Yes, live events -- assuming perfect reception -- often had fantastic quality under optimum conditions. Even in the 1960s.
As a young kid, before I knew the specifics about film and video, anything that was either live or on video (as opposed to film) "looked like Channel 9" to me. (WGN-Channel 9 in Chicago; they did loads of local stuff back then.)
If you are talking about analog videotape, I associate that with bad-quality TV from the 1980's, like ALF and Married..With Children. The shows that were filmed from that era look much better and have held up better as far as visual quality is concerned. I guess the question is when did analog videotape for TV shows go out of style? The look of it was certainly inferior to film. Some shows evidently still are shot on film, but they are rare nowadays. Ten years ago there were several (30 Rock, Lost). Also, I believe the shows currently shot digitally use digital videotape.
Everything goes on flash media or hard drives or both I'm guessing. Everything is shot in HiDef and I'd bet a lot of 4K now. It's crazy amazing how good TV production is. Videotape is more obsolete than film because film is still alive (though barely). In TV production, yeah, very few shows in production are captured on film now but there seems to be an uptick of Hollywood feature directors going back to film capture. dan c
I can tell you that most masters I see are files now. Not sure how they are captured, but physical tapes are disappearing little by little. Really, HDSR's are just backups for the hard drives or files. As for 4K? I have yet to see any in that format. But everything has been shot in HD for nearly decades now. The SD versions were downconverted. Dan
Here in the UK the ITV network only stopped using digital tape for playout earlier this year. They had a 24 hour before broadcast deadline for file copies of shows to be delivered to the playout centre - and anything not ready by then had to be presented on tape instead. So a handful of shows, such as re-edits of live broadcasts from the day before, went out from tape. The cut-off point is now 6 hours.
It's all digital now. Even videotape was technically "digital videotape" 25 years ago with DigiBeta and D-1 video. Let's just say it's all been digital files (for the most part) for at least 10 years. I think when they shoot it well with 24p digital, like on an Alexa or something comparable, the look is effectively indistinguishable from 35mm film on television. We often degrade the picture slightly in mastering, like with some added grain, to give it a little bit more of a "film feel" to it. I was just noticing last night that Stranger Things appears to have added grain to the highlights, but it's subtle. Note that a handful of shows do still shoot on film: Westworld and Walking Dead are two I can think of.
Yeah, even when shows were shooting on film in the '90s, I think some of them got edited on video. That's what happened with the various Treks - The Next Generation, DS9 and Voyager. And that's why Paramount had to spend something like $20 million recompositing the effects for TNG, which they hoped would pay for itself in Blu-ray sales (it hasn't, because sales have collapsed in favor of streaming, although arguably the work has made TNG a more-valuable streaming asset than it would have been otherwise - it looks pretty spectacular in HD). It's also why DS9 and Voyager will likely never see an HD release - it would cost $40 million to recomposite and recreate the effects (unlike TNG, both of its successors used a lot of CGI, all of it rendered at standard NTSC resolutions, which would all have to be re-rendered in HD). There just isn't enough of an audience to be gained to justify the expense.
There's an article about this very problem here: Why Deep Space Nine and Voyager May Never Get the HD Remaster They Deserve | TREKNEWS.NET I'd imagine this applies to many series that had effects put together on videotape - Babylon 5 also suffers from the same issue.
Small correction to this line from the article: So a radical notion was proposed…why not go back to the original negative and REBUILD the entire show, from from the ground up, in High Definition? In the history of television, this had never been done before. Essentially, all 178 episodes of TNG (176 if you’re watching the original versions of “Encounter at Farpoint” and “All Good Things”) would have to go through the entire post-production process AGAIN. The original edits would be adhered to exactly, but all the original negative would have to be rescanned, the VFX re-composed, the footage re-color-timed, certain VFX, such as phaser blasts and energy fields, recreated in CG... There have been dozens of 1990s standard-def film TV shows that have been restored in HD. I can think of a few: Seinfeld, Cheers, Will & Grace, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, That '70s Show, and a whole bunch of others. There were a lot of late-1990s TV shows that kind of "fell through the cracks" and weren't technically done in HD, but the decision was made to rebuild the entire show by rescanning all the negative, re-color-correcting, and re-editing them from scratch. But a sci-fi show would be a different problem for the sheer number of VFX shots in each episode. I could see each show costing at least $100,000 more just for the VFX alone. ($100K is actually kind of low for a show that probably cost $2M-$3M to shoot originally.) The problem is that there were 176 episodes of DS9, so we'd be looking at a minimum of $17 million to redo the VFX -- some episodes would be less than $100K, some more. If the elements are missing (which I know happened in some TNG shots), this could get even more costly. I've always lamented, "the problem is, there's no audience for this thing," and unfortunately that was proven by the relatively disappointing sales of TNG.
Well, I think that's what they're saying - they didn't just remaster a final film print in HD, like you'd do for a sitcom where you'd just scan a single negative or print or whatever. They had to go back to the original photographic elements - in some shots that could be a dozen separate strips of film for a single shot - and then scan and re-composite them. So they're essentially having to reproduce the original effects shots - a very costly and involved endeavor. As for audience, I think if Paramount had gotten the TNG set out 2-3 years earlier than they did, it would have sold well. I think by the time it hit the market unfortunately we'd entered the streaming era, and nobody was paying for discs anymore. Paramount got lucky with the TOS sets - they hit the market just ahead of streaming really catching on.
