Video Suggestion for an ambitous project: Remastering & Restoration

[Commodore256]

Pitch: It's an interesting topic on maximizing potential of archival footage going back decades and it's an under-explored tech niche. There are lots of wedding videos out there that are on an old VHS Tape with less than idea lighting or audio or worse, a VHS bootleg style transfer of 8MM footage and then transferred to DVD with an everyman Happauge Capture Card instead of a professional solution (like a blackmagic teranex 3d) with multiple generations of detail loss. I think it would be an interesting topic to see the most ideal conditions of a video like having the original recording on various formats like VHS, S-VHS, Hi8, MiniDV and maybe 8MM (Possibly BetaCam SP to see what studio archives had to offer because BetacamSP was the god of Video Tape) with tests on transfer generations.

Suggested Procedures: Shoot with your modern studio stuff and demaster to various formats using professional studio equipment and lossless 10-bit TGA sequence and use a Teranex to capture to see how much information was lost. That will give a technological baseline because you're using some super special futuristic sensor that 90's Camcorder engineers could only dream of. Then try recording to a consumer S-VHS Camcorder and try it in both S-VHS and VHS modes and then digitize to both a Happauge and a Tarenx (and even something worse like an easycap) using both a professional VCR for the pro solution with a lossless capture and a consumer VCR for the Happauge and easycap and then encode to DVD bitrates. Try demastering to MiniDV and MiniDV native using a consumer camera and capture should be straight forward because it's digital native. As a bonus, try a BetacamSP native test to see what a TV Station would do with their archives for salvaging and maybe if a remastering client is lucky and has 8MM prints or film enthusiasts that use it in the 21st century and want to maximize their film footage because there's a lot you can do to 8MM in post to make it look almost like 16mm and maybe try to simulate age of an archival recording. After that's all that, see what you can do to salvage the recording and try maximize their potential for modern digital formats via upscaling and colour correcting. These are only suggestions and I'm sure if you like my base concept, you'll have different and better ways of going about this.


I find the topic of remastering by salvaging less than ideal sources to be very interesting. Videos that inspired this post:

 

 

Here's the most ideal example of independent remastering:

Also, this channel has a lot of restored and remasters, (even to 4K) so if this topic tickles your fancy, you might appreciate this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/8thManDVDcom/videos

[PlayStation 2]

I know of some music videos you could restore because the record label thought it was a good idea to store their music videos on VHS.

[Commodore256]

This was suppose to be a suggestion for LTT. I can't get a Teranx But I'm sure Black Magic would love to loan one to LTT for this project because it would help sell some units even if the video isn't a "Influencer Marketing" Black Magic ad, (of which LTT doesn't do anyway) just having the product there as a professional capture device would be enough to make them want to loan a unit.

[LogicalDrm]

This is something that requires much time and money and would interest very few viewers. Plus it would take one or more editors off from editing other content.