This video is sponsored by
CuriosityStream and my own Nebula original series. More on that later. In 2019, a load of music videos
that had been uploaded to YouTube in the early days of the platform
were remastered. YouTube let the music labels keep
the same video IDs, along with all the views and comments, so suddenly,
all those old videos were in HD! And they look... well, it depends on the video. Smash Mouth's <i>All Star</i> looks awful. Now, there are some brilliant
remasters out there. Wham!'s <i>Last Christmas</i> is now in 4K,
and it looks spectacular. And that's because it was shot on film,
full cinema quality, the sort of thing you can literally project
on the side of a building and it will look great. Same with Freddie Mercury's <i>Living On My Own</i>,
the remaster looks stunning. In fact, I think that looks better, because they haven't converted it
to widescreen: they've kept it at the "aspect ratio"
of old '80s television. Because music videos
weren't meant for the cinema. They were meant for television.
It's in the name: music video. So one of the first steps in editing will have been putting the film
through a telecine, which is a very fancy way of
pointing a TV camera at a film projector and saving the results to videotape. It is way more precise than your average
movie-theatre pirate with a camcorder, but the result is that all that film quality
gets crushed down onto a standard definition TV picture
stored on magnetic tape. 480 horizontal lines in the US,
576 in Europe. That's it. Any more quality than that is gone. Editing on videotape is
much cheaper and easier, though, and if you're putting the final version
out on television, well... why would you bother with
editing actual physical film, which is what you had to do
back then? A few videos might have gone to that expense,
if it was part of a big concert film, say. So the <i>Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus </i>
was played at the New York Film Festival, and you can see the cinema camera
with its big, bulky rolls of film in the background of
some of the shots. But the final version of
most music videos were, well, videos. So for the remaster of <i>Last Christmas,</i> a team of engineers had to track down
the original reels of film, and rescan them using
modern technology at 4K, and then, they painstakingly took
those 4K files and recreated every edit
in the original video, frame for frame,
cut for cut. Actually, they were only able to find
seven out of the eight original reels of film, so there are a few shots in there where the only source material was
the TV-quality music video. And you can tell, 'cause this is what an old-school, standard-definition,
analogue signal looks like when you use world-class technicians
to upscale it to 4K. It's not too bad? I guess? <i>Living On My Own</i>
also has a couple of shots where the old '80s digital effects
have to be recreated with modern tech, and... they're not a perfect match. And there are also a couple of shots
that have been replaced, or the timing slightly changed,
no idea why. But again, it's not a bad job. Now, there is a cheaper
remastering option that doesn't involve recreating
the whole edit from scratch: you can take the final TV edit from the best, cleanest, professional-grade
videotape you can find, and upscale that to HD. A lot of remastered videos
have done this. It won't be as sharp as
the original film, but it will look better than
people are used to. Which is what they've done with
the remastered version of <i>Bohemian Rhapsody.</i> And look, I can see why record companies would want
an HD version of <i>Bohemian Rhapsody.</i> It's iconic.
It has over a billion views on YouTube. But this was not shot on film. It was recorded on TV cameras,
edited on videotape— you can tell by
the look of the lighting— and by the fact that these effects required
live feedback to the camera. you could only get this by pointing
a television camera directly at a monitor, which means there was never
any high-quality film version, this was only ever in standard definition. And remember, old-school analogue television
in Europe runs at 50 frames a second. 60 in the US,
but 50 in Europe. Half of the horizontal lines get skipped
each time, which is called interlacing. And it means you get less flickering
on old equipment. So if you want the authentic, original experience,
as seen back in the '70s, then <i>Bohemian Rhapsody</i> should be played
at standard definition, at 50 interlaced frames a second. That's what was recorded. Instead, what you see on YouTube is
a computer's best effort to make a high-definition, 25 frame a second,
film-like picture from that limited data, filling in the gaps,
turning jagged edges into smooth lines. That's called 'deinterlacing'
and it's not done badly here. 'Remastering' doesn't mean 'restoration'.
