I was messing around with some old video files the other day, and you know how it is – some of those old clips look like absolute garbage on modern screens. It’s like watching a bunch of squares try to dance. So I thought, “There’s got to be a way to make this look a little better, right?”
First, I started playing around with the resolution settings on my monitor. I mean, that’s the obvious thing to try. My monitor is a pretty good one, 4K, but the video quality is not so good, just 480p. I found out if I watched it from a higher resolution monitor as it’s stretched too 1080+. It will become more pixalated. So, I tried lowering my screen resolution, thinking maybe if I met the video halfway, it would look smoother. No such luck. It just made everything else look terrible, and the video was still a blocky mess.
Next, I remembered something about how old CRT TVs used to make games look better. They had this sort of natural blurring effect that smoothed out the rough edges of pixel art. So I started searching online for something called a “CRT filter.” It looks like some people swear by these things, claiming they bring back that nostalgic look.
- I downloaded a few different CRT filters and tried them out. Some of them were okay, I guess. They definitely made the video look different, but not necessarily better.
- More like I added another layer of weirdness on top of the pixelation. And some of them were just way too intense. Like, I could barely see what was happening in the video because of all the artificial scanlines and distortion.
Then I stumbled upon some advice about how our brains kind of fill in the gaps when we look at low-resolution images. People were saying that if you squint your eyes, it sort of blends the pixels together and makes things look rounder. I gave it a shot, and it kind of worked. Like, if I squinted just right, I could almost convince myself that the video looked a bit smoother. But who wants to watch a whole video with their eyes half-closed? And this method really made my eyes tired!
After that, I started playing around with some video players. I know the famous one is called VLC, and it has a ton of different settings. It is very hard to use it well. I messed around with the sharpness, contrast, and all that stuff, but nothing seemed to make a significant difference. The video still looked pixelated. Just maybe a little bit brighter or darker pixelated, you know?
Finally, I decided to do a bit more research on what pixelation actually is. I learned that it’s basically what happens when you try to display an image at a higher resolution than it was originally intended for. Each pixel, which is like a tiny square of color, gets stretched out, and that’s what makes everything look blocky. Pixel art is an art form that uses singular pixels to build a digital 2D image block by block. Each pixel carries its own color and color range, known as bit-depth.
So, after all that experimenting, I kind of came to the conclusion that there’s no magic bullet for fixing pixelation. You can try to minimize it a bit, but at the end of the day, you’re always going to be limited by the quality of the original video. It’s like trying to make a tiny picture into a giant poster – it’s just not going to look as good as the original, no matter how much you mess with it. But, I did learn a few things along the way, and it was kind of a fun little experiment. At least now I know a little bit more about why those old videos look the way they do.
