VidFIRE

VidFIRE (an abbreviation of "video field interpolation restoration effect") is a technology intended to restore the video-like motion of footage originally shot with television cameras that have been converted to formats with telerecording as their basis. The word is both a noun and a verb; in a sense, it is the opposite of filmizing, which makes video look like film.

Background

Film recorded for the purposes of United Kingdom television production is usually recorded at 25 frames per second; there is an unrecorded temporal gap between each frame and the next. In contrast, video pictures are recorded as a stream of video fields. Each field can be loosely seen as half a frame, but each field is also a discrete image separated from the previous field by 1/50 second. This difference in the rate of change of the image is one of the factors contributing to the "video look", familiar to viewers as the more immediate, "live" feel seen in many soap operas and sports programmes.

When videotape technology was first created in the 1950s, tapes were extremely costly; but their reusability meant that the cost of a single tape could be spread across several productions, with each successive production erasing and then reusing the tape from a previous one, with the result that relatively few programmes produced on videotape in the 1950s and 1960s still exist in their original format.

The expense of videotape and the various mutually incompatible television standards around the world made it impractical at the time for programme makers to sell their productions to foreign broadcasters in their original video form. Film, however, was considered a universal medium, and most broadcasters had the facility to broadcast from it. Before the development of practical video tape, programme makers such as the BBC
...