co.uk
Sound mix by Graham Haerther: haerther.net
I'm at tomscott.com
on Twitter at twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at facebook.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo
When ID-tv allowed music labels to "remaster" their original uploads, different videos had very different approaches. Some are in crystal-clear 4K; others are very definitely not. Here's why some of them look terrible.
Animation by William Marler: wmad.co.uk
Sound mix by Graham Haerther: haerther.net
I'm at tomscott.com
on Twitter at twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at facebook.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo
Komentar
Alternate title: Why All Star’s Remastered Music Video Isn’t the Sharpest Tool in the Shed
The reason is, the years stop coming, and they don’t stop coming.
Yep! What a concept!
They could have just left it in standard definition, but they figured that we could all use a little change. Yep, what a concept.
On the contrary, it’s the one tool in the shed that is too sharp
@1994 Honda Civic GLi hello honda civic
I deliberately tried to stay away from too many All Star puns. Thanks to CuriosityStream for sponsoring, and for helping to pay for all this animation! The free trial offer has now ended, but you can get access to them, to Nebula and my original series, for only $2.99/month here: curiositystream.com/tomscott
Why even bother then?
Hey, now, why would you do that?
That's fine. I think the video would seem over-produced if you put in more puns.
That's a shame, we'd love to see the puns.
Tom
This is really cool, but also sort of sad. Almost like “taping Over” history. Would be nice to have an option on the ID-tv Playback window to switch between the old video and new one.
@Kamomile Tea this is why piracy is an option or track down old physical media ig
@Kamomile Tea I'd imagine you can the digital effects are usually optional bonus material if you get them physically on blu ray. They did the same thing with old color episodes of Doctor Who where they remade effects for some episodes and it's an optional bonus cause they know not everyone is gonna wanna watch something that isn't the original.
Viewing the old video on a CRT is quite different to viewing on an LCD. You’d really want to recreate that experience too.
@Kamomile Tea I'm not sure about the other shows, but the season sets of TOS have the option to watch with the original effects (without losing the HD everywhere else). It does look a little off sometimes, because everything is in HD and then you have these special effects from the 60's, but I personally prefer it.
@3ICE noone should be able to do it
I just love the thought of having a "Tom Scott" window in my editing software.
@Mexican Defence Minister and more enthusiastic
I mean if we ever start digitizing consciousness, you know Tom Scott will be one of the beta testers.
@[ ACCOUNT SUSPENDED ] thanks bro
@Astro Orbis you already can make that in blender without plugins :)
Me too
06:09 for those who don’t work doing creative roles, you’d be surprised how often the brief is ‘we don’t care, just make it work’ and give someone junior a couple of hours to make it happen
It happens in every type of job, not just creative. Whether it's remastering a video, building a house, stocking shelves in a convenience store, or nearly any other job (hopefully not surgery), someone is going to want something done that cannot be done, and they are going to tell someone below them to just make it work.
@Yama 123numbercauseYTdemandsname It does indeed. I see this all the time in IT. You're wondering why some web site is a pain to use, or is doing weird things, or some company has mangled or lost your data? A lot of the time, "Just make it work," by which the manager means, "Just make it _look like it works,"_ is the issue.
I have a distinct feeling that this (,,We don't care, just make it work!'') applies to more than just the creative roles sector.
@spency kings and you almost got kicked out that one year for the animal house like toga party you threw? but that's not important now....
that's honestly how i did a lot of my work at college. i also did fail half my classes the second semester of the one year i attended but that's not important
Tom, I think it's worth mentioning that a "remaster" is for copyright purposes, a new work of art. Remastering has been used to effectively extend the copyright protection for many older "products". The effect is giving cash cows (Pink Floyd albums, Star Trek TOS) an artificial extended life. It's playing games with copyright law. Lawyers and accountants push these products. It's against the spirit of the law, and it is only for money.
If an album was originally mastered for vinyl and you put it straight on CD without remastering it, it will sound like mush While record companies do love to milk their cash cows, it's a bit of stretch to say that there's no valid reason to remaster an album
Enjoy your content make a two drums and cymbals fall of a cliff remastered
pls plsssss
With terrible deinterlacing 🤣
It was probably filmed in high definition, but ID-tv didn't support it back then.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!
And also a remaster of "you cannot remove your fingerprints with pineapple".
