Idle thought: I don't think I've ever seen one of these TV emulator things implement the situation where the vertical oscillator was slightly wrong and you get the picture slowly looping up the screen.
This one does. You can configure the noise injected into the signal and when it gets too much, it loses sync and the picture starts rolling. It's actually a software NTSC modulator/demodulator, not just an effect to simulate it. https://github.com/LMP88959/NTSC-CRT
These are both amazing projects, but why does NTSC-CRT feel more accurate to how I remember television looking than ntsc-rs?
I'll wait until they do some PAL emulation: take an NTSC source, blurrily upscale it to 576p, apply a crap deinterlacing algorithm to produce a technically progressive image, and some frame blending to get it to 25 fps. Shitorific.
Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out…
I never heard of this quote, but "heard" something similar a while ago, must have been 2020. I was watching a live worship session on Youtube and it was beautiful, kept my mind at peace. Now mind you at the same time I was also a perfectionist, which means you tend to see imperfections in others. Now at a certain point the singer's voice broke as she was hitting a high note. But before I could mentally register the i…
Cracks in the voice are so visceral. One I love is in the Rolling Stone's Gimme Shelter, Merry Clayton is just about screaming and her voice cracks and they kept the band's cheering reaction to it on the record [1]. Truly a case of the subject matter trying to break out of the medium.
Related is that a lot of cultures embrace intentional imperfections in art for spiritual reasons, as it conveys authenticity and humility in the face of perfection. E.g. Persian flaw [2].
Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out…
> "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature [...] I bet the first viewers of VHS were busier with marveling at color, compactness and convenience instead of thinking of the new medium as something ugly and nasty. New technology that gets very popular usually starts as state of the art and impressive, and it's only in retrospect that people think of…
I've always disliked VHS. Broadcast TV was available for comparison at the time and it looked much better.
DVD resolution seemed fine to me at the time - it does not seem fine anymore.
Cassettes were not great, not terrible compared to CDs. That is still the case because stereo audio doesn't get much better than CDs.
Conclusion: Whether something seems good at the time depends on availability of something similar but better.
Film is a fun, interesting, authentic, and useful medium for filmmakers, and there are established workflows for it. A camcorder writing interlaced video to miniDV may have its charms (I still have a great old Panasonic 3CCD one) but as a filmmaking tool it would be really inconvenient. Shooting in an ordinary digital workflow and adding the effect later is a no brainer production-wise. That said, I would not be surp…
In 2009, I recorded a video of the after effects of a torrential downpour in Toronto on a Sony HDV camera. I also called up a few news stations to see if I could sell it. I ended up reaching CFTO (CTV Toronto), and took the footage over to Channel 9 Court. What happened next took me by complete surprise. The flagship station of a national network had no deck in the building that would play HDV mini DV tapes. I hadn’t…
This started long ago. In the 1980s, pros used 60 minute Umatic cassettes because it was the standard and it was the highest quality format. Home users had VHS and Beta (and laserdisc and CED discs and...) The pro market was mostly short videos / news segments / local insertion commercials so a 60 minute Umatic tape limitation was fine with the pros. In the home market, VHS won over Beta in part because the recording time was longer and it meant that most rental movies didn't need a second cassette and a swap in the middle of the movie. To your point, most video production companies had VHS and Beta decks if they needed home formats (I was playing with my VHS-C camcorder and caught that plane crash on tape), but even in the dark ages of NTSC, pros didn't want to use home formats unless they absolutely had to.
That's nice. I've always been a fan of this effect. I myself was working on something (way simpler) in the past. I was just getting a pixel splitting into three separate values (r,g,b) and plotting them side by side to emulate LED behavior. I end up creating an image that you can use on your website to give the impression of lines - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/oldTerminal (that was the best I was able to do without using canvas, for the web).
Which is why NTSC was often said to mean Never Twice the Same Color!
In my decades working in TV it was always "Never The Same Color." See also: Picture At Last! See also: System Essentially Contrary to the American Method
French gonna french. I have always been fascinated by their engineering. There was this joke that Renault headquarters is 16 floors, on the 16 is the top brass, on the 15 are the engineers that design the cars, and the rest 14 floors try desperately to figure out how to assemble them.
Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out…
> "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature [...] I bet the first viewers of VHS were busier with marveling at color, compactness and convenience instead of thinking of the new medium as something ugly and nasty. New technology that gets very popular usually starts as state of the art and impressive, and it's only in retrospect that people think of…
It was “good enough” for them at the time. Technology is and was always about something good enough for most people. But the Eno quote is about art and aesthetic.