Saw some footage on the news from 2007 and it looked…old. Like looking back on film from the seventies in the nineties. Is that reflective of the actual picture quality at the time or does the film degrade? I remember the picture quality being good in 2007.
One of the biggest problems with storing file footage is the size of the files. Many television stations during that era would save video on videotape (if still in SD) or often on DVD if shooting HD. Regardless if file video is often compressed (and thus quality suffers) in order to save space and cost os storage.
Today, with recording media costing far less, file footage can often be stored in it’s original format and thus look better. The period of the early / mid 2000’s through about 5 years ago were transitional between SD and HD, and technology was changing fast. Things have settled down a bit now.
things recorded on tape will look different. Perhaps that was how it was archived. Because tape is analog, it blurs more horizontally. Also, there may be a difference in contrast and colour saturation.
Most TV stations would have been using digibeta since the mid 90’s. It’s tape, but it’s digital.
Most local news in 2007 was shot on standard def digital tape, and you may have viewed it on a standard def TV. Even if viewed on a high-def TV in 2007 it was probably surrounded by a higher % of standard def content, thus by comparison it looked OK.
Today we have become accustomed to almost totally high-def content, and even field news production is done by more capable cameras. E.g, here is a three-camera interview shot by ABC in front of the White House using DSLR cameras. They don’t look very impressive but produce a much better image than previous small-sensor ENG (Electronic News Gathering) video cameras: ABC News Using DSLRs - joema
By the current quality standards we are now conditioned to, standard-def content from an ENG camera in 2007 may not look so good. In 2007 that camera itself could have been several years old and could have even been something like a Panasonic AG-DVX100, recording DV-quality video to 8mm tape.
My guess the footage you saw is not degraded like old film but looks worse since we are now conditioned to a higher video quality.
However it is also possible the archival storage and retrieval system somehow degraded the image quality. E.g, it was probably shot at NTSC interlaced standard def, and may have been viewed on an interlaced display in 2007. Today it has probably been deinterlaced and if that process was not done properly (there are many different algorithms) the image can be degraded.
I don’t know… old video footage ALWAYS looked worse when replayed a few years later, even back in the all-SD days. There was something about it- maybe it was some sort of resolution loss, or color oddity, or something else that was there, or not there when it was originally broadcast.
In 2007 everyone was running around wearing Amy Winehouse–Style Eyeliner (I know I was).
Surely that contributes to the odd look seen in news footage from that era.
In 2007 we were using Panasonic DVCPro, a digital on tape system that wasn’t quite HD but it was 16:9 and it looked pretty good. A typical tape held 33 minutes of video.
Now I am using a Sony PMW 320 XDCAM that records on 32GB SD cards in HD, 107 minutes per card. All video is stored on servers at corporate, no loss.
The industry has changed a lot and is changing even faster.
What required microwave and satellite trucks 5 years ago are now done with bonded cellular backpacks.
It will be really interesting where it ends up, assuming there are any viewers left.
There are many permutations based on date and technology of acquisition, playback and distribution chain to viewer, and type of viewing device.
Of course film-based content will degrade with time. Analog video tape can also degrade, as some who have played on old VHS tape find out. Digital video tape should generally not degrade over time, just as a DVD would not look worse after aging 10 years.
However, transmission and playback factors can expose deficiencies in the original content which went unnoticed in 2007. E.g, back then the content was usually viewed on a smaller screen. Today people have larger screens. You will naturally see more deficiencies in standard-def material.
It is likely (though not certain) that field news content from 2007 was shot in standard def, even if the local station had HD capability. Some local stations in fairly large markets did not upgrade to HD until fairly late – WRKN in Nashville did not go high-def until 2011. So it’s possible that content from 2007 was viewed on a standard def device in 2007.
If it was viewed via over-the-air broadcast, that could have been analog. US TV stations did not transition to digital over-the-air transmission until around 2009, although digital HD was possible using satellite and cable before then.
Analog transmission and a smaller screen hides the limitations of the source material. This is the same principle where TV anchors need better makeup on high-def than standard def. The older standard-def transmission & playback hid a lot of imperfections.
[quote=“joema, post:5, topic:756126”]
Most local news in 2007 was shot on standard def digital tape, and you may have viewed it on a standard def TV. Even if viewed on a high-def TV in 2007 it was probably surrounded by a higher % of standard def content, thus by comparison it looked OK.
Today we have become accustomed to almost totally high-def content, and even field news production is done by more capable cameras. E.g, here is a three-camera interview shot by ABC in front of the White House using DSLR cameras. They don’t look very impressive but produce a much better image than previous small-sensor ENG (Electronic News Gathering) video cameras: ABC News Using DSLRs - joema
By the current quality standards we are now conditioned to, standard-def content from an ENG camera in 2007 may not look so good. In 2007 that camera itself could have been several years old and could have even been something like a Panasonic AG-DVX100, recording DV-quality video to 8mm tape.
My guess the footage you saw is not degraded like old film but looks worse since we are now conditioned to a higher video quality.
However it is also possible the archival storage and retrieval system somehow degraded the image quality. E.g, it was probably shot at NTSC interlaced standard def, and may have been viewed on an interlaced display in 2007. Today it has probably been deinterlaced and if that process was not done properly (there are many different algorithms) the image can be degraded.[/QUOTE
That’s what I was wondering: If maybe I had become accustomed to the newer definition over time. Thanks for the reply.
News from 2006 was probably 480 vertical pixels, versus the standard 1080 vertical pixel HD broadcasts today. It took a while for most stations to transition to HD cameras and broadcasts. The mandatory switchover to digital was in June 2009, but even then I don’t believe all stations were HD.