Minor Project- Films with Bad Video

While researching films with bad audio, it only seemed fair to research films with bad video and weigh up each side. Surprisingly, other than films with really bad visual effects, they're aren't too many films with low quality visuals, that weren't because of the time and availability of technology during that era. Films such as The Blair Witch Project were filmed on a low budget and used the low quality visuals (and also audio) to it's advantage through a clever marketing scheme. Many 80's and 90's films have been criticised for their bad quality and foggy like cinematography but this is mainly due to the converting and restoring process at the time. Many films from earlier decades like the 60's have been remastered and tend to look better than films from the 80's and 90's because they are yet to be remastered.

Films that are probably considered to have the lowest quality of footage is the earliest form of it, such as silent films but you can't criticise this genre based on its visual look and quality. It started the whole industry off and set us on the path we're on now.

A recent release film that seems to have the attention of movie fans due to its low quality visuals in theatres is Spectre (2015)

"At this point, I noticed that the quality of the main film was nothing like as good as the preceding material.

It looked soft, unsaturated, grainy (but not in a good way) and noisy and indistinct in the shadows. At times it almost looked like a high-res version of a VHS recording!

I have no idea what was going on here. I don’t know if there was something wrong, or whether this cinema buys lower resolution copies for its secondary screens (I really do doubt that). Or maybe I’ve got so used to digital that I was noticing that most of the movie was acquired on 35mm film. I’m no expert on cinema film delivery or projection, but I am used to looking at very high quality material, and this certainly wasn’t.

It was all the more striking because I had already seen that the cinema was capable of projecting extremely high quality pictures."

Now this seems to be up for debate at the moment but there are numerous accounts of people having the same viewing experience. Most high budget films are of very high visual quality so the quality of Spectre at these cinemas must have really been low for people to have noticed and talked about it after there experience. 

Sources:

https://www.avforums.com/threads/spectre-picture-quality.1989810/

http://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/3093-why-was-spectre-s-image-quality-so-poor-when-i-saw-it-in-the-cinema