[HN Gopher] Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS ar...
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Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 250 points
Date : 2024-03-25 13:20 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Worth noting, for crusaders against administrative overhead at
| colleges & universities:
|
| > In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder's main
| library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural
| style, the archives of the school's Rare and Distinctive
| Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see.
| Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval
| manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very
| private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands
| of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese
| recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned
| director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for
| decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
|
| > For the archivists at the Rare and Distinct Collections, the
| most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the
| Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is
| believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image
| quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese's tapes are more
| than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized -
| a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog
| recordings is slow, tedious work.
|
| In a perfect world, there might be plenty of well-run and -funded
| museums, which could do such work. In the world we've got...yeah.
| Big, prestige-hungry universities probably bear 90% or more of
| this burden.
|
| In a far-from-perfect world, it would still be lovely if
| universities provided detailed, honest financial statements -
| which clearly distinguished this kind of "preserve history"
| technical work...from the all the myriad sorts of education-
| irrelevant crap that they squander fortunes on these days.
|
| In the world we've got...I'm sure that top-of-market
| administrator salaries and hand-carved jade ceilings in the shiny
| new student amenities are higher priorities.
| nxobject wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm sure that, if you asked every direct
| report why they created a position below them, they'd give a
| perfectly cromulent justification. That doesn't explain away
| the inefficiencies of college in general, but I do think there
| are root causes of that that are worth going in depth into.
|
| For example, presidents have large offices because they would
| say they hold many hats these days, more than they did in the
| past when higher ed institutions recieved more state money:
| fundraising on the road and glad-handing big donors for that
| personal touch, going to policymakers for more money and for
| advocacy, working with big donors to plan large investments
| that open entire research units, dealing with internal
| governance of the college and with faculty. No one person can
| handle all of these responsibilities.
|
| Or you could look at student services: some administrator saw a
| need to support certain student populations to increase
| retention (more college completion = more alumni $$$$, more
| good press about alums), so you now have people that create
| programming to engage first-generation college students, Black
| students, students with disabilities. That's a huge set of
| communities to engage (especially in large institutions), and
| no one person can do all of that as well.
|
| The question is: are colleges doing work that should rightly be
| done elsewhere, and why isn't society making that happen? For
| example, colleges are developing integrated safety nets and
| free services (people who disburse emergency funds, mental
| health care, people that help students navigate this internal
| system, for example), because American society and government
| doesn't offer such an integrated system, at least to the
| standards that colleges are now aspiring to.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Tbh, regarding the preservation and digitization of the
| collection of concern in this thread, plenty of institutions,
| private individuals, companies, and organizations would love
| to take that work from the university. The uni, otoh, has no
| incentive to let the asset out of their hands.
| bell-cot wrote:
| True - but "of the collection of concern in this thread".
| And at this point in time. Vs. many older & larger
| universities have accumulated vast collections of stuff
| over the centuries - 99%+ of which would attract zero-ish
| interest from qualified alternative custodians.
| nxobject wrote:
| It's always fascinating to see how accomplished artists work to
| be in conversation with others in their medium. How do people use
| the past to form their current goals, and how do people use their
| current goals to guide their research into the past? How do they
| deconstruct what they think works, what doesn't? And how do they
| organize all of this thinking?
|
| These are really analytical guiding questions. Although I won't
| have an artistic career, I'd love to learn to think analytically
| like these artists do.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> The entire archive must be digitized - a major undertaking.
| Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow,
| tedious work. For the moment, the university requires the person
| requesting materials to pay for the digitization of any tape that
| hasn't already been converted._
|
| Canada spent a small fortune to digitize thousands of hours of
| analog Canadian TV shows, published them on YouTube, then...
| deleted the channel without advance notice before the videos
| could be publicly archived,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982
| bscphil wrote:
| Chasing through the links, it looks like someone did manage to
| upload a significant portion of the channel to archive.org:
| https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Encore%20%2B%2...