2:00 I love how the editor's software has to have a window for Tom Scott
That’s some 90s vibes for sure
OH NO EDITING SOFTWARE ATE TOM SCOTT
@Cavey Möth Tom Scott isn't a nuisance, I would *gladly* have him take over my computer programs
@Cavey Möth maybe
Is Tom Scott the new Clippy?
Is nobody going to talk about how amazingly edited this video is
@B Graphics design and animation requires more than just "proficiency" (I think you meant that word) in Final Cut Pro (and why do you think he uses macOS-exclusive software? Why not After Effects, like the rest of the god damn industry? Or Avid Media Composer, if we're going with industry standards?!?!?)
Who cares. Dude is efficient at Final Cut Pro.. Wooooah
Awful audio
Why?
Amazing editing.
“It does seem a terrible option to make it worse.” Well, the media men beg to differ
My dude, 2 years on and this is still a banger
@Frisk drinks brisk the nostalgia's getting warm so we might as well sell
@criptych the films we roll are getting really slim
@criptych I just about spit out my drink
Fun fact: Apollo launched in the 60s/70s were filmed on film but then scanned to display on tv all over the world. And since then, the images of Apollo launches we see are those bad quality scans from the 80s... Until someone decided to scan the original films again and put them into a movie: Apollo 11
@Deadpool Inspirational words, thank you Deadpool
The power of film. Even after many many decades, those 65mm film still looks brand new ❤️
@Daniel Huang Its on Hulu now
@David R. TI would be impressed more than anything
@Shaeby maybe it was all bait for you, and you fell for it
5:52 - Some of the shots, mainly the outside shots were recorded onto film, because the cameras were much more compact and portable than the TV cameras. In those moments you see no interlacing, because film cameras introduce no such artefact. On the other side, when it was possible, scenes were shot with the bulk TV cameras. This resulted in interlacing. Finally, the transitions between the film cameras and TV cameras are made entirely onto tape, so that's why the one side is interlaced, but the another - not.
The classic "film outside, video inside" effect, albeit less dramatic than in, say, the '70s.
Smash Mouth: "I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed" Underpaid VFX Editor: "I got you fam"
lmaooo
You mean underpaid VFX technician.
Let me also squish the image to a more proper aspect ratio.
@Nobody the prophet
Here, have a lot of claps: 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Tom, I just want to thank you for including captions for all your videos. We so appreciate it!
@glow cat so true!!
Its very helpful, especially when ur eating loud food
And good quality, too!
The fact that you actually referred to TVL correctly as "lines" and not "pixels" made me incredibly happy.
I hate the general attitude of “this should theoretically be better, so let’s do it and permanently replace the old thing. Doesn’t matter if you liked the old thing, you HAVE to consume the new thing now.”
same with software updates, subscription models... etc
We have a winner!
can i just say that tom is one of the coolest people? i mean seriously, he's accomplished so much.
@heid shows Uh-
@heid shows you literally just copied wtf
@heid shows wtf
I am so grateful to be alive today. My girlfriend saved my life last night. This is a selfie I took in the emergency room after having a severe allergic reaction to almonds. I went into anaphylaxis, meaning my face, my lips, my eyes, my tongue, and my throat all started swelling up rapidly, making it almost impossible for me to breathe. I also had a rash all over my entire body, and I was extremely red. Staying alive had never felt more difficult. At one point, my nasal passage was completely blocked, and it was getting more and more difficult to breathe. They shot me up with Benadryl, steroids, they gave me a breathing tube, and even other stuff that I can’t even remember, and it caused all of the swelling and the rash to go away. Because this was a severe allergic reaction, I need to continue taking steroids and Benadryl for the next week, because it is possible that the allergic reactions could come back at any point over the next week. The steroids and Benadryl make me feel like a zombie, and I really want to take care of my health, so this will be my main focus over the next week. I want to thank my amazing girlfriend, who made the decision to take me to the emergency room the second I started feeling itchy. I was hesitant about going, because I didn’t even want to believe this was actually happening. If it weren’t for my girlfriend driving me to the emergency room only minutes after eating the almonds, there is a good chance that I wouldn’t have made it according to the doctor. This has been without a doubt the hardest few days of my life, but I also look at them as the most important few days of my life. These moments have reminded me about what’s really important in life, and it has made me so grateful to even be here on this earth. I will be prioritizing my health over the next week, and I’ll post updates about how I feel. Thank you all for being patient during these difficult times. This week has been NUTS (too soon for jokes? 😅)
The aspect ratio change is what really annoys me about these remasters. Some crop the 4:3 video to a compromise ratio like you see here, while others simply crop the entire frame to 16:9. In either case, you have less lines, lost detail, and the picture quality is arguably worse than it was if they had just left it at 4:3.
