These days, kids identify them by the aspect ratio.

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    1 year ago

    And video quality. Watching some historical videos from my childhood, like tv shows on youtube… the quality is pure potato. Either the archiving is terrible, or we just accepted much worse quality back then.

    • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There’s a lot of archival video that is just terrible. Digital video compression issues have damaged a lot of old footage that’s gotten shared over the years, especially YouTube’s encoders. They will just straight up murder videos to save bandwidth. There’s also a lot of stuff that just doesn’t look great when it’s being upscaled from magnetic media that’s 240x320 at best.

      However, there’s also a lot of stuff that was bad to begin with and just took advantage of things like scanlines and dithering to make up for poor video quality. Take old games for example. There’s a lot of developers who took advantage of CRT TVs to create shading, smoothing, and the illusion of a higher resolution that a console just wasn’t capable of. There’s a lot of contention in the retro gaming community over whether games looked better with scanlines or if they look better now without them.

      For example.

      Personally, I prefer them without. I like the crisp pixelly edges, but I was also lucky enough to play most of my games on a high quality monitor instead of a TV back then. Then emulators, upscaling, and pixel smoothing became a thing…

    • Hypersapien@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      People always said that Betamax was better quality than VHS. What never gets mentioned is that regular consumer TVs at the time weren’t capable of displaying the difference in quality. To the average person they were the same.

    • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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      1 year ago

      I watch a lot of hockey. Just watching hockey games from the 2000s are full on potato. I don’t remember them looking that bad back then.

  • When I was a kid I used to think black and white meant the TV show or whatever used to be in color but since it got old it turned black and white. My thought process was they changed color just like old people’s hair turns grey… This was 35 years ago before internet.

    • Grimlo9ic@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That’s such a trip. Only a 6 year difference between the two of you, yet you experienced the dawn of something and they didn’t, and it shapes both of your perspectives so much.

      Even though it technically applies to transistors, Moore’s Law has been a good barometer for the increase of complexity and capabilities of technology in general. And now because of your comment I’m kinda thinking that since the applicability of that law seems to be nearing its end, it’s either tech will stagnate in the next decade (possible, but I think unlikely), or we may be due for another leapfrog into a higher level of sophistication (more likely).

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    1 year ago

    Lotta old shows are re-formated just to have the wider screen, since they would still film at higher res for movies or just because. It’s not just an indication of age if something is still only in 4:3, it’s an indication of thrift or just a general lack of giving a shit about the future.

  • perviouslyiner@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Asteroid City switched between aspect ratios as well as switching between black&white as they swapped between the TV story and the ‘real’/cinema story.

      • perviouslyiner@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Even for fans of his films, you have to be prepared for the weirdness to be dialled up to 11 in this one. It’s the cinema equivalent of “I’m so meta, even this acronym”.

        Any of his others would be an easier and maybe more satisfying watch. It’s a nice enough story of course, with the usual silly and neurotic characters and bizarre beautiful sets - just don’t be surprised when people come out of the cinema looking confused.

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    I identified them by awkward haircuts and clothing styles. I knew something was off / wrong, but it wasn’t until adulthood that I was able to piece it together.

  • rm_dash_r_star@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Can always tell when a show is 4:3 aspect. Recently I’ve noticed some modern TV shows adopting the theater aspects of flat (1.85:1) or scope (2.4:1) which I think is pretty cool. The last episode of Strange New Worlds I watched was in scope, that’s some high end filming.

    • CeruleanRuin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      SNW is really top tier production quality across the board. The camera work, the sound, music, design, everything is goddamned impeccable, and that extends to the post production. So much thought goes into every part of it, and I really have to give Paramount its kudos for enabling that level of attention to detail in all aspects of the franchise right now. If I told a fellow Trekkie in the 90s that we would ever see the day, they would laugh.