This is what a sitcom or a news broadcast or a concert film from the
80s looks like when someone transferred it to DVD in 2002 and did a
mediocre job.
The source was captured on a three-tube camera. Sony BVP-360 or
Ikegami HK-323 with a Fujinon zoom lens. Recorded to 1-inch Type C
videotape or Betacam SP. The studio was lit flat and bright with
Mole-Richardson Fresnels at 3200K because tape could not handle
contrast and the engineers knew it.
The tube cameras did something digital cameras cannot. When a light
hit the tube too hard, it bloomed. Not like a lens flare. Like the
image was gently burning from within. Highlights spread soft and warm
into the surrounding area. Bright objects moving fast left a luminance
trail behind them comet tailing. And because three separate tubes
handled red, green, and blue, and because perfect alignment was
impossible, you get microscopic color fringing at hard edges where the
tubes disagree about where the line is.
Then someone took that tape and squeezed it through an MPEG-2 encoder
at maybe 6 megabits per second onto a DVD. And the encoder did what
encoders do: it broke gradients into staircase steps you can count. It
left 8x8 pixel blocks visible in dark areas where there was not enough
data to describe the shadow smoothly. It put faint ringing halos along
every high-contrast edge. It softened everything to 720x480 and called
it done.
The result is warm, soft, slightly compressed, and unmistakable. It is
not ugly. It has a density and a weight that modern 4K video lacks.
Every pixel is working.
Always 4:3 aspect ratio. Always.
