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Comment by tomdell | Hacker News Reader

That's 100% what this is. The company is going back to the video masters and remastering at higher quality levels than was done back in the day. The old master videos are of high quality but were only mastered to a certain quality level for release back in the day because of the state of consumer technology (size and quality of TV screens essentially). This is just going back to the original video masters and remastering for the current state of the art in consumer technology.

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The edited masters were all 4:3 SD, at least until the early 2000s when HD became prevalent, and were all mastered to the highest levels of quality available at the time. To truly re-master to higher quality would involve telecine/scanning of the film, if shot on film, and completely re-editing and this is unlikely at best.

Perhaps they are re-sampling, upscaling, enhancing color and filtering to get rid of NTSC color artefacts, etc., contained in the original edited masters but they are almost certainly not re-mastering using the original sources or even submasters (such as might be done when re-mastering audio from the original multitrack master).

Here is the remastered Petty Free Fallin' and although it is presented at 1080 it is still 4:3 aspect and is clearly not at HD resolution; it looks very soft by today's standards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lWJXDG2i0A

One thing I really hope they don't do is altering the aspect ratio of the restored music videos. By altering the aspect ratio of the video, you are also messing with the cinematography of the video and putting your own "spin" on it.

To make things even worse, sometimes companies will even crop 4:3 footage to be 16:9, resulting in less things being visible than in the original.

Thankfully judging by the videos linked in the blog (at least the ones I've looked at), they've left the restored videos in 4:3.

For a good idea of how bad things can get when a company doing restoration messes with aspect ratios, this video highlights the bad restoration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo

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