Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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>I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.

So many shows very much were composited to analog video tape. I personally worked on edit sessions where multiple film-to-tape transfers were composited to 1" then BetacamSP then digital formats like DigiBeta and everything that followed. I get it is hard to grok for eople without direct experience only ever knowing digital comping with modern software packages without ever hitting tape. But us ol'timers remember the pain

> Were studios really that reckless with their properties?

yes. while it might not have been done out of malice, but just lack of future thinking. for a studio making the first season of an animated title, they might not have even considered their show would be so successful. also, there's no way that they could have predicted HD=>4K and digital streaming. they are only human and just trying to stay on schedule with barely enough time to meet deadlines. meeting air date deadlines are much more strict than whatever dot release your PM is pushing for in whatever software product you might be working.

This is spot on. I had a friend working on early streaming license deals, and a typical pattern was getting the streaming rights to a show and then going on a lengthy adventure to find a higher quality master, if any existed. If you see bad transfers or old SD resolution in a digital format I want you to know that someone tried but the originals were in fact lost.

In the early days of streaming, content owners only had what they had sitting on the shelves. Most of those were SD masters that were formatted for broadcast. In the US, that meant 30i sources. Most TV was shot on 24p film, transferred to 30i in a telecine, edited without any regard to that film cadence, and that was that. The opening/closing songs were typically cut from that same footage, and doing an inverse telecine on that content was a nightmare. Everyone of us that dealt with that to supply the early days of streaming content had "so much fun".

Content owners suddenly had a vested interest in making their content look better, and now there's a way to get compensated to have better sources made to provide to those streaming platforms. To find the original film from old SD TV shows would be very rare. Feature films have been scanned from negative many many times. I was part of scanning a studio's entire library to HD. They've since gone back and scanned (or are scanning) again for 4k. Each time the scan is done, money is spent (and it's not cheap).

Now, the streaming platforms have the clout to refuse "subpar" sources now, and can demand that these restorations are the preferred source

O/T: I've discovered that the animation studio I had a gig for has shut it's doors recently to liquidation.

They had a killer render archival server with archives from 2000-onwards show casing what the studio had studio made. Cartoons, Movies; a collection of praised possessions.

It pains me to think that the studio has handed this over to the liquidators only for it to be shredded and now how many OG copies have now been destroyed.

I’d assume the hard drives live now in someone’s basement. A lot of people save things like that from destruction.

Just because you buy content on the auction block does not mean you own the rights to release that content. You've only purchased the physical media, not the rights. I know someone that has been down that very road after purchasing stuff from an auction after the death of a studio.

They might be unable to release it, but they can still preserve it.

for what purpose? waiting for the copyright to expire, and then hope to cash in on it in the public domain?

if the content is unreleased, there's other complications. you'd then be using the likeness of any talent involved whether that's their voice performance for animated content or for live action their full person. you'll be susceptible to those issues for releasing it.

Internet Archive regularly puts out calls for such works, and maintains several of those archives.

As a registered library, they can do this, and even make (at least some) works publicly available.

Why would the IA put out calls for unreleased, possibly unfinished work, that comes from a bankrupted studio? That seems like a very strange request. Do you have a link showing them asking for that? Also, what does being registered library have to do with being able to publish unreleased works that were never made available? I really think we're stretching credibility here

Unfinished works are still archivable, FWIW. US copyright law is in effect for any work of original authorship, for 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation (whichever expires first) or author's life + 70 years: <https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html>. After such time (and far sooner for works prior to post hoc copyright extensions) all works enter the public domain.

That said, yes, generally I'm more familiar with IA archiving published or broadcast works. Several of those collections are listed here: <https://archive.org/details/tv>.

Brewster Kahle addresses unpublished works in this essay, in part:

The traditional definition of a library is that it is made up of published materials, while an archive is made up of unpublished materials. Archives play an important function that must be maintained — we give frightfully little attention to collections of unpublished works in the digital age.* Think of all the drafts of books that have disappeared once we started to write with word processors and kept the files on fragile computer floppies and disks. Think of all the videotapes of lectures that are thrown out or were never recorded in the first place.*

<https://blog.archive.org/2020/10/07/on-bookstores-libraries-...>

(Emphasis added.)

That said, I haven't found any specific calls for donations of unpublished works, though my search was quite cursory.

> Think of all the videotapes of lectures that are thrown out or were never recorded in the first place.

This is ridiculous "never recorded in the first place". I really do not understand where people think that everything ever said anywhere any time must be recorded. That's some Black Mirror type logic.

For sure, Matt Groening and co. had no idea how much of a phenomenon The Simpsons was going to be early on.

Ironically, The Simpsons has predicted pretty much everything else...

amusing that the studios do all this work in contracts to make sure they have rights as long as they possibly can and then they forget to take care of the physical media

I think you're confusing modern day contracts with content from pre-2000. With DVDs, people started paying attention to the quality of the content to the point that additional things were added to the contracts to have cast/crew available for behind the scenes during principle photography, after edit for commentary, etc. Before that, it was just take the released version and dub it to VHS were quality was an after thought.

That older content just had no concepts of ever being used for anything other than the original broadcast, or eventually, hopefully, syndicated broadcasts. People survived off of royalties from syndication which is why it was a big deal reach that 100th episode. Once they reached 100, they could phone it in. That's why so many older shows had 20+ episodes per season to get to 100 faster.

times have changed. the quality of home video is so much better than it was, and now people pay attention to those details. compare a 4k HDR with surround to a VHS with maybe HiFi stereo audio tracks played back on most commonly the speakers on the TV itself. The timeline from VHS->DVD->HD->4K is not linear which is something I think a lot of people do not appreciate.

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