YouTube and Universal Music Group announced today that they will "remaster" some of the most famous music videos of all time.They want to "ensure that present and future generations can enjoy these timeless classics in a way they have never experienced before". The most important thing was to upgrade the resolution from SD to HD.
With the announcement, 100 music videos have already been remastered, which are also available online via Vevo. Among them are Billy Idol, Beastie Boys, Boyz II Men, Janet Jackson, Kiss, Maroon 5, Meat Loaf, No Doubt, Kiss and Tom Petty.
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New videos will be added weekly in the future, with Youtube and Universal aiming to put around 1,000 videos online by the end of 2020. To make this special video easier to find, "REMASTERED IN HD!" will be added to the video descriptions and #Remastered hash tags will be added to the labels. A direct search for these keywords and the hashtag also lists a lot of other videos. So you have to stumble over the new versions until further notice.
Anyone who has experienced puberty in the last millennium will certainly spend a minute or two browsing, but we are personally disappointed on several levels. First of all the HD-remasterd versions don't look brilliant at all, but hardly better than common, automated upscaling algorithms. Sometimes even visible interlaced artefacts appear at the edges, which we wouldn't expect from a high-sounding term like Remastered. And secondly, it almost hurts your heart to see how cheap many of these videos seem from today's point of view, while at the time they were cool enough not to be questioned. Well. Maybe the upcoming AI can tackle both problems again and finally produce some really cool, AI remastered versions in 4K, which will really look the way we mistakenly remember them.
