U.K. Skate Video Archiving *See 1st Post For Archive Link*

This is spreadsheet is really great work and I give massive props to everyone involved… BUT, this is really gonna fuck up my x-files episodes per day rate so I’m pretty conflicted about this whole thread

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Stay up later, then.

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much props to all involved with this

I think I have a copy of Bubblegum Weekend on mini DV somewhere…

As in, what would have been a ‘master’ back then?
Actually, way too early for Mini DV.

Was that how you pirated it?

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digitised Fraser’s copy when he was at Skate of Mind. Video must be 92 ish

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Oh wow there’s the demo footy from when eS came to Swansea in that vid, mwad.

Drop a video into a HD timeline (think it’s 720x1440 or something similar - don’t quote me on the exact settings) then you change pixel aspect ratio, render it in a HD setting and when you upload to Youtube, it shouldn’t get compressed and retains the quality.

Some people don’t like the older videos being in 60fps and that’s another debate altogether, but it keeps the quality close to how it should be.

No it doesn’t! haha.
50/60fps for old videos like this solely means your computer is generating fake frames in between the 25/30 real frames it was shot in. It’s a step further away from how it was shot and presented originally.

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Ah I meant the actual ‘HD’ timeline, not the 60fps, sorry I should’ve proof read it before I sent it. What I was trying to say is that although you get the ‘60FPS’ because of that, the quality it’s self is close to how you’d see it on the TV.

I have noticed weird jagged lines or some sort of hazing sometimes, so I guess that kind of cancels out what I’m saying.

But…TVs only ever showed 25/30fps back then so any 50/60 export is absolutely not what it originally looked like. Exporting with those sort of frame rates is a step further away from how you’d see it on TV.

If you really want to go deep on it, your old videos were shot interlaced at 25/30fps. That comprised of two fields per frame. Lower and Upper/Odd and Even lines.

…but that is not the same as 60fps.

Because of this, the truth is that none of these videos will never look the same on Youtube no matter your export settings.

The only way to really do it is to get a CRT/big back TV and plug it into a VHS or DVD player.

Thats a big reason why I find it so odd that the VX still exists - because the final image is quite different to the image from the era it claims to be harking back to.
…and yeah, I get that the fisheye looks great. But even that has been superseded (IMHO) with HD 4:3

/tangent

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Oh yeah I’m not gonna say it’s exactly how you’d watch it years ago, it’s been a while since I’ve watched a video on an old TV, so I think some people’s memories are skewed when they say that the ‘HD’ timeline uploads are how you’d remember seeing the vids back in t’day.

I’m not gonna claim any big knowledge with export settings 'cause I’ve only recently dabbled with uploading with the ‘HD’ settings recently, whereas before I just went in and farted around with MPEG streamclip or just tweaked a few things doing a h264 file in Adobe. When I re-uploaded a part from the Washer vid of Tommy I just upload it in a HD timeline to get around the horrible YT compression issues and try to retain some of the original quality. You also get other issues with YT where it makes everything ‘dark’ in certain parts, which is another annoyance.

To be honest I like VX for how it looks at night and the colours during the day, rather than the whole ‘nostalgia’ a lot of people claim haha. I’ll be using mine until it finally dies or the data recorder I’ve attached to it bites the dust. HD 4:3 is the way forward fo sho.

Yeah, compression with youtube (and Premiers inability to deal with H264 very well) do weird things, indeed.

I’m not going to knock any camera really. If you enjoy making videos with it, thats all that matters. VX, HD, iPhone…Whatever.

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It’s a shame there wasn’t any real way around it back when Youtube first came out, a lot of older edits look really weird on new monitors, but I think they always looked pretty…off?

Yeah doesn’t matter about the format, it matters more how you do it. Really like seeing what people are doing in the HD 4:3 thread on Slap, some really cool setups (even people using a MK1 on HD cams, which is rad.)

In other news I’ve put another channel together for the sole purpose of uploading some of the older Welsh scene vids I have. Once I sort out a few issues with two vids I got (compression related, looks like you’re viewing the vid through water) I’ll post some here and I’ll upload the spreadsheet.

Yeah, a lot of stuff got uploaded when YT would max out at 360p. They added 480p later but it was more compressed that DV, of course.

Thats why a lot of skaters used Vimeo early on as the data rates were better (this was all pre-music blocking on youTube) and you could allow people to download the OG file.
Once HD streaming really took off, Vimeo then decided that anything other than widescreen was ‘amateur’ so 4:3 videos had limited max compression. So, everyone bounced back to YouTube and carried on 4:3.
It’s only been in the past 5-6 years that people realised you could upload SD shit in a HD format and trick YT into giving you more bandwidth.

So, anything pre-2015(ish) kind of needs reuploading, which will never happen as unlike Vimeo you can’t replace the video file once uploaded (Which sucks when you notice a mistake 3 weeks after release).

Sick!

What are you using to compress?Honestly, the “YouTube 720” sort of presets are usually solid in things like Premiere/Media Encoder. Try those…You might need to de-interlace if you are using the original DV master to re-encode.

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I’m going to try this now and reupload the two videos I put up last week. What field order do I need to export? I’ve noticed that some new VX footage uploaded on Thrasher still looks horribly interlaced but I’m sure that can be avoided. Also do you know if exporting at 1080 over 720 will further stop the bitrate decreasing?

I remember that happening, in fact a lot of stuff I put on Youtube was reuploaded to Vimeo for a while during 2014 or so, mainly because of the compression related woes I had.

I’ll probably use those YT presets in Adobe, aye. I was having a right mare with those brightness issues I mentioned above, alongside some weird colour distortion (like how a lot of yellows were very orange). All of those were sorted by using the pre-set Youtube settings.

Anything I’m putting on from original VHS tapes will be ported in through Virtualdub, which I think I set to deinterlace anyways. Although I might see if I can use another program, because I do think I lose quality from what I can remember. Probably the way I’ve set it up I imagine.

1080 is a big step up in data rate, but 720 is already above the MiniDV data rate, so it’s kind of pointless going higher. But…nothing stopping you.

RE" Deinterlacing: Set the field order to ‘progressive’.

Thanks, just did a test and it was hard to tell the difference in 720, but 1080 was a big step up.

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Is there a way we (@Les_Zeppelin) could export this and put it somewhere else, with cover images and embedded videos?

Maybe some shoe company would want to pay for it. ‘Carium presents: U.K. Skate Video Archive’ has a ring to it.

Oh, god.

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