i saw a video on youtube that was the old
McDonald’s Mac Tonight commercial from the 80s, but there was a version of it uploaded in 8k. how is it possible, considering the cameras that the commercial was shot on originally? wouldn’t the resolution program have to ‘make up’ what it thinks the details are? thanks in advance!
In: Technology
If it’s shot on *film*, and you still have the film, and it’s in good condition, you can simply scan the film again in higher resolution and digitize the film. While film still has “resolution” in molecular sense, it’s… well, molecular in scale. Meaning, our “modern” quality isn’t even in broad ballpark of how much information can be stored and can be scanned from a high-quality film. And perhaps, how much more we could in 500 years (if film survived to that day).
Basically, like one phone can make poor quality pictures, but newer one can make better ones. If you still have the subject you took pictures of, now you can just take better ones.
If you don’t have film, there’s algorithms that can double the number of pixels and average or even guess (if AI or very complex algorithm is involved) the missing pixels. If there’s red pixel, then an empty place, and red pixel after that, most of the cases, missing pixel should be also red. And so forth.
You can use AIs to upscale images. Wouldn’t the program need to make up details? Yes. Thats what it does.
Old video was shot on analog film up to a certain point in time. Film has had much higher image quality than digital until very recently. Restoring it means scanning/photographing it, running some digital cleanup and color correction.
Old analog TV was not able to show all this information, but the image data is there on the film, in very high resolution.
Where it gets really bad is TV productions in the late 90s/early 2000s. Some of these were recorded digitally, and there is no way to extract more information from it.
Depends on what the old video is shot on. Things shot on film can be digitized in high resolutions because images captured with film have a ton of detail. An image captured by film has no pixels and is more like what the human eye sees (besides like film grain and stuff like that).
Images captured by video cameras can be upscaled either by a hardware or software upscaler or now AI. The new detail has to be filled in though and never quite looks as good as film that is captured in high resolutions
It’s probably an AI upscale that guessed, but it was probably shot on a 35mm film. The camera wouldn’t be a bottleneck if they went back and reprocessed the original film, assuming it was properly preserved.
I bet they haven’t, because all of that costs a lot of money, but it’s not down to the camera.
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