Yes, it is a major pet peeve for me when the original aspect ratio is messed with, and the frame rate sometimes gets choppier.
In case you aren't aware, they recently remastered some of the old Star Trek shows by re-importing the original films and recreating all of the old effects using CG. The result is incredible, as you'd expect from film, but the amount of work that must have went into trying to match every scene shot for shot and trying to recreate every painted effect with digital effects is unfathomable to me. I'd love to see you do a video about this!
@91.5, the phoenix! archive The Blu-ray set features both original and updated effects, and you switch between them of your own will.
@91.5, the phoenix! archive eBay or Amazon. ANY Blu-ray copy has the original effects, and the 2004 dvds have the original effects.
@Sofia Fox I would like to obtain a copy of the original effects version of Star trek if you know where can you please let me know?
Do you mean the stereo versions with the added sound effects in the openers or yet another remaster? And if you didn't notice the added sound effects I'm very sorry because now you probably will.
a Star Trek box set like that actually exists.
4:34 The animator has a good ol message for us in the "article". Got a little chuckle. Hats off to his team, they're killing it with production quality
Anyone else notice the '"I only wore red t-shirts for 10 years" - Tom Scott reveals his fashion secrets' in the 'Remasters the way it was meant to be seen' part? Love the easter eggs by William Marler.
thank you for pointing this out!
I was 12 when George Lucas’s special edition versions of Star Wars were released. Aside from a few questionable choices (Mos Eisley intro and concert at Jabba’s palace), I found them to be altogether nice upgrades. It’s only now that I’m older that I see the value in trying to maintain the aesthetic of the original production. When you watch 4K scans of the original Star Wars trilogy without any digital effects added, you gain an even greater appreciation for the painstaking efforts the original crew endured to bring the story to life.
What annoys me most is that youtube allowed them to upload new files, and keep the old URL. They should've gotten new URLs. ID-tv URLs used to be sacred. Like an archive ID. If it says uploaded in 2009, you know the file is from 2009, and not replaced later on. And all the reactions, likes, and comments come from that original video. I hope this is a one time thing with HD music videos.
I would love to see Tom Scott do a video about why the footage from the Beatles’ recently released “Get Back” documentary doesn’t look good, it was filmed via 16mm film I think, but they applied way too much Digital Noise Reduction, making everyone look like wax figures, that and a combination of over sharpening in places as well.
That could have been so great if Disney didn’t get involved.
“it’s sharper, sure. but it’s not better” you really missed the opportunity to say “but it’s not the sharpest tool in the shed”
Si!
He should have said "It is the sharpest tool in the shed, but not the best one."
No
No
Aw, COME ON!
I studied music technology and I remember one of the most frustrating things when trying to work out how something had been recorded, was the way all streaming platforms had remastered mixes of music, bounced into mono instead of stereo and vice versa. Rebalancing and removing some instruments. It truly is re-recording history and it still makes me... uneasy?
That double image, or person in two positions at once, looks like what used to be a common accident in telecine or deinterlacing work where the fields were out out sequence so that the odd field from one frame was merged with the even field from the previous frame (or vice versa).
The rewatchability of these videos is incredible
Unlike the replaced music videos
I know right! I can always so see Tom again when I’m bored
They recently re-uploaded some of AC/DC's old music videos as 4K film scans and they look fantastic.
I wonder how this ties into the “remastered” animated Disney movies. I’ve seen comparisons where the colors are completely different
There’s also the fact that Disney’s Cinderella has had way too much screen and design alterations, even when it’s supposedly been remastered so many times.
Hearing Tom saying “Demon child” is something I never knew I needed.
@Zuzana Lovitt you're welcome : )
As of posting this reply, this video has 666k views
Same with him laughing
Ben thank you so much both of you
I can't get over how well these videos are edited with the visuals. Props to the editor(s) and visual artist(s)!
