These days, kids identify them by the aspect ratio.

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    74·
    1 year ago

    And video quality. Watching some historical videos from my childhood, like tv shows on youtube… the quality is pure potato. Either the archiving is terrible, or we just accepted much worse quality back then.

    • Hypersapien@lemmy.worldOP
      32·
      1 year ago

      People always said that Betamax was better quality than VHS. What never gets mentioned is that regular consumer TVs at the time weren’t capable of displaying the difference in quality. To the average person they were the same.

      • jeffw@lemmy.world
        7·
        1 year ago

        You kinda can tell though. CRTs didn’t really use pixels, so it’s not like watching on today’s video equipment though

          • zero_gravitas@aussie.zoneEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            What they’re referring to is that analogue CRTs don’t really have a fixed horizontal resolution. The screen has a finite number of horizontal lines (i.e. rows) which it moves down through on a regular-timed basis, but as the beam scans across horizontally it can basically be continuous (limited by the signal and the radius of the beam). This is why screen resolutions are referred to by their vertical resolutions alone (e.g. 360p = 360 lines, progressive scan [as opposed to interlaced]).

            I’m probably wrong on the specifics, but that gives the gist and enough keywords to find a better explanation.

            [EDIT: A word.]

      • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        VHS was capable of not bad quality, people just had a lot bad equipment.

        Some TV shows (if they were crazy) were shot on film so you could re digitize them now in 4 or 8k and they’d look amazing. But there was also a lot of junk that was out there.

        And as others have mentioned if you do an awful job of digitizing it then you could take something that looked good and throw all of that quality away. But if the tape wasn’t stored in good condition then it could just struggle to be digitized in the first place when done properly.

    • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
      21·
      1 year ago

      There’s a lot of archival video that is just terrible. Digital video compression issues have damaged a lot of old footage that’s gotten shared over the years, especially YouTube’s encoders. They will just straight up murder videos to save bandwidth. There’s also a lot of stuff that just doesn’t look great when it’s being upscaled from magnetic media that’s 240x320 at best.

      However, there’s also a lot of stuff that was bad to begin with and just took advantage of things like scanlines and dithering to make up for poor video quality. Take old games for example. There’s a lot of developers who took advantage of CRT TVs to create shading, smoothing, and the illusion of a higher resolution that a console just wasn’t capable of. There’s a lot of contention in the retro gaming community over whether games looked better with scanlines or if they look better now without them.

      For example.

      Personally, I prefer them without. I like the crisp pixelly edges, but I was also lucky enough to play most of my games on a high quality monitor instead of a TV back then. Then emulators, upscaling, and pixel smoothing became a thing…

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
      7·
      1 year ago

      I watch a lot of hockey. Just watching hockey games from the 2000s are full on potato. I don’t remember them looking that bad back then.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
      27·
      1 year ago

      I noticed when watching Good Omens on Amazon Prime that they offer a language option “Original + Dialogue Boost”.

      It works wonders. Almost feels like back in the days again when TV shows wanted dialogue to be understood.

      • BorgDrone
        3·
        1 year ago

        Or you could just turn on dialog boost on your amplifier.

    • drz@lemmy.ca
      14·
      1 year ago

      I think most people have given up and use subtitles on all the time.

      • Send_me_nude_girls@feddit.de
        21·
        1 year ago

        Sure, microphones got better but there is more too it. One huge factor is the mixing for cinemas and not for home theaters or worse for TV speaker.

        • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
          6·
          1 year ago

          No, the video actually goes into that. Directors think it’s “more real” to have mumbled dialogues. But they seem to misinterpret that as “more mumble = more good”.

          • CeruleanRuin@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            It’s a combination of both. Studios typically will mix the end result for the highest-end sound setups, which most people don’t actually have. If you’re lucky enough to have a full surround with the ability to properly dial in equalizer and other settings, you probably won’t have a problem hearing the dialogue even when it’s mumbled. But on conventional tv speakers, it can easily get lost in the mix.

      • barnsbauer@lemmy.world
        9·
        1 year ago

        This video was exactly what first came to mind when I read “badly understandable dialogues”! It bothers me that as we got better mics, the actors became more unintelligible instead of the other way as one would predict.

    • Kiosade@lemmy.ca
      2·
      1 year ago

      I hear this all the time, and maybe I just don’t watch THAT many shows/movies, but I haven’t come across anything where the actors sound like they’re mumbling. Do you have a few examples I could look up?

    • CeruleanRuin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’ve used subtitles for most of my adult life, ever since having kids. First it was so I could watch without waking the baby, and then it was so I could follow along over all the noise in the house. And I never went back. So as sound mixing changed and got muddier, I guess I didn’t notice, because I was already used to not being able to hear half the dialogue anyway.

    • bufordt@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      1 year ago

      That’s a big problem for stuff that was originally shot on video. Old stuff shot on film can look pretty good when digitized.

