Comment by fredoralive

Comment by fredoralive a day ago

Film can definitely wear badly, like there’s some 1970s colour stock that just fades into nothingness.

80s movies would be near universally film, mostly 35mm.

TV is complicated, US network TV would also be film (again, mostly 35mm), but the mid 1980s saw the start of a transition to doing editing and other post production on SD videotape, a situation that lasted until the late 90s / early 2000s and HDTV becoming common. You can go back and redo post from the raw film, like Star Trek TNG, but that takes a lot of effort so only big shows have had it done. Other places like the UK often used SD video for more things barring “prestige” shows (and even then they tended to 16mm) so those will be stuck in SD.

phire a day ago

The end result of a modern film "transfers" looks so good that people massively the amount of effort that went into the restoration.

The color has always faded. They have to color-grade it back to what they think it originally looked like, though it's more common to use artistic license what they it was originally intended to look like. Artistic interpretation always leaks in, and it will never match what someone saw in the theatre (and there was massive variation between prints even when they were brand new).

At least with TV shows like TNG, we have the tapes to use as a reasonably solid reference for what color was actually broadcast.

And then there is scratch and dust removal. They do so much in-painting to get the clean result that we associate with 35mm film today.

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actionfromafar a day ago

The color has always faded - well, not always. The gold standard for movie archiving is to store the movies color separated on three reels, one for red, green and blue, but not use color film, but a special black and white. There's no fading at all on these.
Sometimes the original negatives are in really good condition, but you still have to redo the color-grading, because the original color-grading was done chemically onto some transfer which now has faded or was just pretty bad to begin with, if you even can find it.

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kalleboo a day ago

In the UK, indoors studio shots were on video, but outdoors location shots had to be on film, so there was an obvious difference in look when they cut between them.

Monty Python lampooned this in a sketch where Graham Chapman goes outside, exclaims "Good Lord, I'm on film!" and then flees indoors to the safety of video

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BizarroLand a day ago

A lot of TV classic shows were shot on tape just because it was so much cheaper, and everything live has either always been tape or just wasn't recorded at all as far as I know.

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- extraduder_ire 5 hours ago
  
  For a period of time there was TV but no way to record it onto magnetic tape, so you'd use a telecine (closed box with a film camera pointed at a TV screen) to record what was being broadcast. To air it again, you'd use a cinetele (tv camera pointed at a projected screen).
  
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taped a day ago

> 80s movies would be near universally film

Major movies, yes. But a lot of B films were on tape, and most of the distribution of movies in the early 80s was tape, so as companies went out of business, what was left was tape.

I’m over 50 y.o., but I remember movies from Blockbuster that I can’t find now because they were minor and only distributed on VHS tapes which were dumped over the years. I can find just about anything that was on film.

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crtasm a day ago

What are a couple that you'd like to find?

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