Recreating Hi8

Hi8 is a digital video format that's recorded onto 8mm magnetic tape. The hallmark of almost every magnetic tape digital video format is that footage is scanned using interlacing (i). Modern digital video records using progressive scanning (p). Why today we see 1080p, but before it was 1080i.

Interlacing is what gives Hi8 its distinct deinterlacing artifacts. Interlacing is meant to be a more memory efficient form of video compression where a video frame is comprised of rows and first the top row of pixels is scanned, then skips a row and goes down, the next row is scanned, skips a row and goes down, and again and again until it reaches the bottom of the frame and then it rescans for all the rows it skipped after it reaches the bottom row. Progressive scans each line sequentially without skipping any rows. A result of this "skipping rows" form of scanning is that each series of rows scanned have a time delay from each other, so when there is fast motion in a frame and the two series of rows are interlaced together to produce a whole frame, you get these weird line artifacts where you are seeing one frame being displayed in one of the series of rows while another frame is displayed on the other series, creating a deinterlacing artifact.

Artifacts in Hi8