These videos were shot long before smartphones, GoPros, and the pocket-sized 4K cameras we all take for granted today. Back then I was recording on a consumer camcorder straight to tape, and "high res" meant 320 x 240 at 30fps in the analog domain — what I jokingly call "Old School Taping." There's no hidden detail buried in that footage waiting to be unlocked; analog tape captures what it captures, soft edges, tape noise, dropouts and all. What you're watching was about as good as it got for a guy working out of his garage at the time — and honestly, I'm just glad I hit "record" at all.
That's also what makes restoring it tricky. Upscaling analog to 1080p or 4K isn't as simple as making it bigger — stretch a 320 x 240 frame that far and you're asking software to invent detail that was never there to begin with. Push it too hard and the modern AI upscalers start "hallucinating," smearing faces and turning honest tape grain into weird digital mush. So I'm taking my time: cleaning up the noise and the interlacing first, then upscaling just enough to look right on a modern TV without that over-processed, plastic look. It's a work in progress, and I'll post the restored versions here as I recreate them.
Until then, enjoy them for what they are: a record of just how much work went into building this car. I was holding down a full-time job with two small kids at home when most of this was filmed, and I was lucky — genuinely lucky — to have the support around me that made building K.I.T.T. possible at all.