Late 90s and early 00s broadcasting footage looks almost as clear as HD?

[Marvolo]

Included is an archival file from one of our country's (Germany) main broadcaster, ARD, about a major news event from the early 00s (9/11 2001). The following clip is from September 14 2001. To make it clear: it's not a capture / digitization by myself or anything, this is coming right from the source - the ARD archive.

I don't know what kind of equipment the ARD used during that time, presumably BetacamSP (?).
Anyway, I'm quite astonished at how crisp and clear the footage looks given it's an analog, pre-digital format. Especially the shots from inside the news studio don't look "analog" to me at all, much in contrast to the "live footage shots" from the US where the image seems to become quite noticibly worse compared to that from the studio. I wonder if that's due to the NTSC-to-PAL-conversion or whether the footages in the US really looked like that back in the day? What I also notice about the US footage is small rectangular lines moving from the bottom to the top of the picture. These only appear in the US footage, not in the studio shots.

German live footage shots in contrast seems to be not as bad-looking, yet not as good-looking as the studio shots, so I wonder if maybe the transfer from the US over to Germany might have taken its toll on the overall quality? In pre-digital times, how did they send live footage around the planet? Hardly as a tape by (airplane) mail, especially for breaking news.

Do you think there have been some restoration processes going on on this footage or would analog material from the late 90s / early 00s have always looked so good and clear? It's actually not what I remember analog material to be like. I remember it to be far worse, especially thinking of my own analog footage on VHS or other formats.

[Marvolo]

PS: and here we have the September 11 footage.
What surprises me here is that the studio footage looks noticibly worse from that of September 14 above. I wonder why that might be. Surely they wouldn't have upgraded their entire studio equipment within just 3 days...

[Bwaak]

BetaSP is a good professional format, analog component, introduced in 1986 (original Betacam was introduced in 1982). DigiBeta was introduced around 1992-1993. VHS and other color-under formats including Umatic are garbage.

For international exchange there have been satellite uplinks since the late 1960s.

[Marvolo]

DigiBeta was introduced around 1992-1993.

So you think that's what the footage is based on? DigiBeta?

[Selur]

Most of the content from the 50th (or even earlier) and newer should be 16mm and the content in the ARD archive was digitalized and filtered,.. (there is also a 'retro' archive )

[Marvolo]

Well, this wasn't the 50s and I strongly assume they weren't using 16mm film in 2001.

[pandy]

Many broadcasters similar to ARD (so largest, nation wide, rich) started transition in their studio equipment toward HD since at least beginning of 90's so SD material was frequently down-converted from HD - don't forget that EU started HD TV programs (Eureka 95 if i recall correctly) in half of the 80's - there was idea for analog. Yep - my memory was quite OK: HDTV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-MAC?useskin=vector

[Selur]

You are correct, but the point is that they weren't using something worse.
iirc. 16mm was still used in the 80th and 90th and there were still some 35mm content for documentations in the early 2000.

[Bwaak]

I hope that ARD has kept important stuff in 25i/50p, not in 25p like these files.

Hard news were shot on video since mid-1960s by independent reporters. The invention of TBC made unstable helical video broadcastable, so small and large stations started switching to UMatic from mid-1970s and used it for hard news.

Actualities that were not breaking news were still shot on 16-mm film. The BBC used 16-mm film into mid-1980s, because UMatic was garbage, portable 1-inch machines were bulky, and Betacam has just appeared. From the late 1980s onwards most of the stuff was video except documentaries, which were often shot on 16-mm film, one of the reasons was film look.

The BBC Archive.
Sony DigiBeta promo.

AFAIK, HD was not widely used, even for origination. This is a unique and interesting film: 50 Jahre HDTV und mehr by Rainer Bücken and Klaus Burosch. I have it on BD, but the HD scenes are in 25p, which sucks.

Reely Interesting has quite a few high quality videos digitized from different formats.