Now, analog to digital conversion does not “have to” result in a significant loss of data. Professional tape transfers, broadcast quality digitization and archival quality sampling rates provide virtually lossless copies. The act of filming or videotaping are themselves a process of sampling and reinterpreting and those processes are fairly well preserved in digitization. The difference in how it “looks” or the amount of information relayed is negligible when compared to the difference in how it will be viewed, manipulated or subsequently reproduced. Philosophical energy should probably be spent on these differences, as Manovich seems to be arguing. Anyway, with quicktime files being the go to standard resolution/file size, a lot of compression from the original is possible and sometimes preferred so lower sampling rates can be used when digitizing and therefore result in significant loss. In general, I think what Manovich wants us to get from this is that it’s not really the analog to digital conversion that results in the lousy/lossy youtube resolution, it’s the digital compression that is necessary to make it load quickly, which is still an issue, though it is becoming less so every year.

Although this may be obvious, there is no way to increase the sampling rate or resolution after it’s been digitized/compressed. The youtube video can never look “better” than it does, it can’t be unzipped, so I hope all of the generous youtube contributors out there are keeping the originals or making a copy in a decent digital format. Also, an analog source that is a little worn out can still be viewed and somewhat fuzzy analog signals can still be made out, digital on the other hand is pretty much all or nothing. If your conversion is not closely monitored and reviewed then you may lose whole chunks of the original. So there is definitely reason to feel uneasy about the whole thing.