Some may know that I collect music videos from the 70's, 80's and 90's. I try and hunt out the best possible copies I can find and if the audio is a bit shitty, I replace it with a quality track that is not compressed ie, I avoid mp3's and try to only use lossless audio, such as a .wav file ripped from a CD or a lossless track that is encoded as a Flac file......basically, it's similar to mp3 but where mp3 loses quality, flac does not.
There are many songs that I wish I had a better quality copy of. The ABC's Rage is a great source, but boy, what a mess they are. The degraded quality of a lot of their clips is a disgrace for an organization that has an annual budget of over a billion dollars. Unfortunately, Rage is the only place it is possible to get hold of a lot of Australian videos.
Over the last year, there has been a marked improvement in the quality of some videos mainly all on official channels on Youtube. By official channels, I mean for example, the official ACDC channel. Music Videos in general have not been filmed in a great way on videotape. Prior to current times, there has only been a certain level to improve them. There have been a couple of exceptions - as an example I will use 2 Pink Floyd concert videos.
1. Delicate Sound Of Thunder - This came out on VHS and was mind blowing at the time. One interesting thing they did was to record the concert on 35 mm film and not video tape......basically the same as if you were making a movie. For the VHS release, they simply cut the sides off so it fitted our then 4:3 screen televisions.
2. PULSE - Also a brilliant concert, they made a huge blunder (as acknowledged by David Gilmour) and recorded it on 4:3 videotape for release straight to VHS.
Nearly 30 odd years later, we have a stark difference on improving them. Film is high quality, and Pink Floyd a couple of years ago re- released Delicate Sound Of Thunder on 16:9 bluray. Wow, what a difference. As an example, from my channel below is a link to "Comfortably Numb" from the Delicate Sound Of Thunder concert. I have downscaled it to 1920x1080, and Youtube also compress it, but it still shows what high quality it is.
Pulse on the other hand, cannot be replicated to that high standard mainly because it was recorded on video tape. Pink Floyd have re-released it, but it's disappointing compared to DSOT. See the same song, but from the Pulse concert below
But as I mentioned, there has recently been a major move in that record companies are releasing remastered copies of old videos is what can only be described as amazing quality. New Artificial Intelligence software has changed the game in a big way, even some very average videos can be transformed. I will give you a couple of examples, personal examples as I am responsible for the videos. The video is "April Sun In Cuba" by Dragon. I would expect most would know it, and have seen the video at some stage of their life. The video itself has always been of average quality and suffered from a number of problems, particularly with horizontal lines running through it. Here is the original below, I posted it on Youtube 5 years ago :
As you can see, average. Poor detail, occasional horizontal lines if you look closely. I had a play with some AI software and this difference was very noticeable. Although they are not the exact same clip (above one was from rage), they were similar quality, if anything this one was worst as it had a lot of "noise" on it, like a sheet of rain. See it below after the AI software improved it :
Although you can certainly see the difference, it doesn't work brilliantly on all clips - some have slight improvement, some are mind blowing. A couple of years ago I uploaded a remastered copy of "Split Enz - Dirty Creature" to Youtube. I state it as remastered as I made slight video improvements as well as straightening a few lines and replaced the absolute crap audio on it with a lossless version. It was the best I could do with an average clip, I can't remember where I sourced it but you just couldn't get it anywhere. See below :
Not long after I posted it, Rage actually played it so I recorded it from there HD channel. It was a little better in video quality, but the audio sounded like a tin can. I didn't upload it, as I had already uploaded the above copy. But as mentioned, the video was slightly better and the audio was terrible. This is that clip after I had a play :
The software requires some reasonably powerful hardware. I bought a new PC earlier this year after getting sick of bordering on minimum requirements for a lot of stuff. my current one is an i9, with 32 gb ram and a Nvidea Gforce RTX 2080 Super 8 gb graphics card. Depending on what profile you use in the software, and more importantly how many FPS there are in the video, it can take up to 90 minutes to encode just one. As an example, Dirty Creature above came in at 3.46 gb in size. I would need a data centre to house my collection I cant keep files that big, so I am going to have to either cut the bitrate or downsize to 1080.
While photo technology has kept going forward in leaps and bounds, being able to improve video has been limited. Until now.
NOTE - IF YOU CLICK ON A VIDEO, MAKE SURE IT'S ON 4K. I clicked on it and got 360 ?
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