>>1074364
When you use actual film, each molecule is essentially a pixel. (Not literally, if you're a technical autist, but sort of.) Larger film has more molecules and thus higher resolution. That's why IMAX is a big deal for film buffs. Among other benefits, the most obvious is that it has higher resolution. But even regular 35mm film, which is basically the standard, theoretically has higher resolution than Blu-Ray or 4k. But there is a lot more that goes into it. The physical size of the film is a big deal, but there are so many other factors that even different production runs of a particular type of film might be noticed by filmmakers or film buffs. And digital is different in a lot of different ways. It changes so much of the process. Modern colors look very different largely because of digital filmmaking making color correction an entirely different process.
All that said, even though I'm very interested in the topic, it's all stupid. Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith were filmed at 1080p. I saw them in theaters. So did millions of other people. While people did complain about them, including some aspects relating to the visuals being recorded digitally, nobody was complaining about the films being too low-res. They were blown up to enormous screens, the biggest screens available at the time, since they were among the biggest movies coming out, and 1080p was just fine. Now people are pretending they need higher-res for their tiny computer monitor. Ridiculous. It's a placebo effect.
>>1074367
>However, IIRC, part of the problem was that some changes to tax laws in the 70's basically removed any financial incentive to keep older material in constant circulation.
But home media was barely a thing until the '70s. Back then, if you missed a movie in the theater, or missed an episode of a TV show, you were shit out of luck. You might never get a chance to see it again. Maybe you'd get a rerun, but lots of shows never got reran. Maybe a studio would rerelease a film, but that was rare and only happened for the most successful films. This is part of why so many older films are lost. Granted, by the '70s there aren't too many lost films, but still, the fact that rereleases were rare meant studios often figured it wasn't worth it to even keep them. And this goes double for TV shows. Most of '60s Doctor Who is lost because BBC figured there was no point even keeping it themselves, let alone keeping it in circulation.
It was the late '70s, with the rise of visual home media like Betamax, VHS, DiscoVision/Laserdisc, and the other formats that utterly failed, that the idea of "keeping films in circulation" even really started to exist.
Also, the rise of home media led to the rise of many cheaper films meant to be released on that media, since releasing on home media was way cheaper than releasing in theaters. This became an even bigger thing when people started getting cameras that could record directly to VHS a few years later. You had to get a big ass battery pack and carry the whole VCR with you, but you could do it. And later you started getting camcorders, where the recorder and the camera were the same device. This made it even easier and cheaper. But the thing is that those people wouldn't have the money to keep their ultra-low-budget films in circulation forever. How could you expect them to? These people aren't some major movie studio that exists for over 100 years. They're basically some regular dudes who make home movies with their friends. If they run out of money, are too busy working their day jobs, or just die, then of course they won't keep rereleasing their trashy slasher movie or whatever it was that they made, as much as there might be a cult following for it.
Also, while I think people remember VHS very poorly, and they think it looked a lot worse than it actually did, the cameras these direct-to-video filmmakers often used actually did look like shit. Especially later once you started getting camcorders. Pretty good ones existed, but they weren't necessarily the ones you would see used very often. You can put that shit on a Blu-Ray, but it's gonna look like shit no matter what.
Also, people confuse film and tape, but they're totally different. Tape is magnetic storage. It's not like film, where the color of molecules changes and literally holds the image. It's a magnetic code, and the quality of the image you get after decoding it is nowhere near as good as the image you'll get from 35mm film. There are smaller film formats that look relatively shitty, like 8mm, formerly common for home movies, but even 8mm looks relatively decent when filmed with a good camera, or converted well from a larger film format.