Panasonic's A Beautiful Dream (1991 Analog HDTV 1080i UNIHI Hi-Vision Demo Tape BGV Footage)

This is a 1991 Panasonic Hi-Vision analog HDTV demonstration tape as found on a UNIHI analog HDTV video tape.

This 8-minute video follows a woman as she goes on a grand outdoor adventure with her friends... Only to find out that she was dreaming the whole time. Waking up, she writes about it in a letter to a friend before going out and meeting the friends from the dream for breakfast. All of this occurs in glorious 1035i Hi-Vision (HDTV), and the footage includes plenty of colorful, highly textured scenery which shows off the high resolution of early HDTV. It appears that this footage was shot in Japan, but the unknown actresses appear to be Australian or from New Zealand.

UNIHI is the first HDTV video cassette format. An acronym for "UNIfied HI-Vision," UNIHI was developed by the NHK between 1986 & 1989 with the input & consensus between 10 other Japanese companies including Panasonic, Sony, NEC, Hitachi, and more. Before UNIHI, HDTV recordings could only be made and transported via 1" open reel tapes that were huge, expensive, difficult to maintain, and time-consuming to thread. UNIHI was designed to be a portable, intermediate format which could be quickly & cheaply duplicated and transferred between studios and deployments such as MUSE analog HD television stations, professional presentations, and international production houses. As a result, UNIHI uses a 1/2" video cassette format in a VHS-sized cassette to house up to 63 minutes of uncompressed component analog HD video of fairly comparable quality to the original analog 1" video tape machines. The tape housing and maintainable parts (such as heads) are fairly simplistic while most of the "magic" happens in the electronic domain; a smart move to keep long-term maintenance costs low at a time when technology was rapidly advancing. Unfortunately, UNIHI's existence was short lived. It's mass release appears to have been delayed until at least 1991, and even then it had very little uptake as there were few HDTV deployments that needed the ability to hand off tapes, especially outside of Japan. By 1995, the first (largely superior) digital HD video cassettes were released, and since UNIHI was 1035 line, 60 fields per second only, it was incompatible with the American 720p and 1080i formats.

Unfortunately, the softness and artifacts in the footage strongly implies that the recording is a second or third generation copy of the original.

Enjoy this very special video that was never available to the public in the original HD presentation until now!

Fun fact: This upload marks the first time footage from a UNIHI tape has ever been directly uploaded in full-quality to YouTube! Thanks for being a part of history!

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This was captured off of a mechanically & electrically restored Panasonic AU-HD1500 UNIHI video tape recorder which outputs true analog component (1035i) video. Uploaded in upscaled 4K ProRes for extra clarity!

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More of my vintage HDTV uploads can be found in this playlist:    • World's Oldest High-Definition Footag...  

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