| walterbell wrote:
| Excellent, thanks for tracking those down! About 50% (1600 of
| 3000 items) of the original archive, uploaded Aug-Oct 2023.
|
| Now to figure out what's missing. At first glance, it's
| missing the world-best TV series about investment banking and
| stock trading by humans, _Traders_ (1996),
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traders_(TV_series).
| the_af wrote:
| Wow. Why did they delete it after all that effort?
| walterbell wrote:
| Unclear from public statements.
|
| If the content was licensed elsewhere, at least they could
| have told viewers where to pay to view it.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's sometimes not possible to pay anyone to see it, for
| many reasons, one being if the copyright ownership is
| unclear.
| walterbell wrote:
| In this particular case, digitization was done in concert
| with rights holders. With the help of
| many industry partners, the [Canada Media Fund] CMF team
| unearthed Canadian gems buried in analog catalogues. Once
| discovered, we worked to secure permissions and required
| rights and collaborate with third parties to digitize the
| works, including an invaluable partnership with Deluxe
| Canada that covered 40 per cent of the digitization
| costs. The new, high-quality digital masters were made
| available to the rights holders and released to the
| public on the Encore+ YouTube channel in English and
| French.
| the_af wrote:
| I googled and one result in Reddit claims they were
| announcing new uploads mere days before shutting the
| channel down, which is doubly puzzling.
|
| Someone else claimed the woman in charge of the project
| suddenly quit and there was no other recourse than
| shutting it down. I find this hard to believe...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I dunno exactly why but the idea of being some university student
| in some back room, watching and digitizing what Scorsese thought
| was interesting decades ago, ideally at 1am, seems incredibly
| cozy to me.
|
| I hope the room is filled with other ancient technology such as
| reel to reel, filmstrips, and microfiche so that it smells
| _incredible_.
| speedylight wrote:
| Seems like a great idea for a date!
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Man what a vibe, I'd be all over that and I'm not even a film
| buff.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Martin Scorsese should sponsor https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-
| decode :-)
|
| It's the ultimate in VHS preservation.
|
| I'm sure the Venn diagram between HN and Hollywood could make
| this happen!
| kouru225 wrote:
| I'm sorry what is this? Is this a software capture card? I'm so
| confused.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| It appears to be software designed to use an SDR or (and?) a
| DTV capture card to capture the output of a VCR playing a VHS
| at the RF level, and then transcode and store it. Pretty
| cool, if I'm understanding it correctly!
| Solvency wrote:
| How lossy is transcoding at the RF level of an already
| lossy medium?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's much better than any other existing technology to
| capture VHS.
|
| It bypasses all analog processing of the signal by the
| VHS player and captures the video signal directly from
| the tape head.
|
| All further processing is then done in software. If any
| improvements in software processing is made, the "raw"
| capture can then be reprocessed with better results.
| bitwize wrote:
| So it's like a Kryoflux for VHS tapes? That _is_ cool.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Ha, adding that to my parlance! It's _exactly_ like
| Kryoflux for VHS tapes.
|
| An example - S-VHS tapes can not be played back in
| regular VHS players. They can't handle the format.
|
| But with vhs-decode, it doesn't matter. A regular cheap
| VHS player can "rip" an S-VHS tape.
|
| And decode the HiFi FM-stereo signal, too.
| rainbowzootsuit wrote:
| Or Domesday Duplicator for LaserDisc Preservation.
| gofixurcode wrote:
| It's actually a fork of that project!
| iisan7 wrote:
| Best at capture/preservation, but only theoretically best
| at playback someday. Currently the best software
| processing algorithms are imo not on par with video
| playback quality from the best hardware of the era,
| especially for damaged tapes. It's hard, although
| certainly not impossible, to imagine that changing. I'm
| 100% glad it exists though.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You could always take the best hardware of the era, and
| capture from that. If you were talking about decks. I'm
| not sure about playback - the output from vhs-decode
| looks pretty darn good to me, but I'm not an expert at
| all in composite video gear.
