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I wonder if that means they had the originals for all these on film in a vault somewhere, or if they used digital voodoo to do a better job interpolating from v

I wonder if that means they had the originals for all these on film in a vault somewhere, or if they used digital voodoo to do a better job interpolating from video. I don't know the production history of the music video industry, but The Killers and Lady Gaga are from an era (early 2000s) that could have been shot digitally.

dragonwriter 7y ago
Even things that are shot digitally are often shot at a higher resolution than is used for distribution, and the music itself would have been recorded in a form much better than would be useful for TV distribution of the time.
deleted 7y ago
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ancientworldnow 7y ago
I'm a colorist that works on a lot of music videos with more than a few VMA's under my belt. It's not uncommon for us to deliver 1080p compressed masters (at the labels request) despite having shot and finished in 4K or even 6K. Typically delivery specs to the label are 1080p ProRes 422HQ or DNxHD175 and an a 20mbps h.264 web "master." Unfortunately, youtube's compression kills things that are even uploaded with enormous master quality files. I recently did a video for a major artist that was shot primarily on 35mm film (some bits were 16mm and 3.2K Alexa) but the uploaded versions look terrible despite coming from high quality files. This is due in part to the subdued, low contrast color palette and heavy grain we went with - both of which are problematic for youtubes codecs which seem to be optimized for high contrast, rich color, grain less video. In this case, even though we have gorgeous masters now - the version on YouTube is a far cry from what we've screened in theaters, festivals, and on television. And this is after conference calls with Vevo and YouTube engineers who end up just apologizing and unable to do anything about it. Frustrating. Of course this true to some extent for every video we upload, but some are much worse than others. Vimeo does not really have this problem (or not nearly as much) for what it's worth.
asdff 7y ago
Let's hope they weren't kept in UMGs 'vault' (really a shelf in the back of a hot warehouse) that went up in smoke 10 years ago.

dragonwriter 7y ago

Even things that are shot digitally are often shot at a higher resolution than is used for distribution, and the music itself would have been recorded in a form much better than would be useful for TV distribution of the time.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ancientworldnow 7y ago

I'm a colorist that works on a lot of music videos with more than a few VMA's under my belt. It's not uncommon for us to deliver 1080p compressed masters (at the labels request) despite having shot and finished in 4K or even 6K. Typically delivery specs to the label are 1080p ProRes 422HQ or DNxHD175 and an a 20mbps h.264 web "master." Unfortunately, youtube's compression kills things that are even uploaded with enormous master quality files. I recently did a video for a major artist that was shot primarily on 35mm film (some bits were 16mm and 3.2K Alexa) but the uploaded versions look terrible despite coming from high quality files. This is due in part to the subdued, low contrast color palette and heavy grain we went with - both of which are problematic for youtubes codecs which seem to be optimized for high contrast, rich color, grain less video. In this case, even though we have gorgeous masters now - the version on YouTube is a far cry from what we've screened in theaters, festivals, and on television. And this is after conference calls with Vevo and YouTube engineers who end up just apologizing and unable to do anything about it. Frustrating. Of course this true to some extent for every video we upload, but some are much worse than others. Vimeo does not really have this problem (or not nearly as much) for what it's worth.

asdff 7y ago

Let's hope they weren't kept in UMGs 'vault' (really a shelf in the back of a hot warehouse) that went up in smoke 10 years ago.