I wish the stupid youtube compressor hadn't hit it with the "SD doesn't matter" settings. VHS should look way better than this, but there's digital macroblocks everywhere, and as sibling comment said, no longer 60i.

I agree though, for a videotape that old, it must not have been played very much for the tracking to still be that solid. Also modern "record NTSC Video to your computer" USB dongles tend to be unable to deal with even slightly unsteady CSYNC signal, so they must've used good equipment. Too bad about the youtube.

I wish it was 60 fps though. At some point the footage was probably deinterlaced by discarding every other field. (Also, YouTube would not show it as 60 fps anyways as the resolution must be upscaled to at least 720p for the 60 fps option to be available.)

I understand this is very typical with online video. I wish it wasn't though.

Have you never watched a movie from before the 90's? :)

Star Wars? :) Sure, the tech was there, but it probably wasn't affordable for everything. Plus the preservation. This is before mass consumer digital media (maybe something like laserdiscs were available though?)

It's weirder than that; I watched the Silicon Cowboys documentary about compaq, and the archived footage quality takes a sharp dive from the 70s to the 80s as they switched from recording on film to videotape.

Tape quality was good and a lot cheaper, but it doesn't last as long before the video signal gets munged