| xattt wrote:
| Even the best VHS decks from the 80s/90s, which would
| have been used in production environments and thus "well
| worn", would have wear-related quality issues.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| But that's the beauty of vhs-decode. The transport
| mechanism needs to be stable and the head clean. The rest
| of the player doesn't matter.
| Solvency wrote:
| I'm not following why would software still be inferior
| playback to now ancient hardware? Isn't that sort of like
| suggesting digital can't replay a vinyl record transcoded
| to digital as well?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Sort of correct - except that the software to reliably
| decode VHS took some time to get right, and there still
| are regular improvements to the vhs-decode github repo.
|
| For a long time a great S-VHS deck, professional Time-
| Base-Corrector and so on from a TV studio, was the better
| option over vhs-decode software, especially on bad tapes.
| But now, I'd go with vhs-decode any day.
| kmoser wrote:
| Yes, but still don't throw away the original tapes,
| because if a better (read: more accurate/sensitive) tape
| head ever becomes available, you'll want to use it to
| upgrade your capture device and then re-scan the original
| tapes with even better fidelity.
| pkkm wrote:
| It's a fully software-based VHS decoder. It takes the raw
| signal from a VHS tape, captured with a high speed sampling
| device, and reconstructs the video on your computer. In
| theory, this approach should allow higher quality
| digitization than any physical VHS player - it cuts the
| analog decoding electronics out of the loop, and it allows
| you to capture once, then tweak the algorithm and decode many
| times without disturbing the tape. You could even preserve
| the raw captures in case better decoding algorithms come out
| in the future.
| pkkm wrote:
| I think the biggest obstacle right now is not the software, but
| the hardware. The software works, but requires either buying a
| $300-$500 set of three circuit boards, or finding a specific
| PCIe capture card and potentially modifying it. If someone made
| a nicer version of the Domesday Duplicator - single board in a
| case, $100 to $200 - I think that would make the project a lot
| more accessible. Even better would be if someone started
| selling modified VHS players, having replaced their normal
| electronics with a capture device and a USB3 port. After all,
| many people don't have a soldering iron or a desktop computer.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If we are talking about serious archiving of lots of tapes,
| $500 for a capture device is _nothing_. The labor costs of
| keeping the actual tape deck(s) in good order is probably
| going to dwarf.
|
| But I have actually toyed with the idea of setting up
| complete workstations modified player, and a slightly better
| software UX. Don't know how to reach the market willing to
| pay for such things, though.
|
| For tinkering at home, the specific PCIe capture device is
| actually quite easy to find, it seems it's still produced for
| some reason.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Mr Scorsese should consider donating his collection to the film
| experts at the VFA. https://vfa.expert/
| CurrentB wrote:
| I was hoping to see this exact recommendation.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| From the _website_ I can 't exactly tell why sending all the
| tapes there would be a great idea. But you guys seem to know
| something I don't, care to elaborate? :)
| davexunit wrote:
| Gregg Turkington has vast movie expertise, set a Guinness
| World Record for watching 501 movies in 501 days, and
| maintains the largest film archive in North America. I
| can't think of someone I'd trust more with Mr. Scorcese's
| collection.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Is watching one movie a day really that impressive? I bet
| a ton of people in old folk's homes have him beat by
| virtue of sitting around all day in the in vicinity of
| televisions.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| Maybe he saw them in theatres
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Watching movies doesn't give you all the facts to become
| an impressive movie critic. Would you for example know
| the exact number of Oscars each lord of the rings movies
| got from just watching them?
| labster wrote:
| No, I would look Oscar wins up on a wiki just like
| everyone else.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Then you would not be a very good movie critic, just an
| elderly person.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I don't really get your point. Having an encyclopedic
| knowledge of trivia surely doesn't make you a good
| critic, either?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| I take it you're not a gregghead.
| davexunit wrote:
| Or how many Blondie movies there are? No Googling!
