PUTTING ALL LEGAL ISSUES ASIDE FOR THE MOMENT!

As I see it , more and more classic music videos seem harder and harder to find. Even some that were on YouTube , now are unavailable on Youtube, or are of such poor quality they are not worth watching.

Youtube itself contributes to this problem with their implementation of "SD" quality which seems inferior. It seems anything lower than 720P resolution is downsized to 480P. This is a substantial quality loss for PAL videos that might otherwise be 704x576 or 720×576 These PAL videos get downscaled to 640x480 on a 4x3 video. Likewise an NTSC digital image may have a resolution of 720x480 or 720x486 where the Horizontal resolution is then reduced to 640 on a 4x3 video.
Even the official copy Michael Jacksons "Thriller" high budet video does not meet what I call SD quality standards when viewed on Youtube.

As Laserdisks have some of the highest quality and many music videos were released on Samplers, compilations, and by artists, it seems a logical choice to rely on Laserdisk sources with high quality anaolog video captures, and a digital "bit perfect" audio capture.

In some cases videos may be "restored" or "enhanced" versions hat may have had some clean up done to them. Personally I restored the Buggles "Video Killed The Radio Star" that I downloaded from youtube, upscaled to 720p, removed video drop-outs , and film defects, re-synched to the rematered audio at a higher bitrate than youtube uses, and it looks and sounds better than the YouTube copy.

I would like to start a "High Quality" music video archive online and want to know if others may be interested in the same or contributing content .

The goal is to offer higher quality classic videos than are found on Youtube as in my opinion what youtube claims to be SD quality falls very short of reality. This combined often with questionable source material, makes the problem even worse. Laserdisk seems to be an optimal source for content of classic musc videos.

I am interested in hearing any comments, as well as hearing from any potential collaborrators or contributors

Mark

I think it’s a great idea.

That SD YouTube thing is a major drag. Mainly because the sound gets murdered too when with LDs it can potentially be flawless otherwise.

Utoob now put ads in everything not 101% paid for. (Or worse?)

This is the new "free to air" of our age.

They only care about bandwidth vs viewings so go for it - and if you're truly serious then preserve superior quality versions offline of course........

How can it look better than your source?

Magic.

Yeah, every time I made copies of my VHS tapes back in the day they were better than originals.

Even making a copy of an LD to VHS was AMAZING and you could swear I had a bluheadSVHS

Well you compare yourself!

For one I hand painted out video drop-outs , film dirt , etc . I improved some match frame edits that had horizontal or vertical jumps, and in some areas I hand painted each frame to get rid of artifacting or other imperfections. On the final video you will also notice the white at the end of my version is WHITE , not light gray as in the YouTube version. I adjusted the video levels to take advantage of the full luminance space available, without clipping. Lastly , the audio was re-synched to the remastered CD version of the music and encoded to 256K AAC. The same kind of restoration has been done to many old films and photos.

Youtube copy



My Copy
http://www.retrotec.com.mx/retrovids/?v ... arRestored

If you pay attention the difference is obvious in the first several seconds.

I'm uneasy with it. Because technically there is more original information before your restoration than after it. What you have added is subjective to me. Where does a frame need repainting? Which colours are wrong? How do you determine that? Maybe the "white" at the end was supposed to be gray?

A frame needs repainting when there are HUGE BLACK HORIZONTAL LINES (videotape dropouts) dashing through the image, or even small ones for that matter!

No colors were "corrected" , in fact I never mentioned any color correction. I did make the video use the full luminance range as any good television engineer would do. There are people with no experience capturing and posting to youtube who have no idea what a video level or waveform monitor is, obviously some of them work for Vevo. You need only look at this video to see that even Vevo does a lousy job https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v2GDbEmjGE compare that to my version here http://www.retrotec.com.mx/retrovids/?v ... DoDeDaDaDa . Although Vevo/YouTube claim it is UHD it looks like the Vevo/Youtube version is crap at any resolution. They clipped the whites, low color saturation, etc. Those are adjustments they should have made at capture time. Once it is clipped , it is GONE, not coming back.

The video peak white on youtube version of Video Killed The Radio Star is not white. If the whole length of the video runs and there is no white in any of the images, then it is a technical calibration issue, unless you are running a tape of Black, or a dark grey test pattern.. I did work as a Television Engineer for a while , so know this to be true. That is why every TV station monitors the waveform of the video right next to the Program monitor.

Also the majority of the videotape dropouts (black horizontal lines) seen on the youtube version happend in distribution, not in production. I saw for the first time in my life on an Italian Streaming music videos network a "clean" copy of Video Killed The Radio Star with few videotape dropouts. AT first I thought it was my version, but it did have film emulsion bubbles and dirt in the gate. Most every version , even MTV versions, had videotape dropouts that were not from production. It was just crappy distribution.

Film scratches , hair in the gate at film to tape transfer, and emulsion bubbles yes were there at production time but might as well clean them up too since I am cleaning up most frames anyway.

If you think they wanted the slight horizontal (or was that vertical?) jump in the girl standing sideways you are wrong that was a deficiency in the postproduction system. There was a similar jump after the dissolve with the girl now big. On PAL it is Different but in the NTSC world that is caused by bad SC/H phase, and could be exactly the same on PAL . Probably a technical issue they were not able to resolve at production time (call the engineer) .

I think what I cleaned up was "undesirable" , and in fact made an effort to not change the content at all, or as little as possible.

Do you really think it would be more desirable to see h264 blocks on the wall rather than the version smoothed over wall with Photoshop? The blocks weere not in the original, I guarantee it. In fact you would probably not notice had I not told you but it might make a nicer viewing experience.

Maybe you feel the need to archive digital artifacts , but I do not. They were not there in the original, and should not be there.

Okay, if that makes you happy. Personally I want to see exactly what was available to mere mortals, not studio engineers, in the 1980s and 90s. I'm not interested in "perfection". I guess I'm more interested in history and the best presentation available at that time.

Personally I have no desire to see captures of VHS videos, nor bad DVRs of a bad cable connection. I like my video clean.

Since this is a Laserdisk forum you should be aware the quality available was quite good, in fact the Laserdisk was the best and thus the reason I posted this thread here.

It is a no-brainer to check video levels on what you capture from analog and should be a required step. Back in the days of Tape copies it was normal to "setup" to bars and tone on the source material then ensure thevideo content even looked consistent with the bars and the audio consistent with the tone. If you think you do not need to then you are not making accurate "archives" of anything.

You need to also consider much of the cheap capture hardware out there has its own set of problems like poor gamma, low video levels, AGC, crushed black levels, that goes without mentioning capturing from a 30 year old device with its own issues. Some here even say to use a proc amp , but unless you are dealing with a broadcast proc amp , a cheap proc amp will destroy the quality of a Laserdisk, as most of the consumer crap comes nowhere close to the specs of the laserdisk.

Last I checked I was mortal.

and by the way, if you really want to archive Laserdisks this is the only way
https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=978
Anything else is archiving only a part of the content

Good, then you can get sued like one for copyright infringement.

I just bought a DVD of Ripping Yarns and there is another Palin Jones skit/series from Black and Blue called Secrets
and the only version out there is a poor recording from VHS that was done back in the day from TV and released
on the UK DVD set.

SO I would much rather see that than nothing.

Guess you are really doing this to perfect something and start a business or work for a major company rather than a hobby
to put a flag out that says SUE ME.