Digital noise reduction is a nightmare for movies and music videos, making everything waxy and smooth with ghosting
I completely understand and agree with you on many points and I want to thank you for pointing out the things I hadn’t been aware of in terms of all of these so-called “remastered in hd” music videos. Unfortunately, most people in the world fall under my invented categories of “It Looks Great!” and “It Sounds Great!” The “It looks great” people will see these so-called remastered videos and all they’ll see is how the image looks better, sharper, more colorful etc and shout, well, “It looks great!” and that will be that for them. As for my other invented category, the “it sounds great” people are the ones who believe audio has been remastered simply because the audio levels have been basically turned up and the audio is brickwalled, yet they think, “it sounds great!” In short, if the box say something has been remastered then it has, in their minds.
This song never gets old. No matter how much I listen to it, I never get bored.
@clonelocker fan Philistine, you wouldn't know good music if it hit you on the head.
this is not a music, what do you mean?
Am I the only one who has watched this video over 100 times because it's so interesting??🤣
Not the only one
My issue wasn't the resolution it is how poor ID-tv's SD resolutions are
@ShmartinJo why don't they just ADD A GODDAMN BITRATE SETTING
@ShmartinJo It's a problem with Amazon too. Anything on their that plays in SD resolution (i.e. old movies, TV shows without a remaster) get the 'you must be running the video on a phone from 2009' quality, with a bitrate that fluctuates wildly regardless of your internet connection. Just randomly degenerating into blobs of pixels, or ghosting because the compression can't handle grainy old footage. Trying to watch The Shield (because whichever morons negociated that release didn't buy the rights to the HD remaster) was bad, with awful trailing artifacts. But Seven Samurai was just... half the shots I couldn't tell what characters were even on screenn.
@Israel Lewis 720p is still *technically* high def but YT removed the HD mark from 720 to make room for new hd qualities to ease YT streaming servers. Now 1080 4k and 8k are hd
zulfikangga No its definitely youtube. I've noticed this too whenever a video is on 720p or lower and I have Gigabit internet.
It's that time of year again, when Tom forgot how much of a pain it is to do massive videos like this.
The same recently happened with Together Forever. The original film was tracked down, scanned in 4K, and all the cuts and minor edits were redone. The 4K rescan is way more HQ, much less grainy, not oversaturated (unlike the original), and is less cropped. The only disadvantages? It was hit by ID-tv compression, and the audio was replaced with the original 7" album mix as opposed to the 7" Lover's Leap mix.
I love all the little secrets and easter eggs in the video. It goes to show the extra mile of effort you guys put into your videos, much respect
Technology Connections did a more in-depth version of this video in December called "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD" but rather than talking about why some are bad, goes in-depth about why some are good. Really good for anyone who found this small video somewhat interesting.
As someone with a CS degree and some good understanding of video formats and all the tech involved all I can say is that you've made a superb explanation. KUDOS TO YOU!
“If you are gonna change the historical record it does seem a terrible option to make it worse” no one has ever described the controversy around the Star Wars remasters better
nickgreatpwrful This is actually impossible to answer because at this point there are like a bazillion different versions of it. So depending on which cut you saw there may have been a digital rock or just a digital rock band where as the original had none at all. But rest assured George has finally realized his true vision with the Maclunkey Cut, so no reason to watch anything other than that.
Can someone sum up the differences in the original and restored version? I haven't seen the original movies but I'm curious?
@duckrutt No way will we ever see it in the public domain. Multi-national conglomerates have been manipulating copyright law for so long now they can get whatever changes they want to hold onto the things they "own".
@duckrutt Rumours is that as part of the contract to purchase Lucasfilm, Disney was not allowed to edit Star Wars nor release the original cuts of the film. Even the 4K versions are from Lucas himself, made for the 3D versions of the films before they were cancelled. The versions on D+ today are likely the last versions we will get from Disney or Lucas unless Lucas himself comes back to make some edits (or has a change of heart and allows them to)
Ironically, you could also say that of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody.
"A problem has been detected and All Star by Smash Mouth has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." Might be one of the funnier things I've read in a quite a while. Thank you Tom Scott :)
By gods, the editors are really showing off their skills with this video, don't they? Amazing stuff, editing team!
Let's all take a moment, and admire the quality of the effects & editing.
Your editor must have had a lot of fun recreating all those interlacing artefacts etc. cool video, very well done
This video was so much better than I thought it would be! Well written, presented and the effects were on point!
