I have noticed that when a TV show uses news footage from the 1980s or even the early 1990s it appears to have been shot on film, even though I know videotape was probably originally used. Why does the footage appear as film? Are video recordings of news events transferred to film for archival purposes (perhaps for long-term durability), or does video degrade over time in such a way as to appear that it came from a film source?
A couple of things could be happening here.
First, virtually no video footage has been transferred to film. Although film is far more durable than any video or digital medium, video-to-film transfer is expensive and extremely rare. So what you’re seeing is almost certainly not that.
It could be:
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footage shot with older equipment that was of noticeably lower quality than current standards. Being fuzzier, it is perceived as “film-like.” Footage from before the early 1980s might fall in this category.
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(as you suggested) a recording of high quality that has deterioriated over time. However, the tape would probably have to be at least 15 or 20 years old.
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material that is is several generations down (i.e., a copy of a copy of a copy). In the analog world, each successive copy is slightly worse than its predecessor. Or,
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the program’s producers have intentionally processed the material (e.g. superimposing film scratches) to signify that it is old footage.
- Make sure you’re not watching archival FOOTBALL footage, which is on film.
The video in question was from 1986, a shot of a plane that had been hijacked and bombed in Libya. It was on “The FBI Files” on the Discovery Channel. I know that video was used then and long before that. I have seen news excerpts of Nixon that were clearly recorded on video, not on a film source. I’ve also seen replays of the 1986 Space Shuttle explosion that still look the way I remember them when I first saw the news broadcasts.
If it was a news report from Libya, it may have been originated on film. In the US, TV networks and local stations had pretty much completely switched over from film to video for newsgathering by the early 1980s. But the rest of the world took longer. So the footage you saw may have been shot on film by a Libyan news crew.
Also, I believe that in that era, film may have been used by US crews in remote or hostile locations, because film cameras were smaller and more reliable in the field than the relatively new portable video gear. Film also overcame the standard problems: back then, if you used your own gear to shoot NTSC video in the wilds of Remotistan, you might not be very close to a production facility that could edit it or transmit it to a satellite for you. Renting non-NTSC equipment locally was more expensive and, worse, was a crapshoot as far as quality was concerned. But film was (and still is) standardized worldwide.