The video that made me ask this is this one [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914)
A-ha: Take on me in 4k. How is this possible when 4k didn’t exist when the video was made?
In: Technology
tl;dr you can’t.
there are two ways you can think of resolution:
* number of pixels – you could simply say that if video is encoded at 3840 x 2160 pixels, “it’s 4k.” this could be misleading though, because you could take very low resolution video, like 640×480 digital video from the early 90s, and just scale it up, so that each pixel in the source video was just made 6x bigger (that is, scaled to a 6 pixel x 6 pixel box). this operation would technically increase the number of pixels, but would leave the amount of information unchanged, because the image would still look all blocky.
* ability to distinguish details – you could say that an image or video has higher resolution if you are able to look at it and distinguish a higher number of details, like strands of hair or pores on skin. this is true regardless of the medium – for example, high-quality film images can be high resolution even though film doesn’t represent image data as pixels.
so if you take source information from the relatively low-resolution film they used in the 80s and map it onto a digital format with very many pixels, you increase the resolution in sense one (pixels) but not sense two (ability to distinguish details).
The video would have been recorded onto film given its era. Photographic film has really high resolution we just don’t associate high resolution with the old analog TV era because the TVs didn’t have much to work with, but movie film is somewhere in the 4k-16k range depending on the size and quality of film. If they had a good quality recording then its just a matter of scanning it in really nicely and you have a 4k music video.
This is why old movies can also be upscaled to 4k(but they often have film grain and anomalies from years in storage) but more recent movies that were shot and edited digitally cannot be. If the movie was captured on an early digital camera at 2k resolution (roughly 1920×1080 or 1080P) then you don’t have the raw data to work with. You can fudge it in post processing(which your TV will do) but its not quite the same
That video was recorded in 1985 on film from my understanding.
Film itself has a resolution way beyond 4K depending on the grain size. As long as the film is preserved, it can be re-scanned using a higher resolution scanner.
We will probably get an 8K cut in a few years.
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