For example, they remastered Taxi Driver from 1976 to 4K Quality, but they can’t remaster Lakers vs Celtics from the 80s?
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The biggest issue is the media used to preserve the event.
Sporting events are shot with the goal of quick production influence to be aired almost immediately. So usually electromagnetic tape is the media of choice to capture the event. Similar to recording something audio on a cassette tape, that is the best reproduction you’ll ever be able to work from.
Now a Hollywood film that was likely recorded on true film negatives, have a much higher quality original source media to go back to. As technology improves, better reproductions of those negatives can be made and distributed.
Because movies were shot on film, which has a relatively high resolution (35mm motion picture film—the most common format for professional filmmaking—has an effective resolution of ~4K), whereas televised sports had a relatively low resolution (broadcast in *standard definition* (640 x 480 pixels)) during that time period.
Of course, televised material shot in a different format (e.g., on film) may be in a higher resolution. In those cases, it may depend on rights issues, the will to invest in the remastering, etc.
If it was shot on video it can’t be made bigger without quality loss. If it was shot on 35mm film and the negatives are still around and in good quality they can be scanned at 4k because film has a very high resolution.
Sports can be remastered but there’s not a market for watching reruns of old sporting events. Classic movies will get replayed on TV repeatedly and even rereleased in limited theaters. But people generally don’t rewatch sporting events. ESPN had a channel dedicated to replays of older games. It was ESPN Classic. Obviously, ratings didn’t justify it’s continued existence.
I’d love to see see a remastered Mike Tyson v Buster Douglas fight.
Hollywood movies from that era were shot on actual film, which has super-high fidelity and resolution. In essence, the clarity of the finished product was limited by the projection technology at the time rather than the actual media it was captured on. Television broadcasts, on the other hand, were shot on magnetic tape that didn’t have as high fidelity or resolution, since it was a lot cheaper than actual film, and TVs at the time were limited to 320p or 480p resolution anyway so there just wasn’t a need for higher resolution.
Movies are often filmed in a higher resolution than televisions can handle. This means that the VHS tape the movie was originally sold on has been made lower resolution to match the TV. As TVs catch up, the movies can be remastered to include the better resolution. Sports games aren’t shot on the same high-resolution cameras that movies are and so the information to remaster them simply isn’t there. What you see is what you get.
Movies (pre 2000) are shot on film and depending on the film grain quality you can go back to the original film which has been carefully retained and remaster it to 4k.
Sports games (Pre 2000) are transmitted straight to video (VT) as so were only ever recorded at NTSC, PAL or SECAM quality – also in most cases video archives (Pre 2000) have been digitized over the last 20 years and the originals destroyed.
The media it was recorded on has a lot to do with it, although with modern technology you can upscale resolution and use AI algorithms to fill in the holes. The problem is that is an *expensive* process, and there isn’t enough of a market for rewatching old sports games in 4k to justify the expense.
Movies were shot on film which is very high quality. (They were shown on giant screens after all). Now that we have modern 4K digital scanners they just go grab the old film strip from a warehouse and scan it digitally.
Old tv programs were not shot on film, but broadcast using a different technology with lower resolution. They may have been recorded on tapes or something similar. So they can’t be rescanned because the original format was already low resolution.
It all depends on what the original footage was recorded on.
Old movies were recorded on film stock, which can potentially have quality equivalent to incredibly high resolutions.
Most broadcast media (if it has been saved at all) was saved on things like VHS or betamax tapes – these have a fixed resolution, as they were only ever intended to be displayed on a TV (which had a set amount of pixels on the screen).
So you can do back to something recorded on film, and make a more detailed higher quality scan, but there is only a limited amount of quality available on tape.
It is worth noting that not all old film will be of good quality, and capable of being displayed nicely at 4k+ resolutions – a higher sensitivity film stock, or earlier emulsions will be limited in resolution and detail, so scanning them at high resolution won’t really provide any big benefits.
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