It means 'recreation'. You'll see marketing blurbs saying
remasters are "the way it was meant to be seen". Which is a great tagline, but... no, it wasn't. Remastering is, to an extent,
changing the historical record. There are fan remasters of
Bohemian Rhapsody out there, upscaled from VHS, 50 frames a second,
that are much more true to the original. But at least Bohemian Rhapsody got
a decent HD remaster. It's not like what they've done
to Smash Mouth. Look at his face in this scene. That's not a clear high-definition picture,
that's some kind of demon child! It's scaled up wrongly,
it's over-sharpened. Look at the diagonal lines here,
they're jagged and stepped. I tracked down a standard-definition version
from years ago that someone had reuploaded, and... yeah, I can see
why a computer would do that. And, oh yeah, it's badly deinterlaced
in some parts too, because here, you can see the cheerleader is
in two places at once in the same frame. It's not bleed-over
from the next frame either. She's in two different places there as well. Same for this scene with the dancer. Why is there a dancer in just one scene
in this music video? But those deinterlacing artifacts,
I don't understand how they're even possible. Did they shoot some of this
on a TV camera at 60 frames a second and then grade it to look like film? That doesn't make any sense, but that's the only way
that those artifacts could happen. But other parts look fine, and look like
they're on film at 30 frames a second! And the parts that they pulled from
the movie that it was a tie-in to — <i>Mystery Men</i> — those run at 24 frames a second, and you can see in this transition, the right side
is badly deinterlaced with a ghost image and the left side has every fifth frame doubled
so the frame rates match. I— I— I genuinely cannot understand
what has happened here. It is a complete and utter mess. Presumably some underpaid and overworked
VFX tech was given a low-quality, already-broken
copy of it and told: "It's just Smash Mouth, we don't care.
Just make it work." So they threw the video into a
basic resizer to make it HD, massively dialed up the sharpness, and tried to squeeze the aspect ratio
into... whatever this is. The HD remaster looks worse
than the one it replaced. It's sharper, sure,
but it's not better. And if you are going to change
the historical record, it does seem a terrible option
to make it worse. I've got an original series over on Nebula.
Here's the trailer. <i>I invited five people to play some games.</i> <font color="#FFFF00">I trust no one.
</font><font color="#00FFFF">None of us are trustworthy.</font> <i>...in an environment designed to
slowly break their team apart.</i> <font color="#FFFF00">This is real money!</font> <i>But all they knew is
they'd be sat around a table</i> <i>trying to win real cash: $10,000.</i> <font color="#FFFF00">The vibe's changed after that theft.</font> <i>This is a show about trust,
about loyalty,</i> <i>and about Money.</i> <font color="#FFFF00"><i>Tom wants the chaos.
(all laugh)</i></font> Nebula is a home for new,
in-depth and experimental content and collaborations from
education video creators that you may well have heard of. and it's bundled for free
at this link with CuriosityStream, a subscription streaming service
with thousands of big-budget, professional documentaries
and nonfiction titles. CuriosityStream is $2.99/month
or only $19.99/year. You can get a 30-day free trial,
including access to Nebula and my series, by going to curiositystream.com/tomscott. [Caption+ by JS*
https://caption.plus]
Tom Scott kills it again
Here's the Wham! 4K upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwNV7TAWN3M
I also hate it when 4:3 videos are stretched to 16:9. Or worse: the image is zoomed in and cropped.
Anyways, great video by Tom Scott as usual.
Technology Connections made a longer video on this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpABCxiDaU
Next he should talk about remastered audio. Now that's a shitshow.
In 20 years these bad remasters will be remastered themselves, along with their artifacts, and the historical record will be even more distorted. These problems are solvable (include a dropdown to select which version you'd like to watch) but the copyright holders don't care about the archivists. It's depressing.
Nebula is one of the few sponsorships commercials that I'm always tempted to actually get.
I just want to point out that the "dancing guy" was Kel Mitchell, who was in the movie... so it kind of makes sense he randomly pops and locks for bit.
I've said the same thing about those stupid "AI upscale videos" that seem to be going viral on Youtube.
I honestly hate these.
The original video has grain, natural contrast and a regular frame rate.
Upscale resolution. ok. Stabilize the video, also OK
But when it looks like its been hit with 1000% sharpen filter and then that sickly soap opera motion that almost everyone turns off when they buy a television, that's when you have gone too far.
Even worse is when they do this to Anime, these fake 1080p upscales.
Original
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/dragonpiece/images/8/82/11740-ssj3_goku_super.jpg
1080p "upscale"
https://otakudome.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/maxresdefault-4.jpg
Makes me puke everytime I see the remaster haha
Toms whole channel is full of mealtime videos