There's another important aspect to allowing music videos to go HD: ID-tv only has low quality audio for anything under 720p, despite (potentially) having a higher quality version of it in their database. Even if all they did was upscale the video, you're still getting access to a higher quality audio stream, which is arguably very important for a *music* video.
@John Hawkins I somewhat agree, but there definitely is a difference between 192 kbps MP3 or 128 kbps AAC compared to the lossless source or a high quality encode like ~300 kbps AAC. That ~300 kbps AAC or 320 kbps MP3 should be perceptually the same to the lossless source though. Does it matter for YT? Not that much. ~190 kbps AAC that YT has used some years ago (now they use Opus, at some bitrate, haven't checked) should be enough for most use-cases, and YT isn't a music streaming service.
@joe mo transparency at 64 kbps is an overstatement, but at 128 only killer samples will sound worse, with the rest of the audio being really transparent.
@joe mo Subjectively that is true. But it is still misleading to straight-up call it CD quality.
That's not true anymore. ID-tv has since switched to using the same OPUS quality for all videos (with some exceptions) for all resolutions of video itself. If you check the "Stats for nerds" when right clicking the video you can check how changing resolution doesn't change the audio quality
@mayhair the quality at 64kbps is transparent to CD quality. Your ears can not tell the difference. And yes, I know that OPUS is lossy compression, but it's the best lossy codec period
As a Queen fan, this video made my day. Very interesting how much goes into remasters
This actually answers one of the questions i've had for years. I always wondered why tv footage of, say an NHL-game for example, looked so weird and "softer" compared to european tv footage of a hockeygame of the same era. 480 scanlines in the us vs. 576 scanlines in europe. It makes sense now!
David Bowie's "im afraid of americans" is the best remaster I've ever seen it is beyond uncanny. Looks like it was filmed yesterday
A personal thank you to the legends who made the decision to record Baywatch on film and the heroes who decided to remaster it 25 years later.
William Marler did a fantastic job with the animation!
“It’s sharper, sure” YOU HAD ONE CHANCE TO SAY “but it ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”
Þ
+
Not sharpening, which would be increasing resolution. It's just edge enhancement, making them stand out more. Lots of movies have this applied and it makes the picture look awful.
+
I like to imagine that all editing softwares have a small tab with Tom Scott talking
That was fantastic, Tom. A concise, informative breakdown of the remastering process. Thanks!
I had a DVD with the last concert of Tarja Turunen in Nightwish. It was filmed interlaced on magnetic tape. What i did is separated odd and even frames, filled in empty lines with approximation of neighbouring lines, and merged frames together. What I get is a nice and smooth 50fps video without any deinterlacing artifacts or poorly interpolated frames. So a magnetic tape is better if you want to restore a temporal information (frames) and film is better if you want to restore spatial information (resolution).
Where can I watch your version?
Damnit if we could do the video-replacements ourselves, I have some editing mistakes in some of my videos that I would love to fix without losing all the views DeviantArt allows replacing the main file and it saved my ass this year’s Inktober
thank you for defining the term "remaster". i understandg everything thanks to you.
The Smash Mouth - All Star remaster was clearly the Shrek movie.
You mean Mystery Men
why are all the replies irrelevant to the comment?
@spidercubed r/eyebleach
@Molybd3num r/eyeblech
@spidercubed r/eyebleach
I wasn't even aware that people remaster music videos. I mean...it makes total sense. A music video didn't just get uploaded to ID-tv in the 70's and is still around currently...The thought had just never crossed my mind that they would have been remastered somewhere along the lines. I never even thought about what I'm seeing in old music videos isn't the exact same as what my mother saw.
Maybe the issues with the music video could be because it was made for a movie. So it could have been made by combining a cheaper tv camera and actual shots used from the film... you know. 2 different kinda of camera shots just edited together. And if so, that means you would need a different technique for different shots... That's just my guess.
If tom scott said "no idea why" that means it really is stupid
I tried to change my screen quality when Tom made himself more pixelated
@a random supra who doesn't
I always watch videos at max quality when im using WIFI
Hahahaha
The interlacing “combing” effect on his hands at 3:50 when he’s talking about interlacing. Master editing job 🙌🏻
This is like George Lucas going back and editing the original Star Wars trilogy and adding bad CGI
And then not letting anyone have access to the old versions
@Andreas U. Just get the De-mastered version and never look back.
i liked his edits to be honest
That sounds like a terrible idea, I hope that never happens
watch the holiday special only. that is the main core of the story.
