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Film: the reason some of the past was in HD

Technology Connections

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♫ last Christmas, I shot it on film ♫
♫ but the very next year, I switched it to tape ♫
♫ this year, to save me from tears ♫
♫ I’ll just go and shoot in 4K ♫

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20 Comments

@TechnologyConnections Creator 6 years ago (edited) Pinned

OK, here comes a pinned comment about the whole Star Trek thing (and I've edited this to give a little more clarity);
I'm getting a lot of mixed information from commenters about what specifically is preventing Voyager (and Deep Space Nine) from getting an HD Re-release. Some people are saying it's just a money thing, and that Paramount couldn't recoup their investment (as learned from their experience doing the TNG re-release). TNG was, after all, edited on tape so what is the substantial difference?
Yes. TNG was originally edited on tape, not film. I implied in the video that there was a "final cut" on film but this isn't the case. From my research and understanding, as helped along by others, the key difference between TNG and Voyager when it comes to making an HD re-release feasible is that while some of the VFX work on TNG was rendered to tape, this was largely things like phaser effects, planetary orbital scenes, and other minutia. Most shots of the Enterprise were done with models / practical effects, and as such they existed on film from the get go, meaning they existed with the full detail film can capture. So yes, the version we saw upon its initial release came from a tape, but unlike Voyager (and DS9), a much greater percentage of the original effects footage existed on film.
This meant that to re-release the series in HD, scanning the film negatives took care of a large portion of business. It largely needed to simply be re-edited to match the original cuts and timing. The most complicated part of the process was re-compositing some of the film-based effects. But since they existed on film, it was mainly a matter of re-alignment. Relatively few VFX elements were done exclusively on tape, and so it wasn't a monumental undertaking to recreate them for the HD release.
In contrast, for Voyager and (to a lesser extent) DS9, CGI was used heavily. And since that was rendered to tape and composited with the live-action scanned from film, the negatives (assuming they still exist) are just the live scenes and nothing more. If a re-release were to be done in HD, a much greater amount of work would need to be done. DS9 doesn't have it quite as bad as Voyager, but it would still be more complex than TNG. Some of the original computer models have been found which would help with recreating the VFX scenes, but in many cases the production houses that did this work went out of business. Which leaves many, many scenes where the entire thing needs to be re-done from scratch. And given how expensive this would be, it's likely never to happen. So no, it's not impossible that we'd see DS9 and Voyager get re-released in HD, but very unlikely. The extra complexities required would add tremendous cost to an already expensive endeavor.

@VaterOrlaag 6 years ago

Monty Python even made a joke out of it:
"Alright, stop that sketch. It got too silly."
"You can't stop it - it's on film!"
"That doesn't make any difference to the viewer at home, does it?"

@dash4800 1 year ago

I always like to remind people that whenever they are watching a detailed explanation about how photography works and thinking how complicated it seems, that a person in the 1820's figured this out.

@MattMcIrvin 6 years ago (edited)

Monty Python not only used both as you mention, they did jokes about it. "This building is entirely surrounded by film!"

@Owen_loves_Butters 1 year ago

19:45 The camera's comedic timing is one of those things that happens occasionally that you could never convincingly argue wasn't staged.

@papaya1908 6 years ago

‪”Photography seems like a very trivial thing today but it wasn’t so easy for the vast majority of its history. The goal of this video isn’t to go through the entire history of photography”
That’s not very Technology Connections of you
“so we’re gonna fast forward to about 1900‬”
Ah, there it is.

@zupperm 6 years ago

Regarging early tv: I think the most amazing thing was that they would shoot live TV-shows live for the east coast, radio the live signal to the west coast on a non-standard frequency, film the broadcast, develop the film and then broadcast a projection of the film live to the west coast because they had no way of time shifting otherwise. TV Studios would use more film than actual hollywood at the time.

@ChaseBrown231 5 years ago

"Or IMAX and you should just give up trying" LMAOO I used to be a projectionist for them. Its HUGE.

@Kirmo13 1 year ago

Discovering the existance of an entire playlist about analogue TV at 1AM is not the great news it seems. This is going to be a long night

@SoundFieldPBS 6 years ago

Dynamic range is the easiest way to tell between a film source and a tape source.

@meechmushrooms 6 years ago

Today I learned the "soap opera" effect is a real thing. Growing up, I always noticed this... odd fluidity with soap operas. They all flowed so smoothly, and everyone I tried explaining it to didn't understand. I thought I was crazy until this video.

@blaster-zy7xx 6 years ago

As a kid I tried to identify what made soap operas look so weird to me. I never could put my finger on it. I asked other people and they didn't know what I was talking about. I thought it was the lighting. Now I find out it was the frame rate I was reacting to. Thank you for solving a mystery of my childhood.

@FORTRAN4ever 2 years ago

The film industry would store films in vaults and forgot about them. There was no effort to maintain the films to original condition. Some very old films could not be recovered. In fact, a National Archive building at a the Suitland Federal Center located in Suitland, MD, caught fire due to poor ventilation and the historic films went up in flames. How did I know about this fire happen? I was working at the U.S. Census Bureau located at the complex and saw it happen looking out the window with a bunch of other statisticians of a nearby building in real time. That is, until our branch chief ordered us to get back to work.

Paramount Studios let their original "Godfather" print go to near ruin. It took a lot of restoration work, which included editing including parts of other prints in circulation, in order to release an acceptable copy of one of great film. It would appear as though studios had no vision of the future value of their films. Likewise, using less expensive film technologies instead of Technicolor (in which used dyes to capture images) have resulted in the washing out of colors over time.

@machinerin151 6 years ago

"And we were all having fun watching these amazing movies at the cinema, enjoying our popcorn, socializing with the neighbours"
This line hits different in 2020

@fakshen1973 5 years ago

Film shoots were incredibly expensive. So when shooting professionally, there was a budget for your stock and how many feet of film was going to be developed. This required more forethought, planning, and actors who could nail their lines in a minimum number of takes. If you were shooting excessive numbers of takes or angles, you probably would go over budget. Today, storage is dirt cheap and getting a viewable image is instant... rather than putting all your hopes and prayers that what you shot was on a good batch of film and nobody screwed up the process along the way.

The same holds true, to some degree, with music. It was expensive to record music. It was expensive to shoot film. But here we are... people making videos of what they ate for lunch.

@GibusWearingMann 6 years ago

someone should start a streaming service with a similar premise to what GOG did. "We'll stream your old movies and TV that you've forgotten about and aren't selling, a cut of the revenue going to you, and if you let us borrow your film masters we'll cast it to 4K at no cost to you!"

@ollie_04 4 years ago (edited)

One of my favourite examples of film vs tape was Doctor Who.

Most if not all serials of classic Doctor Who as mentioned were shot on tape in the studio and film on location, like most shows in the 70s.

But with the 3rd Doctor's first serial "Spearhead From Space" because of a strike at the BBC, the entire serial was shot on location with 16mm film and because of that, it was the first classic serial released on Blu-Ray.

@rewboss 6 years ago

Since you mentioned Monty Python, they once did a sketch where the characters suddenly realized the building was "surrounded by film". They kept trying to escape, but every time it cut to an exterior shot, they were on film and retreated back inside in panic.

@TheHouseOfWaffles 6 years ago

I remember watching Doctor Who as a kid and wondering why the interior scenes where always so clear while the outdoor scenes were always a bit grainy.

@6884 6 years ago

Here I am, at 1AM watching a video on stuff that I mostly already know, AND YET how could I resist? This guy could read the Cleveland phonebook and he would have my undivided attention.