Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
A spot from November sweeps 2004, this one had some serious technical hurdles to pass. An interview was conducted with a local couple who participated in ABC's "Wife Swap" show. The footage we had of the original show in question was on a VHS tape in very questionable shape, and it looked horrible. So how do you still show it? The answer in this case was to shrink it down as much as possible. To justify that, I used a bit of stock footage and kept the entire spot "on the TV" seen in the spot itself, thus hiding some of the video deficiencies (while also making it a bit of a meta message).
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
A spot from November sweeps 2004, this one had some serious technical hurdles to pass. An interview was conducted with a local couple who participated in ABC's "Wife Swap" show. The footage we had of the original show in question was on a VHS tape in very questionable shape, and it looked horrible. So how do you still show it? The answer in this case was to shrink it down as much as possible. To justify that, I used a bit of stock footage and kept the entire spot "on the TV" seen in the spot itself, thus hiding some of the video deficiencies (while also making it a bit of a meta message).
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
