Thoughts on this weird lens flare?

Found in an episode of season 4 of Sabrina, I’ve never seen one form rectangular color blocks before. It looks like that funky piano from CE3K.

It looks a bit like some kind of anamorphic lens flare, but I’m not 100% sure.

I think there is some flat glass surface in front of the lens, and a square hole is projecting on it.

Why would that be a lens flare instead of noise in the video signal?

Is it possible that it was inserted deliberately for artistic effect? Maybe someone on the show was a fan of J. J. Abrams.

That was my first thought, though a true homage would require about 5x as much flare. “Now, you know it’s up to you whether or not you want to just do the bare minimum.”

That was my immediate response, too. I’m sure I’ve seen that before when filming through a rectangular piece of glass.

Because it isn’t? It looks nothing like MPEG artifacts.

It may not look like pixelization artifacts, but it’s awfully suspicious that these features are;

1.) rectangular
2.) parallel to the bottom of the screen.

That pretty much screams out that these are unlikely to be optical effects. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. If it was optical, the symmetry requires that whatever was making them would line up with the axes of the video elements in the camera. There are scenarios where this could happen, but I’d suspect the video electronics before the lenses.

I think they are artifacts from when it was shot, played back, or recorded from that playback. They follow the raster lines and look just like common noise.

They do not–noise would not remain in place as the scene moves. Those are not not not MPEG encoding or decoding artifacts.

Sorry, but - no way.
Look at the objects - they both exhibit typical prismatic lens flare due to coated glass surfaces.
Now, maybe it is some combination of lens flare and digital artifacts, but it’s not just digital noise.

The encoding has nothing to do with it.

Then I have no idea what it is that you think encoding means. This:

“I think they are artifacts from when it was shot, played back, or recorded from that playback.”

Is explicitly describing encoding/decoding

No it is not. Encoding and decoding are about the way the data is stored and transmitted, not how the cameras and displays actually work.

Yes, it is. That is why what you are saying is profoundly ignorant.

I think that what @TriPolar is saying is that this video would have been originally recorded in some low-overhead lossless format, before being converted into an efficient format like MPEG, and that he thinks the artifacts came from the earlier stages in that process. Obviously there has to be some sort of encoding in any video, but the artifacts need not come from the encoding.

Here’s one example of anamorphic lens flare:

Like I said, I’m not sure if that is it or not, but some examples of it do look similar to the OP.

Yes, that is what he is saying. But he is wrong. Macroblock artifacts do not look or behave like that. He is “not even wrong” on this.

It doesn’t need any intermediate recording format, it’s coming out of the camera sensors bit by bit, and eventually displayed that way on a digital television. That bit stream in the camera may be immediately exported in MPEG or any other format. Noise affects both the recording and display hardware in lines like that.