Between our inception in the year 2000 until June 2010, all the video we shot was in Standard Definition. Between July 2010 and Jan 2021, everything was shot and mastered in HD 1080p. Since then, everything has been shot in 4k.
Our current standard of 4k video is pretty good, and plan to stick with it for a few years at least.
Our HD1080 video is quite good, and we always encoded to a high bitrate so the HD versions of videos appear to a high standard. We may consider up-scaling HD 1080 videos to 4k in 2030 or so.
Our Standard Definition (SD) video is very low quality compared to today’s standards, and due to issues with the internet at the time, our videos were quite “compressed” (reduced in quality so they could be downloaded in a reasonable timeframe for most users).
For this reason, we’re looking into recapturing our SD content from the original MiniDV tapes, re-editing, and re-releasing on the site.
What’s involved
This is an enormous and complex project – we have around 3,500 MiniDV tapes, and this is old, outdated technology – while it would be simple to do an analog capture, the quality is appalling. So we’re working to do digital capture (MiniDV stored the media digitally) to retain maximum image quality. That means using reliable Firewire cables (haha), Win7, firewire PCI cards from the 90’s and capture software from the early 2000’s. 25 years is ancient in computing, and getting the capture system working is very tedious.
The MiniDV tapes have been in cool and dark storage for the last 12 years, and are in very good condition. In tests so far, no tapes are damaged. Thankfully, the tapes are almost all labelled very clearly, and we seem to not be missing any (though we’re not sure how to tell that for sure).
Capturing is in real-time. Once we have a reliable capture system set up, we can look at scaling up to have several systems capturing concurrently (ie, several MiniDV playback devices, several PC’s).
ABOVE: Sorting out tapes, in this case from Solo model shoots.
How it works
We have made a few tests of capturing full shoots, editing them and upscaling them to HD1080, and the results are truly excellent (in fact, even the uncompressed raw MiniDV image quality is quite impressive!).
Upscaling is adding pixel data between the existing “known” pixel values, using Artificial Intelligence. We’re using the Video Enhance AI software from Topaz Labs.
Project timing
This is an ongoing project in 2022, and is being discussed on our forums under the Artificial Intelligence upscaling of old scenes thread. Participation from customers is most welcome.
Once the tests are concluded and we have a workflow that’s reliable, we can start capturing the old videos in earnest. We expect this to be a “years” project. We’ll be starting with Shoot Types we know are the most popular (for example, girl-boy shoots, big group shoots), then probably girl-girl sex shoots that feature popular models. Suggestions are welcome on the thread.
We’ll be adding a filter to the Browse page to show these upsampled videos.
We expect to have the first upsampled videos up on the site in March 2022.