No, there wouldn't be that much. It'd be cheaper just to recreate the shot digitally with digital artists. They could theoretically use the foreground matte material if it survived on film, but everything else could be digital. In the case of Star Trek, you can see the entirely-digital shots on the Blu-ray. I'd just say, "do that, but don't make an attempt to make it too much better than what was originally done."
I wonder if the 1999 TOS DVD sets are still available? Those prints would be the only ones to still have the following: 1 - the original "electric violin" version of the opening title theme on the early season 1 episodes (although only "Where No Man Has Gone Before" also has the closing theme version of that), and the original opening credit version (with Gene Roddenberry's creator credit below the STAR TREK title graphic) on the first two broadcast episodes from the same season. 2 - the original late 1968 Paramount Television logo on the season 3 episodes. ~Ben
It might be cheaper now, but that's not what they did for restoring TNG. They actually re-composited the original filmed shots, many of which were the result of multiple motion controlled passes. I think most shots of the Enterprise involved at least 4 separate filmed elements - the background, model with environmental lighting, a pass with the ship window lights, and a pass with the other lighting (nacelles, deflector dish, etc.) - as each required separate exposure settings. Oh, here's a video describing it, and I was wrong - 7 passes, just for the model: You could do what they did for TOS - recreate the effects with CGI - but I'm not sure how much cheaper that would be. I suspect - given the cost of CGI - it would actually be considerably more expensive. It would also require a lot more management and effort.
Yeah, I know. I worked for one of the companies that worked on the show, Technicolor. All the new VFX were done in 16x9, BTW. (Film scanning was done by CBS Digital at TV City and by Illuminate in North Hollywood.) I also knew some of the original guys who worked on TNG at Unitel and Varitel in the late 1980s and early 1980s, and even interviewed for a job (which I did not take) at Unitel on the Paramount lot. They used quite a bit of Ultimatte, which was an amazing process for its time. It would be much cheaper to redo all the VFX in CGI today for the simple reasons that a) they could farm it all out to a 3rd-world country like India or China, and b) they wouldn't have to rescan 7 different pin-registered film elements. The tools and hardware are fast enough now that they could turn around shots fairly quickly, plus they already have the existing finished reference for comparison, so there's no experimentation and testing involved. I know this part of the business very well. Unfortunately, the dollars and cents of the ultimate goal aren't going to work.
One way it could work financially - as a lure to get hardcore Trekkies to subscribe to CBS All Access.
I made that observation to my Father when I was a kid, and he screamed at me "All right, Steve, just lock yourself in a room with a TV and scream every time a plane goes by!" He was militant about my values!
Even today, overhead planes do affect satellite reception. I've seen "hits" and glitches in shows occasionally because I know there was a police 'copter in the neighborhood that flew overhead for a second or so. Eh... crap happens.
But what really sucks is if you have "Inflexible-Explosive Disorder" and you can't control how you react to things like that(as a Child)! Nobody knew about it in the 60s, so my Dad thought I just had bad values and lacked respect. OK, I know this isn't a psychology forum!(Unless it's about the BOB NEWHART SHOW!)
Regarding Paramount Television, I think Laverne & Shirley was the first (off-network) series to be syndicated on Type C 1" videotape when it was first distributed to syndicated TV stations in September 1981, correct? At the time, there were still two seasons left to burn on ABC, so for syndication it was slightly re-titled as Laverne & Shirley & Company or, in some places, as Laverne & Shirley & Friends. It was the same thing for Happy Days when that series entered syndication two years earlier (in September 1979); in that case ABC still had five seasons left to burn, so for syndication the word Again was added to the show's name, becoming Happy Days Again - but since these first 130 or so episodes entered syndication in 1979, they were still using 16mm film and, if I know right, did not switch to using 1" tape until ABC canceled the series for good in 1984. ~Ben
Our local ABC station (the last to get on the air and cheap as can be) used to show beat-up old prints of Addams Family and The Munsters. They invariably ran those shows on an ancient B&W telecine that bled the motor noise into the audio.
It's amazing you would remember this. I was the guy who did the mastering on the first three seasons, and I pretty much did all of them, over at Modern Videofilm in Hollywood. Paramount mainly did it (as I said in a previous message) just to save money, because they realized that a $75 reel of videotape could hold two half-hour episodes, and those would cost about $300-$400 on 16mm film. The videotape image would also look better since it was done from 35mm, was cheaper to ship, took up less space, and wouldn't get dirty and fall apart (unlike the film). We wound up doing all the Paramount syndicated shows: Star Trek, Mission:Impossible, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Joanie Loves Chachi, and a bunch of others. I also color-corrected all the Police Squads and a few others that were short-run shows that aren't seen very often. We actually did the last 2 seasons of Happy Days for Paramount TV during 1982-83-84, and ABC aired those tapes directly because it was less trouble than running the prints on the air. We also used mag tracks, so it sounded quite a bit better than the usual optical track.
Speaking of the shorter-lived Paramount shows, I wonder if you were in charge of remastering The Immortal? I bring that up because it's going to be released on DVD next week! Here's the official teaser video VEI (the company in charge of releasing this series on DVD, under license from CBS Home Entertainment) put up on its YouTube channel: ~Ben
