Why Some "Remastered" Music Videos Look Awful

This video is sponsored by CuriosityStream and my own original series Nebula. More on that later. In 2019, a large number of

music

videos

that had been uploaded to YouTube in the early days of the platform were

remastered

. YouTube allowed record labels to keep the same video IDs, along with all views and comments, so suddenly, all those old

videos

were in HD! And they

look

... well, it depends on the video. The Smash Mouth All Star

look

s horrible. Now, there are

some

brilliant remasters out there. Last Christmas by Wham! It's now in 4K and looks spectacular. And that's because it was shot on film, full cinema quality, the kind of thing you can literally project on the side of a building and it will look great.

Same goes for Freddie Mercury's Living On My Own, the remaster looks impressive. In fact, I think it looks better, because they haven't converted it to widescreen: they've kept it in the "aspect ratio" of old 80's television. Because

music

videos weren't made for cinema. They were destined for television. It's in the name: music video. So one of the first steps in editing will have been to run the film through a telecine, which is a very elegant way of pointing a television camera at a film projector and saving the results on video tape. It's much more precise than your average movie theater pirate with a camcorder, but the result is that the entire quality of the movie is captured in a standard-definition television image stored on magnetic tape. 480 horizontal lines in the US, 576 in Europe.

That's all. More quality than that is gone. However, editing on videotape is much cheaper and easier, and if you're releasing the final version on television, well...why bother editing actual physical film, which is what you had to do back then ? A few videos could have gone toward that expense, if they were part of a big concert film, for example. Thus, the Rolling Stones rock and roll circus was presented at the New York Film Festival, and in

some

shots you can see the movie camera with its large and voluminous rolls of film. But the final version of most music videos were, well, videos.

So for the Last Christmas remaster, a team of engineers had to track down the original film reels and rescan them using modern 4K technology, and then painstakingly took those 4K files and recreated each edit back to the original video, frame. for frame, cut by cut. They were actually only able to find seven of the original eight reels of film, so there are some shots in there where the only source material was the TV-quality music video. And you can tell, because this is what an old-school standard definition analog signal looks like when you use world-class technicians to upscale it to 4K.

It's not that bad? I guess? Living On My Own also has a couple of shots where old '80s digital effects have to be recreated with modern technology, and... they're not a perfect match. And there are also a couple of shots that have been replaced, or the timing has changed slightly, I have no idea why. But again, it's not a bad job. Now, there's a cheaper remastering option that doesn't involve recreating the entire edit from scratch: you can take the final TV edit from the best, cleanest, most professional videotape you can find and upgrade it to HD.

Many

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 have done with the remastered version of Bohemian Rhapsody. And look, I can see why record companies would want an HD version of Bohemian Rhapsody. It's iconic. It has more than one billion views on YouTube. But this was not shot on film. It was shot with TV cameras, edited on video (you can tell by the look of the lighting) and the fact that these effects required live feedback to the camera.

This could only be achieved by pointing a television camera directly at a monitor, meaning that there was never a high-quality film version, only in standard definition. And remember, old-school analog television in Europe runs at 50 frames per second. 60 in the United States, but 50 in Europe. Half of the horizontal lines are skipped each time, called interlacing. And it means there is less flickering on older equipment. So if you want an authentic and original experience, like what was seen in the 70s, then Bohemian Rhapsody should be played in standard definition, at 50 interlaced frames per second. That's what was recorded.

Instead, what you see on YouTube is a computer's best effort to create a high-definition movie-like image, 25 frames per second, from that limited data, filling in the gaps and turning the jagged edges into smooth lines. . That's called 'deinterlacing' and it's not done wrong here. "Remastering" does not mean "restoration." It means "recreation." You'll see advertisements saying that the remasters are "as they should be seen." Which is a great slogan, but... no, it wasn't. The remastering is, to some extent, changing the historical record. There are fan remasters of Bohemian Rhapsody, upscaled from VHS, 50 frames per second, that are much more faithful to the original.

But at least Bohemian Rhapsody got a decent HD remaster. It's not like what they did 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 poorly enlarged, it's too sharp. Look at the diagonal lines here, they are jagged and staggered. I located a standard definition version from years ago that someone had re-uploaded and...yeah, I can see why a computer would do that. And, oh yeah, it's also poorly deinterlaced in some parts, because here you can see the cheerleader is in two places at once in the same frame.

It also does not overflow from the next frame. She is also in two different places there. The same goes for this scene with the dancer. Why is there a dancer in only one scene of this music video? But those deinterlacing artifacts, I don't understand how they are possible. Did they record any of this with a TV camera at 60 frames per second and then scale it to look like film? That doesn't make any sense, but it's the only way those artifacts could occur. But other parts look good and seem to be filmed at 30 frames per second! And the parts they took from the movie it was related to, Mysterious Men, run at 24 frames per second, and you can see in this transition, the right side is poorly deinterlaced with ghosting and the left side has every fifth frame duplicated so that the frame rates match.

I—I—I really can't understand what's happened here. It's a complete and utter disaster. Presumably some underpaid and overworked VFX guy was handed a low-quality, already broken copy and told, "It's just Smash Mouth, we don't care. Just make it work." So they put the video into a basic resizer to convert it to HD, greatly increased the sharpness, and tried to adjust the aspect ratio to... whatever. The HD remaster looks worse than the one it replaced. It's sharper, sure, but it's not better. And if the historical record is going to be changed, it does seem like a terrible option to make it worse.

I have an original series about Nebula. Here is the trailer. I invited five people to play some games. I don't trust anyone. None of us are trustworthy. ...in an environment designed to slowly separate your team. This is real money! But all they knew was that they would be sitting around a table trying to win real money: $10,000. The atmosphere changed after that robbery. This is a show about trust, loyalty and money. Tom wants chaos. (everyone laughs) Nebula is a home for new, deep, experimental content and collaborations from educational video creators you may have heard of. and is included for free at this link with CuriosityStream, a subscription streaming service with thousands of professional documentaries and big-budget nonfiction titles.

CuriosityStream costs $2.99 ​​a month or just $19.99 a year. You can get a 30-day free trial, including access to Nebula and my series, by visiting Curiousstream.com/tomscott.