Poor quality "Official" music videos can't be upgraded due to copyright?

[aramkolt]

I'm sure some of you have noticed that some older music videos on YouTube are extremely crappy quality video-wise.

I thought it would be cool to obtain some of those videos on U-Matic which would have been used by the likes of MTV and others for broadcast in the 90's since I've got the equipment to digitize them.

I kind of assumed that YouTube would flag for copyright, still let me publish, and then just appropriately direct any generated-revenue to the copyright holder. In reality, it just won't let me publish the video at all. Part of why I want to do this is to showcase the hardware being used which is technically fair use, but you can't really argue with a hard stop when uploading.

Just to give an idea of the level of improvement that is possible, I've uploaded a screen recording of the official video for "Walk on the Ocean" on the left and my U-Matic transfer that is also uploaded to YouTube, but unwatchable by anyone other than me because it cannot be published due to the copyright. The original music video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12bM1CqHoBY

Having the side by side screen recording removes the "YouTube compression/player"-factor since my capture is also "Youtube compressed/played" and is as it would appear if I were to be able to publish. The audio in the attached clip is just my computer's microphone, so don't mind that.

So...... I guess the world is just stuck with crappy-quality "official" music videos if their owners don't care to update them themselves? I suspect in a lot of cases that the original music videos are lost, or at least difficult to obtain, or the artists would have updated them by now.

[The 14th Doctor]

Pretty much, sadly some music tracks have more heavy copyright restrictions than others. Need to edit that content out myself when I do TV recordings.

You either get songs that make it so the video is blocked worldwide, or only certain countries..

[dellsam34]

Pretty much you have to file a claim for every video you upload and hope the copyright owner won't request to block your video or ask for a copyright strike, I'm not sure if all of them are legally copyright owners and they can monetize your video and YT has no way of knowing if they are indeed the copyright owners unless you gamble on taking them to court which could end up in losing the case if they are proven to be right, and that's what they are banking on. We've seen examples of false claims from some YT members who talked about it publicly.

To do this you have to have a dedicated channel for just this purpose, because you could get a copyright strike or a suspension of your account for a certain number of days, repeated offenses could lead to a permanent closure of your account, So have a backup of all your videos just in case.

[hech54]

Telegenics Number 118C. Top 40. January 1993

[aramkolt]

Telegenics Number 118C. Top 40. January 1993

Yeah, it's hard to find specific older compilation tapes like the Telegenics, though those were all VHS as far as I know and should be lower quality than U-Matic.

I'd love to do a direct comparison of say the Wolfram (Betamax) vs Telegenics (VHS) vs U-Matic of the same song, but finding all of those would be difficult these days. Also seems more and more pointless if I can't share the improved videos to replace the poorly aged official versions.

[hech54]

Telegenics Number 118C. Top 40. January 1993

Yeah, it's hard to find specific older compilation tapes like the Telegenics, though those were all VHS as far as I know and should be lower quality than U-Matic.

I'd love to do a direct comparison of say the Wolfram (Betamax) vs Telegenics (VHS) vs U-Matic of the same song, but finding all of those would be difficult these days. Also seems more and more pointless if I can't share the improved videos to replace the poorly aged official versions.

I think there was a Promo Only compilation DVD release of it.