cool facts | reCapture

cool facts | how video works... mostly

NTSC video origins:

The technology used to record and transmit color TV in the USA from 1953-2016.had to be compatible with all the old black & white TV's already in the public's living rooms. The National Television Subcommittee on Color was gathered to develop a way to transmit color alongside B&W TV. It was considered by many video technicians as poor compromise for making the old B&W TV stations capable of displaying and transmitting the new color technology. A running joke with many TV engineers was that NTSC stood for Never The Same Color because TVs were so bad at reproducing color from one set to another.

Digital Video Files are stored in two ways: either as Lossless or Lossy methods. Lossless video files - also known as Uncompressed Video such as QuickTime 422 HQ - has no compromises, recording every detail and color with precision. Whereas a Lossy - or Compressed Video file such as an MP4 - decreases the precision of the video by eliminating details the human eye doesn’t notice and creates compromises in color and how motion is perceived. An Uncompressed Video is superior to a Lossy Video file, but the Lossy file is often 1/10th to 1/100th smaller in data size - yet can look surprisingly similar to the uncompressed original. Our master working files - UDMs - are saved in the Uncompressed QuickTime ProRes 422 HQ format, whereas the delivered video files are MP4's running at 15/Mbs for a good compromise of size versus quality. The UDMs (Uncompressed Digital Masters) can be purchased for an additional fee, but know they can be huge...10s to 100s of Gigabytes large.

Interlaced video frames:

The early broadcast technology had a hard time transmitting visual information over their limited-bandwidth airways. To achieve a viable picture, TV images were sliced into two Half-Resolution scans known as Fields that resembled your fingers of each hand nestled within each other. This created a series of alternating pictures that were reassembled - Interlaced - into Frames running at 29.97fps*. An unfortunate side-effect of the interlacing process was an often blurry half-resolution image when seen as a still frame.

* This silly frame-rate has haunted us video editors and graphics designers ever since. The reason for this slightly-slower-than-B&W video's 30fps can be learned at this Wikipedia page about the curse that was NTSC.

these color bars still haunt us to this day