you know what really sucks? the compressification of pre-online footage.

there is so much footage being shared these days of video, like advertisements and old tv shows that is horribly, horribly compressed, probably because it's ripped from YouTube uploads. video essays will show a 90s commercial and it'll be a 480p mess of garbled compression blocks. i honestly believe we are training people who weren't from that era to believe that tv looked like this in those days. there's a difference between high quality low resolution footage, and the mess we see on YouTube.

i really hope that there is a movement to archive low resolution footage with less compression before it is lost forever. it feels like a pretty big archival problem--I've seen that even archive.org suffers from compressed footage sometimes.

meanwhile we are about to enter an era of proliferation of ai upscaled versions of these videos. so the videos that are shitty versions will become high resolution shitty versions that are harder to differentiate between the real version... it's very worrying.