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 May 1, 2005 Messing With a Good Thing Every branch of technology, including video, develops and improves with each new generation. It’s taken video longer than most to live up to its potential, but the strides of the past few years have been impressive. All it took was a realization by those responsible for designing and marketing products that there was a demand for improvement, and it began to happen.This is all to the good, of course. The upgrading of the video system is a positive thing in itself, and it’s just in its infancy. But it brings its own frustrations to those of us who have been dabbling in video recording for a number of years -- years when technical progress was slow or nonexistent. The typical videophile has amassed a collection of VHS tapes recorded before the improvements happened, and these tend to look worse and worse as other technologies advance. There are a number of things that can be done to get the most out of older recordings. The most obvious is to upgrade the monitor on which they are viewed, which will also pay benefits for more recently recorded material. Most of us, however, must be content to accept older recordings as the flawed products of early technology and just try to enjoy them, warts and all, as best we can. The professional software industry has never been comfortable with that philosophy. The major video and audio recording companies own huge inventories of material that they naturally want to sell for as long as possible, but many of them still believe that consumers are interested only in movies or records produced with the latest techniques, and therefore attempt to simulate current recording methods using old material. Sometimes this works out very well. All those old analog music tapes gathering dust in the vaults of the record companies definitely benefited from being reissued on compact discs because it was the delivery system -- the vinyl disc -- that was flawed, rather than the master tapes themselves. On the other hand, the record companies persisted for years in synthesizing two-channel versions of old monaural recordings, in the belief that no one would buy a record that wasn’t in stereo. The fact that the rechanneled versions are always inferior to the originals didn’t seem to matter -- the record jacket had to say "stereo" somewhere on it. A similar thing happened in video, beginning in the 1980s, with equally unsatisfying results. After decades of fighting the forces of electronic video, the movie studios finally came to terms with the fact that more people watched their products at home than ever ventured out to a theater, and they determined to capitalize on that. But they had to find a way to take advantage of the huge investment they’d made over the years, and so got heavily into the business of rereleasing classic films. Many of the best of these old flicks had been filmed in black and white, however, and those who owned the rights to them seemed bent on repeating the errors of the stereo-crazy music industry by "colorizing" them. Some classic TV shows were treated the same way, although few viewers found that as upsetting. Part of the problem is that many older films are no longer owned by the people who made them, and who might have had an interest in preserving them as they were originally produced. Rather, much of the inventory was acquired by companies whose main interest was video distribution, and who believed that films, however important, would not sell unless they were in color. Never mind the fact that many of these films were produced long after the introduction of color film, and therefore were made in monochrome because the filmmakers wanted them that way. They’re still being colorized. It may be that the owners of these films are correct to a degree. Some buyers undoubtedly do prefer their viewing to be in color, whatever the source material. And it can’t be denied that some of the techniques used to add color to these old black-and-white films were very effective; sometimes it’s hard to know whether the original was in color or not. Even so, film students and aficionados will never be likely to accept the altered prints of their favorites, and the economic reality is that the current owners of the films -- not to mention video dealers -- would probably resist setting up a double-inventory system in which both versions were available. Colorized prints still show up on the tube with reasonable frequency, many of them old MGM films. I was reminded of this by a passage in Jane Fonda’s new autobiography, My Life So Far, in which she talks about her first meeting with her future husband, Ted Turner. He had purchased the MGM film library and was positively gleeful that his company was ruining these old movies by adding color. I saw one on television recently, and it looked awful. There is one sign of progress. As these classic films are reissued on DVD, the ones that have been colorized often include the original B&W version as well. ...Ian G. Masters
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