[Stooky Bill]

Excellent it might be, but is there any need to make the picture quality look that poor? Unless he's trying to spoof a pirate TV station that's not how 'old TV' looked. A little treatment to make it not look HD yes, but shaking and blurring the whole thing is too much

Analogue TV looked great, we were all happy with VHS quality at the time - it's pretty good, and compared with some of the low res stuff online it's brilliant. People need to stop rewriting history

[James2001]

It's no different to how they show "old films" as being scratchy, dirty, grainy and playing at the wrong speed. Which isn't how they look when shown properly.

[James2001]

Those "VHS" filters don't usually look like VHS either, unless it's a heavily worn tape that's gone down several generations.

[Neil Jones]

Those "VHS" filters don't usually look like VHS either, unless it's a heavily worn tape that's gone down several generations.

I have yet to see a VHS filter that looks anything like, well VHS basically.  Its either too "clean" or its clearly been downsampled from shooting in HD/4k in the first place, although I suspect that may be because all that's shot digitally these days to files.

I'd suggest its one of those production techniques that needs do it properly or don't do it at all.  Get a VHS recorder and feed your shiny digital footage through it.  Yes it'll look like crap afterwards but at least it'll be genuine crap

[James2001]

The thing is, feeding it back to genuine VHS usually looks much better quality than people expect VHS to be :-P

[Neil Jones]

Oh I know, but producers of things that include the "VHS look" have this cock-eyed notion that VHS was a awful piece of junk that was virtually unwatchable, so lets use this filter that manages to make it look worse than it actually was!

It will always look "unwatchable" if you blow it up on a 65" screen mind you, but that's hardly surprising.

[TesTVWhirl]

When I did the birthday stuff for the website a few years back and made a point of recreating authentic 'postage-stamp, low bitrate RealVideo files from pres sites circa 2001', I actually recorded and played back everything through proper VHS machines to get that part of authenticity too. However as VHS in proper use was nowhere near as bad as people often remember especially at small sizes, I still had to very deliberately bypass and offset all the automatic tracking just to add in the noise lines some seem to think were there all the time or no-one would have noticed.

I'm guessing in 10 years time the 'Youtube look' will be in via a filter which distorts a perfectly good picture to try and make it look like someone is badly pointing an ipad camera at a funny angle at their TV, before sticking massive big 'ScreenCapGrabPro 10' and 'DivX' logos over the top.

[W. Knight]

Some interesting articles in TV archival:

Historical local footages in 60s and 70s discovered in a defunct WIN TV news bureau in Mildura, Victoria:
www.abc.net.au 

Treasure trove of historical Mildura footage saved in WIN TV building clear-out …
A historian intends to digitise the archival footage of Mildura taken from the f…
  Source: www.abc.net.au

An SCMP interview with VCRBase in Hong Kong, one of the larger local groups in saving old videotapes:
www.scmp.com 

Recording old Hong Kong on video: why this group believes digitising VHS tapes i…
HKVCRBase especially values collecting videotapes of old advertisements because …
  Source: www.scmp.com

[Si-Co]

Some CITV footage from 1989 that raises a question. This was the live era of CITV and on the monitor behind the presenter, you can see a VT clock counting down into the US import Disney’s Duck Tales. For some reason, this clock shows ITN! I’m not familiar at all with the cartoon series itself, but why would such a clock feature on the UK print? Was it perhaps edited at Grays Inn Road? Other than that, I can’t think of any reason why ITN would be linked to an American cartoon series!

youtu.be 

This video can only be viewed on YouTube.

Credit: TELEVISION HEAVEN UK

Sorry - seems you have to view on YouTube.

[James2001]

Presumably they were responsible for either editing it or playing it in (though admittedly I'd assumed imports were played from Central... but maybe some weren't).