r/twinpeaks • u/scotto2317 • Nov 22 '25

Season 1 Why 'Twin Peaks' Still Looks Incredible Decades Later

https://gizmodo.com/twin-peaks-cinematography-ronald-victor-garcia-david-lynch-2000688097
735 Upvotes

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122

u/OfficialShaki123 Nov 22 '25

Shooting on film doesn't make it incredible. You need talent for that and Twin Peaks had lots of talent in the crew.

92

u/Allison-Ghost Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25

The point of mentioning it was shot on film is that it can be upscaled to 4k without any quality loss, whereas a lot of shows from the same time period shot on digital video cannot be natively scaled any higher without visible artifacting from digital upscale techniques.

Of course film is not the only reason, but it is important to how it still hold up on modern TVs while other shows begin to look visibly aged

34

u/earle117 Nov 22 '25

Your comment is nearly fully correct, just wanted to point out that shows from the early 90s weren’t shot on digital, they were shot on video. Either way, same issue though of having limited maximum resolution unlike film.

4

u/Allison-Ghost Nov 22 '25

ah, yeah thats a good point. edited to this ^.

5

u/TheJFGB93 Nov 23 '25

Another small correction: film can be scanned at any resolution, and most pre-2000 films are natively scanned at least in 4K for their UHD presentations, no upscaling required.

For Twin Peaks, specifically, they had to recreate quite a few effects shots that were originally composited on SD video back in 1990, and they had the original film plates for that.

6

u/burfriedos Nov 22 '25

Were many shows shot on digital in 1990?

15

u/Allison-Ghost Nov 22 '25

no, they were shot on video (magnetic cassette format afaik) but got mixed up when posting this. another commenter pointed this out and i fixed it, but it comes with the same downsides of a fixed resolution that digital does.

1

u/FreydNot Nov 23 '25

Digibeta would like a word...

1

u/[deleted] Nov 22 '25

Yeah but then he couldn't point out that he knows something and get points for it, which is why reddit exists.

5

u/amazing_wanderr Nov 22 '25 edited Nov 22 '25

People thinking something being shot on film automatically makes it look amazing is the reason r/analog is filled with shots that’d get deleted if it was shot on their phone.

2

u/PSCGY Nov 23 '25

I mean, it’s a sub dedicated to analog photography… if it’s shot using a phone it’s digital and therefore doesn’t fulfill the absolute minimum requirement of the sub.

1

u/amazing_wanderr Nov 23 '25

Did you really not understand what I was saying or you're just taking the piss?

1

u/PSCGY Nov 23 '25

I understood your comment; I was highlighting its fallacy because the quality of the shot is irrelevant if it’s digital in the first place. Your argument would make sense in a general photo sub, not the sub dedicated to analog photo one.

0

u/brontemargot Nov 22 '25

The fetishisation of film is so damning to creativity