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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The X-Files went the opposite way: The streaming release was remastered from higher quality originals that had been prepared ahead of time for the eventual arrival of higher resolution TV.

I’m not surprised that some shows were never archived at higher quality, though. The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry. Many classic series were not instant classics, they were shoestring operations trying to get a product out the door on too little budget. Getting anything across the finish line was the objective, not archiving the highest quality for future generations.

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> The entertainment industry has a lot of people who just want to get their job done and go home, just like any other industry.

I think another reason, in addition to yours, is that the entertainment industry sees their products are disposable, or want them to be disposable. This way they can pull the drain plug from the pool, so they can pump in new content into it. Otherwise, listening same good old songs will inevitably eat into profitability of the new releases, because you can watch/listen for so long in a given time.

BTW, I don't share the same views with "the entertainment industry". You can't get the good old albums from my cold, dead hands.

I work in gaming and this is very much the same attitude, though it is starting to change: with things like Xbox Game Pass, there are now theoretically revenues to be skimmed from older releases via subscription revenues, so there is at least lip service paid to proper archiving of working files and source code. It's still tough to make the case not to phone home or rely on publisher-hosted services.

Residuals as quite lucrative potenial income stream argue to the contrary.

That made me think of Law and Order (since I remember reading that day players want to get on those shows for the residuals), and I saw a relatively early episode of SVU on a rerun that looked freshly shot.

The new X files HD/4K version looks preposterous! Ridiculous! I’ve been watching them recently and I was blown away by how good they were.

I know most productions now run so tight they rent their stuff, so once the edit is done and shipped most of the raw footage is all purged. No outtakes or extra footage exist. Actors prefer this for their image, studios will not pay to store any of it, but what a loss.

A case for having a couple LTO-9 drives on hand.

We knew HD TV was coming since the days of the first analog demos (1125i, IIRC). It’s also a matter of budget to shoot in high quality film, shoot widescreen, and get any SFX/VFX at least recomposed. Entire series of Dr Who were lost to originals being reused.

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