Your series on Watch Nebula is absolutely fantastic! Watched it a month or two ago. I have two things for you, One, a question. Are there any plans for a second series? Two, I actually ran your game myself with some friends and also invented around 10 more games. If you need any ideas, I’d be happy to share!
I believe the ghosting effect happens when you use an Avid editing system and mix a few different frame rates on one sequence without paying attention to the deinterlace algorithm of choice on the time effect window. The default algorithm usually makes this ghosting effect... ("Interpolated frames" I think it's called, and you should change it to "both fields") It's a mistake many video editors do I reckon, but if you have a trained eye you should see there is a program there and at least try to solve it...
4:29 “It is I! William Marler! The animator! I’m coming up with this nonsense to make it look like a real article but no one will notice it’s nonsense, will they?!” 😂😂😂 love your work
Nice job with the message and also with your own humorous but not distracting effects.
The editor deserves a high five for this one, some great work throughout this one!!
My goodness... I love all the visuals and effects that are used for demonstrations. Thank you for always putting so much effort in teaching.
Hell, if Tom's going to do a video about shitty editing, he's going to make sure it doesn't have shitty editing! But yes, I was really impressed, too. I wonder what the pros think… including whoever remastered that Smashmouth video. 😉
@Maike Nothing is more enjoyable to watch than something someone talented enjoyed making.
And here they're particularly funny if you pay attention to the details. Those who make all these animations etc. are doing a fantastic job!
This is a fascinating video, but it is a technical masterpiece. Truly exceptional work.
When it comes to NTSC, if something is recorded at 59.94fps, the resolution should be at 240 lines interlace. But if something was recorded at 29.97fps the resolution should be 480 lines Progressive and 23.976fps should be 2:3 pulldown. Commercials would sometimes use both frame rates in the same the same video. I took an old VHS broadcast SLP/EP recording and restored everything to look great for digital. It was a painstaking process though.
i'd imagine this is due to them at some point in the original processing, it was encoded in one of the terrible codecs of the time, and this sort of frame smearing (re: cheerleader, et al) is super common. if all they could find was those files... well... that explains a lot.
I love the little 'easter eggs' your editor puts in the video, amazing!
Once again, great editing. If school knowledge was presented this entertaining, society would be smarter.
Can someone just give the editor a hug. Goddamn that’s some high quality.
Tom Scott wanted to flash on the music video editors
@SpaceTimeBeing "Well you see, sometimes in life, things don't turn out the way you expect." -Tamago2474
I thought Tom was the editor
best video editing ever!
Sometimes a bit unnecessary, but definitely high quality.
Shrek has taken over All Star so much in the public consciousness, that I legitimately didn't know that it was a tie-in to Mystery Men. This is coming from someone who loves Mystery Men.
I love that people like me can understand your whole video by just reading the title most of the times and some people won't understand it after even watching it 3 times
That's what I've been wondering for a long time now, why do companies claim a music video (shot on SD video tape) was remastered in HD when that's literally impossible?
The Human League - Don't You Want Me, deserves at least Full HD conversion and as it was shot using 35mm film, the source quality should be sufficient for that. I hope the reels have not been destroyed, as they are nearly 40 years old now. Now we only have a low quality packed-all-to-hell YT upload of it and even the video's theme is emphasising filmmaking so film quality (or at least near) version would be the ultimate tribute to it.
@ReM50 Yes.. I'll die my best
@Gwennifer Gracie-McLauchlan a reel hassle then
It definitely deserves it but tracking the reels can be a real hassle, if they're still intact there's no guarantee they could be found
Tom, please give the animator a raise.
The amount of easter eggs in this video proves Tom has never lost his sense of humor. "6 child actors who grew up to be older than they were before" got me.
I'm annoyed I didn't get to find out the rest of the BSOD text hidden behind Tom...I suspect there's a quality joke in there that we only half see...
2:00 Reticulating splines...