      • CeruleanRuin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        But then you also have that very specific window of time when a lot of stuff especially SFX was done on video that can’t be upscaled. Babylon 5 fans weep.

  • 🇨🅾️🇰🅰️N🇪@lemmy.world
    28·
    1 year ago

    When I was a kid I used to think black and white meant the TV show or whatever used to be in color but since it got old it turned black and white. My thought process was they changed color just like old people’s hair turns grey… This was 35 years ago before internet.

      • 🇨🅾️🇰🅰️N🇪@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        Yeah but it’s more complicated than that. They colorized a lot of movies after the fact, the colors were always extremely bright, kinda like when people would color their hair extremely bright. On the contrary I’m not very bright

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        No, that was just for effect. Notice that all the scenes playing in Kansas are B&W (even the ones at the end), and all of Oz was in Color. It gave the place an extra kind of quality above the B&W pictures they were used to. I have heard that people in the cinemas gasped in surprise when the switch happened.

    • Grimlo9ic@kbin.social
      8·
      1 year ago

      That’s such a trip. Only a 6 year difference between the two of you, yet you experienced the dawn of something and they didn’t, and it shapes both of your perspectives so much.

      Even though it technically applies to transistors, Moore’s Law has been a good barometer for the increase of complexity and capabilities of technology in general. And now because of your comment I’m kinda thinking that since the applicability of that law seems to be nearing its end, it’s either tech will stagnate in the next decade (possible, but I think unlikely), or we may be due for another leapfrog into a higher level of sophistication (more likely).

    • Treczoks@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      Retaliate! Hand them a rotary phone and ask them to order a pizza.

      Bonus: If they actually managed to phone someone, ask them to send an SMS with it next ;-)

        • Treczoks@lemmy.world
          1·
          1 year ago

          Can’t send a text with a landline though.

          Of course, that was the joke ;-) Does not hurt to watch them trying to figure this out.

    • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
      5·
      1 year ago

      I sometimes watch old movies and it gets infuriating how long they talk around the same fact that everyone already agrees on. Yes, he was killed with a knife because it’s still stuck in his head, now move on!

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 year ago

        The pacing of the oldest movies comes from the theater. Watch a live play and it will seem well paced and ‘natural.’ Fast cuts from TV ads made people want a faster pace in television shows. Back in the day, ‘Miami Vice’ was cutting edge because they were the speediest.

    • SgtAStrawberry@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      Especially in action scenes. I used to watch Hawaii five O the 2010 version and sometimes a chanal showed the old version with the same name, the are so incredibly different in pacing and the amount of violence. I really liked the old one in that regard, much less shooting and blood.

  • PhiAU@lemmy.world
    16·
    1 year ago

    Re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my kids in new hi-def, and you can clearly and easily see the stunt doubles now, and the SFX look really dated now that you can see them clearly.

    It’s amazing what old CRTs would let you get away with.

    • SasquatchBanana@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 year ago

      It’s not so much what they got away with but working with the tools they had. It is the same for pixel art in the early gen consoles.

      • brianorca@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        The SFX was the limitations of tools they had, (and budget) but there were a lot of aspects of set design and stunt doubles where they could get away with more on a TV show in SD compared to a movie that was on film. When HDTV started, even news shows were forced to drastically improve the quality of the set pieces and makeup because small details could now be seen.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.netEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    Lotta old shows are re-formated just to have the wider screen, since they would still film at higher res for movies or just because. It’s not just an indication of age if something is still only in 4:3, it’s an indication of thrift or just a general lack of giving a shit about the future.

      • _g_be@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        Watching Friends on Netflix in 4k is really trippy, since there are shows filmed just a little later on digital that look so bad.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    7·
    1 year ago

    I identified them by awkward haircuts and clothing styles. I knew something was off / wrong, but it wasn’t until adulthood that I was able to piece it together.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
    7·
    1 year ago

    Can always tell when a show is 4:3 aspect. Recently I’ve noticed some modern TV shows adopting the theater aspects of flat (1.85:1) or scope (2.4:1) which I think is pretty cool. The last episode of Strange New Worlds I watched was in scope, that’s some high end filming.

    • CeruleanRuin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      SNW is really top tier production quality across the board. The camera work, the sound, music, design, everything is goddamned impeccable, and that extends to the post production. So much thought goes into every part of it, and I really have to give Paramount its kudos for enabling that level of attention to detail in all aspects of the franchise right now. If I told a fellow Trekkie in the 90s that we would ever see the day, they would laugh.

  • perviouslyiner@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    Asteroid City switched between aspect ratios as well as switching between black&white as they swapped between the TV story and the ‘real’/cinema story.

      • perviouslyiner@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Even for fans of his films, you have to be prepared for the weirdness to be dialled up to 11 in this one. It’s the cinema equivalent of “I’m so meta, even this acronym”.

        Any of his others would be an easier and maybe more satisfying watch. It’s a nice enough story of course, with the usual silly and neurotic characters and bizarre beautiful sets - just don’t be surprised when people come out of the cinema looking confused.