| defrost wrote:
| Penny Singleton or Debbie Harry?
|
| _Videodrome_ 's a classic.
| nick__m wrote:
| Death to Videodrome!
|
| Long live the New Flesh!
| throwup238 wrote:
| No, it's not and the Guinness World Records were a joke
| long before this. It's a consultancy that people hire for
| PR ("verification").
| VelesDude wrote:
| The responses to this... _chefs kiss_
| kouru225 wrote:
| Typical Greghead response
| kubectl_h wrote:
| This whole subthread is a five bagger.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised when I see On Cinema references in the
| wild, mainly because I'm still amazed that they survived
| cancellation by Adult Swim only to create their own hyper-niche
| streaming service that has survived for going on three years.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The mystery science theater people did a similar thing:
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rifftrax/rifftrax-
| live-...
| VelesDude wrote:
| Ohhhhh, I've got the Oscar fever, Hope you got it too! Pour
| me some bubbly now its all you got to do. Its Christmas for
| tinsel town, the academy awards. Pop up some popcorn, Welcome
| aboard. Whose gonna win? Whose gonna lose? It's I've got the
| oscar fever hope you got it too. Whose gonna win? Whose gonna
| lose? I've got the... who...
| kouru225 wrote:
| I work for someone who has a very large collection of old video
| tape. You think these people would be interested?
| georgespencer wrote:
| Context: https://www.vulture.com/article/tim-heidecker-and-
| gregg-turk...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The Internet Archive will likely take them. Happy to
| facilitate logistics and cover costs.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Mr Scorsese from?
| davexunit wrote:
| Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes)
|
| 5 bags
| jt2190 wrote:
| They were already donated to the University of Colorado Boulder
|
| https://archives.colorado.edu/repositories/2/resources/1887
| Solvency wrote:
| > Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access
| to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of
| amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week's
| TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his
| interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese's New York
| office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual
| hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be
| active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled,
| cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a
| computer, and filed away for Scorsese's personal viewing and
| research.
|
| Wait so let me get this straight. Scorsese, an incredibly busy
| and prolific director, paid a full-time team to record TV
| content, around-the-clock, all based on him whimsically
| highlighting programs of interest from a weekly TV guide?
|
| And then he'd periodically book a flight to NY to randomly pluck
| these VHS tapes from storage and watch them?
|
| Was this just an ultimate wealth flex? Could someone like
| Scorsese really not simply gain access to virtually any content
| he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If you have (much) more money than time, it seems like a TiVo
| with concierge user interface.
| shannifin wrote:
| Probably a lot easier and cheaper to build his own collection.
| Not sure paying others to do the work makes him the archivist
| though.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| When you're that rich and that interested in your niche, in a
| world where there aren't any other ways to catalog then you do
| what you gotta do even if it's pay ~$1 million / year.
|
| For Scorsese, by paying for this system he can make sure that
| he can do the watching and the research he wants, no matter
| what. The "no matter what" is the important part; no matter
| matter who makes a show/movie, no matter what his relationship
| with it's creator/owner, no matter if the studio wipes the
| tapes hours after airing it just the one time, Scorsese will
| have his own copy as sure as the sun will rise. For many a rich
| folk, they will blow 7 figure sums on things they themselves
| feel are less important than such an ironclad guarantee without
| a moment's hesitation.
|
| It's not too far fetched.
| listenallyall wrote:
| I doubt Martin Scorsese was all that wealthy in the 80's when
| he started this. He was well-respected, sure, but he made art
| films, not summer blockbusters like Spielberg and Lucas or big-
| time comedies, and the external revenue streams (HBO, video
| rental) were fewer and smaller. He was known, but he wasn't
| MARTIN SCORSESE like we know him today (that would probably
| have been Coppola). And I'm guessing most of what he was taping
| was news and talk shows (to get accents, styles, vernacular,
| etc), which would often not be kept permanently by the
| broadcasters, and lots of more obscure things that would be
| difficult to track down.