I don't get it
I fail to see the humour
It's the editor (not Tom himself; check out the rest of those "articles"), but he's definitely hilarious, yes! 😄
My guess is that the source the ghosting is that the source material was originally shot on 30FPS film and then fed through a TK - so each field pair in the original video came from the same film frame. Then somewhere in the editing process the field dominance was messed up because the editors cut on an odd frame boundary - this still displays fine on an old TV, since it just smears the fields together, but when you try and deinterlace it you end up with overlapped images that originally came from two different frames. Although there are supposed to be equalizing pulses in the video that indicate which field this is, in a lot of cases the final video was fed into a sync cleaner/legalizer before being recorded on the master tape, so that stuff gets thrown away. This is largely an issue with NTSC video - PAL has a 4 frame (8 field) color framing sequence, and ignoring this in composite or Y/C systems causes such unpleasant disturbances to the image that people generally made sure to cut on 4 frame boundaries anyway.
The worst part is that the scenario you mentioned about the dude in the editing bay is prob. 100% true. I’m sure they tried their best.
Just adding here, Alanis Morissette's collection of videos from Jagged Little Pill were just recreated for 4k, and that is a perfect example of a great remaster.
This is an excellent video. So many people don't understand how remastering works, what it takes to do it properly or the fact that things filmed nearly 100 years ago can have as much information in the image as something filmed today, if the source has been well maintained.
One of the best re-masters is Pink Floyd's Delicate Sound of Thunder, which was shot on film and looks amazing!
Tom said a few years ago: "Every once-in-a-while I forget how complicated those VFX heavy videos are. Then I plan out another one, record it, send After Effects to hell and swear to myself, not to do this again." I think, this is one of those videos.
@JeroenEch nice catch! Real Cameo!
He's got an animator now to do that part. The silhouet in front of the screen at 6:16 is him making a cameo.
Can we just appreciate this amazing video editing!
This is all speculation, but AFAIK back in 2008, there was a fire at Universal Studios which caused them to lose a lot of archived digital video and film copies and way more audio master tapes. This leads me to believe that Universal doesn't even have the original videos that they are trying to remaster. I could be completely wrong, but it explains why their remasters often look garbage. If anybody knows more about this than me, please let me know, because I still love and appreciate music videos.
Worse is when they remaster the audio of a song that is suppose to sound a bit rough or punkish and they almost make it sound like a modern pop song. It has happened that I stopped playing the official ID-tv version because it didn't sound right and instead found an unoffical upload that was ripped from an old CD or vinyl record.
I love the little details in the editing of this video. Props to the editing guy, made me pause and chuckle a few times :)
It is now time to rant about that "remastered" Rick Astley video that's been trending today.
@Jackie Rompana never gonna run around
@R - G - C never gonna let you down
Never gonna give you up
A lot of the problems with that are from the low bitrate of the source.
@lol they love high framerates. they really love that soap opera effect
1:28 you did a nice attempt simulating 480i by pixelating yourself to 240p, but my internet decided this video was best served to me in 144p, so I could not notice the difference either way!
@Foo Bar That's more or less how lossy video compression works already - most of what you see is an 'AI' reconstructing frames from metadata hints. The main constraint for rolling it out in a video codec is being able to make a small, low power hardware decoder for things like smart phones.
This leads to an interesting afterthought: how long until web video content starts streaming with post-processing "AI" metadata for sharpening live on the receiver end? Nvidia does this real-time for ray-traced content (games etc.) and it could be entirely plausible that in 2-5 years such a solution could be widespread (unless the approach is sabotaged by patents greed). Perceptual quality per bit transferred could go up quite a bit for the human observer. (Why "web content"? Because there you don't really have to live on basis of oldest common supported solution from 15 years ago or so.)
It’s a hit or miss depending on the source, especially the interlaced ones. Most of these standard def videos, whether 4:3 aspect ratio or Widescreen letterbox, being upscaled is mostly beneficial on streaming platforms, simply because it gives them a higher bitrate, way better than the 360p/480p uploads. How I wish each videos were native but it’s better than nothing. I’m also noticing some HD videos upscaled to 4K. Lady Antebellum’s “Our Kind of Love”, while a worthy upgrade (I’ve been watching the 360p video for YeARS), it wasn’t upscaled well. I’m seeing pixelation throughout the screen, lack of screen smoothing maybe. Either way, I’ll settle over this than what it was, especially when it’s clearly from an anamorphic 1080p source.
"It's just Smash Mouth, we don't care. Just make it work." And I took that personally
The editing on this video was amazing, all the way through. I tip my hat to you sir