Documentary footage question/rant: why is archive footage so blurry/grainy nowadays?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by bartels76, Aug 20, 2018.

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  1. bartels76

    bartels76 Forum Hall Of Fame Thread Starter

    Location:
    CT
    It seems like it is happening more and more where I am watching a documentary or even a news/entertainment piece and they take grainy footage off of a video website like You Tube or whatever rather than getting it from the source whether it be a movie studio, TV network, or music label. a lot of this footage I am talking about should be readily available. Not rare or bootlegged.
    I have been watching the 2 CNN docs: History of Comedy and The 2000's and there are numerous examples of the this happening and there seems to be no rhyme or reason why the footage quality is all over the place. This isn't a rinky dink operation doing a cheap documentary. It's CNN. Is it a thing to get say Oscar footage from only 10 plus years ago directly off the ABC or Oscars servers rather than getting a gross looking YouTube file? I feel like this is the norm to just crib it off You Tube and get permission to run it from the source rather than getting file downloads from the sources.

    Anyone that works in the doc industry can shed some light on this?
     
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  2. Tim S

    Tim S Senior Member

    Location:
    East Tennessee
    First off, I'm not in the industry. I do have a film, journalism and archival studies backgroung - fwiw. As for the Oscars example, I sincerely doubt CNN is grabbing footage like this off youtube and airing it. It's not only unethical, it's probably not legal.

    Older documentary footage is another issue altogether - a lot of it is just not going to look good and if you are a historian or a producer you don't "doctor" that footage for any reason. And, yeah, noise reduction/grain reduction and related processes would, in this sense, be doctoring. You are trying to present history and a large part of that is not messing with any of it.
     
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  3. crispi

    crispi Vinyl Archaeologist

    Location:
    Berlin
    One thing to keep in mind: a large percentage of footage shot before the early to mid 2000s was shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Networks nowadays just crop the image to fill up the current 16:9 screen rectangle, so about a third of the image is lost on the top and the bottom. So if your source was already a standard definition NTSC or PAL image, then it will look pretty bad anyway on a HD screen. Throw away that third of the image and it will look even worse when scaled up to fill the screen.
     
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  4. bartels76

    bartels76 Forum Hall Of Fame Thread Starter

    Location:
    CT
    They are getting permission to air everything per the end credits but the footage looks like crap One example of the footage that I am talking about is this clip but looks WAY worse. Worse than Youtube quality.
     
  5. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Sometimes, even if they have permission to use it, the only archive copy could be a VHS tapes. I was contacted by director Alison Anders's daughter Tiffany about using a video I put up on YouTube years ago of Patti Smith on the TV show Kids Are People Too singing You Light Up My Life. I recaptured it for her at higher quality, but ultimately she wasn't able to secure rights to use it in a film. Personally, I think the network didn't own the rights, and rather than help track down who did, they just refused permission.

    Anyways it was perfectly possible that I was the only person who recorded the show or at least the only one who still knew where the video tape was.

     
  6. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    The reason why is that the source footage looks like crap, and there's only so much that can be done in post to fix it.

    I know of cases where better-quality footage exists, but the film owners will not release it for fear it might be lost or damaged. This forces documentary people to use substandard copies just to have something in their show.

    Sometimes, there's also a time element. If they call up the Academy and say, "we need such-and-such a clip from the 2007 Oscars," the Academy may say, "it will take us 2 months to find the time to get you that file." If the show has to air two weeks from now, they'll say, "screw it, we'll just grab any old copy we can."

    I have worked on big-budget network documentaries where we went right down to the wire hoping to replace some extremely ugly clips that hadn't yet come in. Sometimes, they come in the night before air and we're frantically working around the clock to replace all the bad clips with good ones, and sometimes the replacements never come in and we're forced to ship the show with the ugly clips.

    In the case of the Academy, they have no excuse: all the Oscar shows should be digitized and available as files right now, to the point where they could just zip through and have everything you wanted in less than a week. But sometimes, some studios and organizations are incredibly underfunded and disorganized, much more than you might think.

    As @Chris DeVoe says above, sometimes there's a cloud over the rights. I know of cases where one person claims to own half the show, another company claims to own the other half, then a third person owns the physical videotape. And even if you can pay all these people, then SAG-AFTRA, the AFM, the DGA, and the WGA come in with minimum residuals that have to be paid. There are also sometimes contracts where specific people have to approve the use of the clip in anything other than the original show, and these people are dead... it's a legal mess.
     
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2018
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  7. DigitalDave74

    DigitalDave74 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Columbus Ohio
    I really noticed the difference between the archival footage and the newly shot stuff on the otherwise wonderful Mister Rogers doc Won't You Be My Neighbor at the local theater in Columbus. That same theater showed a pretty pristine version of The Star Wars Holiday Special in their bar before The Force Awakens (!!).
     
  8. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    Same reason why all the footage of Bigfoot and UFOs still is. :D
     
  9. DreadPikathulhu

    DreadPikathulhu Senior Member

    Location:
    Seattle
    I’m seeing way too much standard definition material zoomed in on and cropped. Apparently people just can’t handle their entire screen being filled, no matter how hideous it looks.

    My spouse is a big fan of crime documentaries, and they usually have plenty of SD newscasts or other archival media of the day and it all looks terrible. I wish they'd frame it properly and add a caption that is archival footage and that's the way it is supposed to look.
     
