why old archive video from the BBC generally looks so good (as opposed to old US based archive video footage)?

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Example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK88CkVCbVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK88CkVCbVg)

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The BBC were notoriously bad at keeping footage and destroyed tonnes of it. So I’m not sure why this was an exception.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The original resolution of British broadcast video (pre-HD) has 625 lines of resolution vs 525 in the US, so the source is higher quality. The BBC is most likely using surviving broadcast tapes as their source for their online content, and may be upscaling it to push it to 720 or 1080.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The British government used to do wonderful things with publicly funded efforts.

All that money pouring in, it seems obvious that they just invested heavily in equipment and personnel.

We have sadly fallen from grace, and just about anything funded by the tax payer goes down the drain or in the hands of incompetent fools.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not sure why you think old US based archive video is bad. As a video engineer I have digitized hundreds of hours of archive footage and as long as the tapes were still in good condition, looked just fine.