So I have been watching over the air broadcasts lately and mostly reruns of shows. I was amazed at how high a resolution the original star trek was but I remember there was a thing where it was revamped although I thought that was just special effects. then I noticed many other old shoes like I dream of genie also have really great resolution. I noticed some newer shoes though had worse resolution. Heck star trek the next generation seems worse. I have been wondering if this is because of trasition to digital filming. Like the old film I assume might have greater clarity when digitized but when we started filiming in digital maybe it was worse. I could see tv shows doing it first because they figure the resolution going out only had to be so good for the sets of the day. Anyone know about this type of stuff?
While probably not technically correct, and maybe not always the case. A simple way to think about it is that film is infinite resolution, this is because it is analog and not digital. Meaning the image on the film is not made up of a pre-defined number of pixels.
So as long as a copy is available on film you can always make a digital duplicate using the master film that will match whatever is the “best” format of the current time.
Whereas if the original is produced digitally you are basically limited to that resolution or lower without using some “artificial” up scaling of the digital master.
This is one of the reasons film is still used in industry, because it has archival value.
As far as over the air television looking better, this really depends on what you are comparing. Which may also depend on geographic location and services. And I might be out dated on this but at least in the US when they switched from analog to digital broadcasting, over the air was actually 1080p/i while cable was using 720p as HD. So broadcast at least at that time was actually better.
I assume cable also has some compression that is happening. But this may not be the case since cable boxes aren’t really a thing anymore. Unless TVs can just process the cable signal themselves now.
Doesn’t answer all your questions but hopefully points you in the right direction to look more into on your own if you’d like.
Digital video cameras didn’t start being used until about the end of the 90s.
The old film shows that look good are probably digital restorations, they can run the analog film into digital capture to get higher detail than old-school SD TV could show from the same original filmbut like i dream of genie and tos where just tv shows to. Did tv start using crappier film at some point?