| rurban wrote:
| No news, no shows, sorry. Just films.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| The article mentions he also taped things like his mother's
| appearance on Regis and Kathy, but primarily films.
| listenallyall wrote:
| "a devoted interest in recording films _and shows_ from the
| '80s to the 2000s"
|
| "4,400 distinct titles, including features, documentaries,
| shorts, history programs and award shows"
| chiph wrote:
| I'm thinking the system helped him avoid Hollywood politics. If
| a studio lost the bidding to distribute his next film, they
| might try cutting him off from high-quality originals out of
| spite.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly
| from studio sources for research work?
|
| I suspect that's a far more miserable, time-consuming and
| failure prone approach than simply taping them off the TV. The
| studios aren't set up to _show_ films, they 're to hand them
| off to distributors. The whole system is set up to deal with
| films in bulk, not to individual users. And they won't have
| them in convenient VHS format, so even if Scorsese had a guy he
| could just ring and ask for Film X, what he'd get would be ..
| several reels of 35mm. Sure, he's probably got a little cinema
| for that as well, but it's not as convenient as a TV.
|
| And of course asking the studio runs a high risk of "no".
| The-Bus wrote:
| Scorcese's production company office was based in the Directors
| Guild of America building on 57th St for many years.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist
|
| Seems like he _employs_ an archivist, not that he 's an
| archivist. A better title might be _Scoreses 's secret VHS
| archive_, I don't know. Archivist is a specific job with
| specific, non-trivial training. It's a nitpick, but it reminds me
| of when people acted like Elon Musk designed the rockets for
| SpaceX or his Tesla cars, or when they talk about Steve Jobs
| creating the iPhone. The person with the money and the vision is
| critical to success, but it's just not accurate to say that they
| did these things themselves.
| porbelm wrote:
| If all they do is follow his instructions on labeling and
| categorization, he himself is also an archivist, with the
| people being his clerks. He started taping on his own long
| before it became a multi-VHS "i need people to do this" setup.
| BMc2020 wrote:
| related:
|
| The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV
| History https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-
| televisi...
|
| _First recorded in Marion Stokes's home in the Barclay
| Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had
| been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased
| solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed
| on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-
| based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the
| recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the
| only comprehensive collection preserving this period in
| television media history._
| beebmam wrote:
| He should have donated these to the Victorville Film Archive,
| which exists specifically to archive and care for VHS recordings
| dmix wrote:
| Have they documented the gear/process they use for archival?
| dedman wrote:
| Honestly a bit rude of Martin to not have consulted with Gregg
| Turkington first.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| If you remember the MPAA vs DeCSS fight from the early 00's..
| what Scorsese was doing here would be considered serious
| copyright infringement by the MPAA.
|
| The reasonable person would consider it fair use to gather
| reference material for their job. The MPAA was arguing in court
| that any violation of their DRM was illegal, reprehensible,
| irredeemable. And Scorsese was likely a member!
|
| He was buddies with Jack Valenti!! Via wikipedia:
| In 2007, Scorsese was honored by the National Italian American
| Foundation (N.I.A.F.) at the nonprofit's thirty-second
| Anniversary Gala. During the ceremony, Scorsese helped launch
| N.I.A.F.'s Jack Valenti Institute in memory of former foundation
| board member and past president of the Motion Picture Association
| of America (M.P.A.A.) Jack Valenti.
| basch wrote:
| Reference material for a commercial for profit job would likely
| hurt a fair use argument.
| kleiba wrote:
| Wasn't he recording from TV? What DRM was that breaking?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I suppose one could argue is that if you were recording
| cable, your recording the decrypted image alas breaking DRM.
|
| My guess is as best as yours. Lawyers enjoy flinging three
| letter acronyms around.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| rights for me but not for thee,
|
| or rules for thee but not for me.
| indus wrote:
| ...and my SO complains about my Natgeo print collection.
