What resolution is TV filmstock?

Cafe Society
21

Right now, the majority of 16:9 displays showing 4:3 material are showing it distorted in some way because of a misguided desire to “fill the screen”. Given a choice between 4’ tall cowboys in 5 gallon hats, or taking material from the rest of the film and producing seamlessly matching material to fill in and maintain at the original framing in the middle of the frame, I know which I’d pick.

Image-Based Rendering has been around since the late 90s - an early example was the Ikea scene in “Fight Club”. It’s become more useful recently with more advanced techniques in 3D digitizing. It’s not as if we’re talking about colorizing “Citizen Kane” - this is more like adding the rest of the apartment to “Three’s Company”. It will involve a small amount of sliding the 4:3 image side to side inside the 16:9 frame if an an actor enters from one side.

I’m talking about this as if it’s already being done, but I may have just thought this application up. Anyone have a few million bucks and want to go into business?

22

Well, it’s rare that anything of significance in any given shot will be at both the top and the bottom of the screen at the same time, so framing for tops of heads is more important than for their knees. And they do have digital ways to deal with unique framing situations too.

Whereas with Pan and Scan there are very often significant things at the left and right of the screen at the same time, one or both of which will then get cut off in 4x3.

It’s still not ideal to reframe at all, but it’s better to adapt from 4x3 to 16x9, than vice versa.

23

Although the previous posts are mostly very good, here are a couple of additional points. First is that over the past 50+ years, TV shows have been shot on dozens, if not hundreds, of different film stocks with widely varying characteristics. So obviously there is no one answer to the OP.

Even in the 1950s and '60s, 35mm motion picture stocks had resolving power well beyond HD quality. After all, in theaters those images were projected to 60 or 70 feet wide, and appeared sharp and clear. Furthermore, Kodak and other film manufacturers have not stood still in the last three decades. Believe it or not, in the last decade or so, film image technology has advanced more rapidly than digital imaging technology in terms of resolution and low-light sensitivity.

So theoretically, any TV show shot on film should be capable of a very high quality HD release.

However, there is always a difference between theory and reality. The primary issue, especially for older shows, is the availability of the original film elements and their condition. I would guess that for many, if not most, shows from the 1970s and earlier, it would be rare to find well preserved film elements for the majority of the series’ episodes. After the shows were transferred to video for broadcast, production companies had little reason to save the film, since there was no inkling then that home video – to say nothing of the Internets – would become a new revenue source. So I imagine the vast majority of that material is long gone.

In many cases, the original video masters are also probably lost or in bad shape. I would guess that the DVDs of most 1960s and '70s shows available now were mastered from tapes that are several generations down from the edited film master.

Since the advent of VHS home video, DVDs, and the Web, producers have recognized the huge sums of money available from ancillary sources and have therefore been more protective of their assets. So it’s generally easier to make high quality transfers of those shows, because more of the original elements have been saved.

Finally, it is now possible with digital technology to significantly enhance images, removing noise and increasing resolution. Imax Corporation is able to take 35mm Hollywood films and digitally blow them up, virtually seamlessly, for 60x80-foot IMAX screens. This level of enhancement is far beyond what would be needed for HD. Of course, it’s very expensive to go to that extreme, but a similar process for HD resolution would be cheaper. It’s just a question of whether DVD distributors will find it necessary and worth the expense.

24

But the collective SDMB has enlightened me nonetheless. :slight_smile:

25

One issue may be the special effects. I read that this is a problem with “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. The show was shot on Super-16, but the effects were done at a lower resolution.

26

This is a very good point. To the extent that special effects were done (rare in 1960s and '70s shows, but increasingly common as computer effects became better and cheaper in in the '80s and '90s), it may be more complicated and expensive to remaster them for HD release. Nor, as many might expect, is it simply a matter of re-rendering them at higher resolutions. FX software packages advanced rapidly and were often not backward compatible, so even if digital elements exist (a questionable assumption) it may not be simple or even possible to obtain the software version with which they were created. And even if you can, it probably won’t be capable of creating imagery that meets today’s standards of quality.

Then there’s the question of purism: should you do Lucas-like retconning of the effects, or just leave them in their original old-school state. In this case, economy supports the purists’ view.

I forgot to mention an anecdote from my own past that relates to this subject. I worked for many years at the National Air and Space Museum, and for our regular science-fiction film festival we ran several episodes of Star Trek (the original series) in 35mm. We obtained the prints straight from the studio. This is how I know that not even the studios know where all the prints and original elements are for all of their shows. In several cases, a specific episode we wanted wasn’t available in a 35mm print.

Keep in mind that since these shows had never been run theatrically, this wasn’t simply a matter of losing track of, or discarding, unnecessary release prints. AFAIK, all of ST:TOS had originally been printed to 35mm for video transfer, and so missing prints very likely meant that the best possible source material for remastering (i.e. an edited master positive) was lost, for some episodes, at least.

Perhaps not permanently. The fact that our contact couldn’t track them down may only mean they had been misplaced, or were on loan elsewhere. But it’s an indication that the studio didn’t have a firm grip on what some would see as priceless assets.

Another interesting piece of this story: when we ran the 35mm prints on the large screen of the IMAX theater (they didn’t fill the screen, of course, but they were pretty big) it became hilariously obvious that stunt doubles had taken the place of Shatner and the other stars in the fist fight sequences. The 35mm frame captured plenty of detail that the producers knew would be lost in the transition to video.