Top of the Pops

It's almost like they're reading our posts, as the Paul McCartney YouTube channel uploaded an official version of the music video the other day (for some reason his music videos have never been posted officially to the site like other artists have).


It's still not great quality, certainly not a newly transferred remaster, but it does seem to have been cleaned up of scratches and dirt. I think the copy shown on TOTP 1979 is probably still the best, because you can actually see detail in dark areas rather than it just being black (and as it's a very dark video, in terms of lighting that is, that helps a lot).



But even better is this - a UHD, newly transferred version of the Last Christmas video. Wow! It almost looks wrong seeing it in such high detail like this. Worth noting by the way that the video was always shown in a 16:9 aspect ratio, originally with letterboxing of course, so it hasn't been cropped.

I find it quite interesting that they've kept the raw film footage for all these years.

Some of the outdoor shots still look ropey, but the indoor stuff looks great. I wonder if music channels will start using this (but downscaled) rather than the awful version they have now?

I also wish in general music channels would stop cropping 4:3 videos to widescreen. The majority of them look awful and worse still, some are cropped by whoever uploads them to YouTube as well so finding them in 4:3 is a struggle. Show it in the ratio it was made in, not some butchered form.

Yes, it seems the TOTP repeats are the only outlet left on British television for music videos in their correct aspect ratio.

Personally, I think even music videos with faux-letterbox effects should be left as 4:3 and pillarboxed, even if it does put the picture in box in the middle of the screen. The letterboxing is an intentional effect that's meant to be there, after all. There's plenty of music videos that play with the letterboxing as well, such as effects appearing over them or people stepping outside it, which is also totally lost when they're cropped off.

An effect that's destroyed by the black bars at the left and right though...

You can negate that by filling the left and right bars with something though.

When TOTP first went widescreen, their existing 4:3 title sequence of the time was adapted without cropping the top & bottom but instead by filling the extra width with flipped "reflections" of the left-most & right-most parts of what was already there (as if mirrors had been placed at the edges of the original 4:3 version).

I remember this, but have never found it online anywhere. Think it only lasted a few months.

Yes, it lasted up until the last regular edition of the year, the new titles were introduced on the Christmas day episode.

Have they gone back to the raw film footage or just the master tape?

When the Spice Girls reunited this year they released all their music videos in 4K using the masters and on the whole they looked incredible.




Although the green screen effects in 2 Become 1 look a bit ropey

You can tell it's the raw footage just from looking at it, it's clearly native HD, you wouldn't get that detail from a 35 year old SD master tape!



The dodgy ending shot they tacked onto the Viva Forever video is cringeworthy though! And I have actually seen that version pop up on TV on Now 90s, I had to rewind it and see it again to check I hadn't imagined it (then went back to a recording I made from another music channel years ago to check it hadn't always been there). Not sure how they thought that was a good idea.

One of my old lighting electrician colleagues in the McCartney video near the end - we did pull his leg about doing some moonlighting on it at the time! Not the best technical quality (and for those interested in such things - some Quad tape head velocity errors clearly seen in the mix to the pink at the end).