| rurban wrote:
| Marty's obsession with collecting films is very well known in the
| film industry since the eighties. Just read any better 80ies film
| book about New Hollywood. He sat hours a day in his basement, and
| often invited others to watch movies with him.
|
| So, not secret at all.
| max_ wrote:
| Leo DiCaprio said that, Martin Scorsese has watched every movie
| ever made until 1980. [1]
|
| Made me understand how seriously he takes film.
|
| [1]: An interview with letter box on Killers of the Flower Moon
| on YouTube
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| To write good piece of music you need to know by heart a lot of
| music in such and other styles. Thes same with movies. As I have
| watched many Scorcese's and Tarantino's movies, I'm not surprised
| by what they put into their masterpieces, these guys are learning
| from old school.
|
| On the other hand, I am outraged that I am forbidden to watch old
| movies, as they are not publicly available, and enshittification
| of streaming services is progressing. Less classic content, more
| money, divided by studios/companies/corporations. Am I supposed
| to pay 200$/month for 6(7?) subscriptions to have 30% of the
| content I want to watch
| rchaud wrote:
| I spent the early '00s watching old and obscure movies via
| torrent. Megacorp stores didn't stock them then and mega-
| streaming networks today won't either. Don't look for art at
| the toy store.
| kerrsclyde wrote:
| UK TV comedian Bob Monkhouse was another obsessive VHS archivist.
| He amassed a collection of 35k tapes and saved some recordings of
| UK TV shows which were previously thought to have been lost by
| the BBC.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Monkhouse#Film_and_televis...
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I was going to say that the cost of just the tapes would be up
| to a million of todays dollars. But then I read:
|
| "going back to when Monkhouse first bought a home video
| recorder in 1966"
|
| Wow... if he started that early, the costs must have been
| astronomical in the beginning.
| kerrsclyde wrote:
| There was a BBC Four documentary about his archive. I think
| in that it reported that he was one of the first people in
| the UK to own a VHS device with the facility to record.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| This is cool for sure, but given the horrific resolution of the
| medium any recovered rare movies would, at least forme me, make
| watching it a painful experience.
|
| He could have the best VHS records out there and the best tapes,
| but the source material being recorded would be painfully
| limited, as would the recordings.
|
| I would have expected Scorsese to have requested, threatened,
| manipulated, bribed, and so on to obtain film reels.
|
| This would not be possible for a lot of the content but surely
| for quite a few.
|
| He could do the same for original VHS cassettes with the movies
| (like you would find in a rental store. Just unwatched ones.
|
| Also that he would have people to buy DVD version when (if) they
| came out. Still if a DVD version was released that would indicate
| that the source film was available and Scorsese could have a copy
| of that instead.
| airtag wrote:
| VHS is indeed horribble, if watched on today's TVs and wasn't
| that great back then. European PAL was a bit better than NTSC.
| And, while it's full of noise, it doesn't have the smear of
| digital noise reduction.
|
| Scorsese grew up with this TV resolution and I'm sure he would
| have preferred high quality for things we cared about, but for
| day-to-day use, having VHS was fine. (If he really cared, he
| could have gotten a betamax recorder or a super-VHS recorder to
| record off the TV)
|
| I'm pretty sure that he'll stream better copies - but for those
| not available, having a noisy VHS is great. And with
| streaming/digital "sales" you never know which films you're
| going to lose next...
| rchaud wrote:
| VHS resolution is 330p, and Youtube still has millions of
| videos that top out at 360p but still look fine for consumption
| purposes.
| porbelm wrote:
| It's not 330p as 330 is the HORIZONTAL resolution, not the
| vertical. Vertical is still the same as NTSC (525 lines) or
| PAL (625 lines) so you'd technically have "480p" (NTSC) or
| "576p" (PAL) visible, with half the horizontal resolution.
| You can't describe these old video formats in the newer NNNp
| or NNNi terminology.
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