archival footage!

[RetroTVNitekatt]

I enjoy "American Dreams",and Have you ever wondered about how they restore that classic AB footage?

The existing "American Bandstand" shows are 16mm kinescopes (Film recordings from special tv monitors made for this purpose.) As Video Tape was still expensive to use once. (This is also why Dick Clark's "Where The Action Is" and ABC's "Shindig" only exist as 16mm kinescopes and not video tape.) Which are digitally treated to improve quality.

To improve the quality of the 1960's footage they run it through a digital program to increase the resolution of the image-it's a process that doubles the resolution based on the fact TV sets run 30 frames per second and film runs 24. It "restores" the missing frames and makes it look as close to live/video tape as possible. Not to mention a touch up of the footage to remove scratches and stuff from the film negatives to make it look as close as the original tv broadcast/video tape as possible. The time and cost to do is clearly one of the factors that they don't use more actually footage.

Of course,the other reason it's cheaper to recreate performances (and a great appeal of the show!),then clear and get the rights to use both the footage and actually recordings.