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2018
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  10. SoundAdvice

    SoundAdvice Senior Member

    Location:
    Vancouver
    I've noticed that the CNN series appears to only be using VHS dubs of any Arsenio clips(probably the hosts own copies). I don't recall it ever appearing on any DVD(comedy/music comp) from a master. I imagine that certain guests like Zappa have nice broadcast copies or the Bill Clinton Sax clip can be sourced from news program masters. CNN specials were not limited by time/money/connections.

    I remember Vidiot(?) once saying on here a couple years ago that some 80's talk show with notable/historic speaking/music had issues with the master tapes being unusable.
     
  11. The Wanderer

    The Wanderer Seeker of Truth

    Location:
    NYC
    Another factor is our ever-improving home TV image sharpness and quality - we're now seeing flaws unseen before
     
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  12. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Very true. At one point, I was watching pre-recorded VHS tapes on a 10' CRT projector. If I were to pop one of those tapes in today, I'd have to schedule an appointment to see if I had cataracts.
     
  13. JohnO

    JohnO Senior Member

    Location:
    Washington, DC
    Smaller archives, and up to places like the Smithsonian, and NASA, still have video "masters" in SD, made from the low quality (to us now) telecines available at the time right to U-Matic or something. For token or no payments they could furnish obscure but likely PD filmed material from those videos, but they won't do a new transfer. Then blow that mush up to 16x9 and you have a current cable documentary. The original film could be sharp and clear (considering probably 16mm) but nobody will ever see it. If they could find it. If they still have it.
     
  14. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Arsenio was owned by Fox, and since AT&T/Warner Bros. owns CNN, I think Fox is not anxious to give CNN a great deal on the clips. And it's very possible that Disney now owns the rights to that show, but where the clips are physically located is a good question. And there may be legal issues where Arsenio Hall himself has to be paid and has to approve of the use of the clips before anybody can use them.

    If they know what physical film reel it came from and the approximate time location on the reel, it wouldn't be that hard to take the reel from the warehouse shelf, pop it up on a modern scanner, and redo it for HD. But you multiply that times 100 clips per show, it can be a lotta work.
     
  15. bartels76

    bartels76 Forum Hall Of Fame Thread Starter

    Location:
    CT
    I just watched the Betty White PBS special and even the Golden Girls clips varied in quality! Some looked like a dubbed YouTube clips and some looked perfectly fine. This should be an example of the rights and availability not being an issue at all. However, the Mary Tyler Moore, Odd Couple, and some other ones from the 60's and 70's looked fantastic. Very strange.

    Thanks for some of the examples above.
     
  16. The Wanderer

    The Wanderer Seeker of Truth

    Location:
    NYC
    LOL

    Now I'm seeing things I never saw before - some better not seen
     
  17. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Developing a highly discerning eye for video flaws is a huge pain. Like the reel markers every 20 minutes on 35mm film prints, to the "anti-vibration wires" in Sony CRT TVs to MPEG artifacts in video, there are plenty of things you learn to see when you get into this deeply that have the potential to ruin your life.

    Like kerning. If you don't know about kerning, you don't want to know about kerning. Once you understand kerning, your life will be a living hell of poorly kerned text.
     
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  18. hurple

    hurple Forum Resident

    Location:
    Clinton, IL, USA
    Oh, they better be real glad that wasn't caught.
     
  19. AKA

    AKA Senior Member

    Arsenio aired on a lot of Fox stations and affiliates, but it was owned by Paramount (and is now the property of CBS).
     
    Last edited: Aug 27, 2018
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  20. Vahan

    Vahan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glendale, CA, USA
    It's also annoying how clips that were originally on videotape now look like film. But I don't think this is a recent thing. In theatrical/current prints of Imagine John Lennon, all the videotaped clips (i.e. Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett) looked like film. But in early video releases and TV airings, they were in their original videotape look.
     
  21. Alert

    Alert Forum Resident

    Location:
    Great River, NY
    If you're using this material in a documentary, wouldn't the "Fair Use" doctorine make it perfectly legal?
     
  22. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    It was shot at Paramount so that is very possible. No doubt CBS/Paramount/Viacom controls the assets, but getting those pieces together and legally cleared would be problematic.
     
  23. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Fair use is a defense, not a right. There are no clear guidelines for exactly what you can use, exactly how much of it you can use or even what classes of project can use what.

    Basically, if you using it in a commercial product, even if it is artistic criticism of something, you're going to have to pay for it. I wish the rules were more clear, and that there were a compulsory license, so that you could use anything and just pay into a fund for however much you used. But the truth is it costs whatever the market will bear.

    Large universities have an entire department to evaluate fair use, on a case-by-case basis. The webcast This Week in Law had the person from BYU's copyright office explaining all of this much more clearly than I can.



    Here's something from Stanford University:

    Unfortunately, the only way to get a definitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court. Judges use four factors to resolve fair use disputes, as discussed in detail below. It’s important to understand that these factors are only guidelines that courts are free to adapt to particular situations on a case‑by‑case basis. In other words, a judge has a great deal of freedom when making a fair use determination, so the outcome in any given case can be hard to predict.

    The four factors judges consider are:
    • the purpose and character of your use
    • the nature of the copyrighted work
    • the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and
    • the effect of the use upon the potential market.
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2018
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  24. John B Good

    John B Good Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    NS, Canada
    I have complained about similar things before. To no effect.

    I wish all those cell-phone users who get to film things they are present at, could at least hold their phones horizontally. :(
     
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