http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoInsideFilmOutside

Monty Python's Flying Circus "Gentlemen! I have bad news. This room is surrounded by film!"

From the very beginning of regular television broadcasting in Britain in 1936, up until the 1980s, British TV drama and comedy shows were made using multiple electronic (video) cameras in studios. That was fine for the interior scenes, but when it came to location shooting, the cameras and (after their introduction in 1958) videotape machines were so big and heavy they needed large outside broadcast trucks to transport them to the location, to say nothing of the complex power supplies providing their multiple operating voltages. The cameras also required very high light levels to avoid picture noise, which compounded the impracticality of working with them on location. Consequently, many shows used 16mm film and audio tape recorders for exterior footage, since the equipment was much more portable (often battery-operated) and film was easier and more forgiving to light and could be edited easily. This meant that interior and exterior shots have a completely different look.

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Although somewhat jarring to today's younger audiences, the lack of visual continuity was taken as normal by British viewers (and overseas viewers of British imports). There were exceptions: for example, as early as 1975 Doctor Who was occasionally produced on videotape, even for on-location exteriors. In the US and West Germany, most shows were done completely in either film or video, while most other countries avoided outdoor shots as much as they could until the arrival of colour TV and U-Matic tape in the 1970s.

By the mid-1980s, this dual format began to be phased out as so-called "outside broadcast" cameras became more efficient. Productions therefore began to adopt either completely filmed or completely videotaped formats. It almost completely died out in the late 2000s, as productions switched to using HD video cameras, which gave a look in-between video and film and was ultimately cheaper than both of the former two options combined.

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An unfortunate side-effect of Video Inside, Film Outside is that it has rendered most, if not all, of these productions unsuitable for high-definition remastering; most remasters simply treat the filmed portions to match the quality of the taped ones.

The rough American equivalent is the "soap opera effect" , so named for the fact that many soap operas are shot on video to save money. This became more of a problem after progressive TV displays became the norm for Western homes; because the videotape these older programs were shot with used interlaced video, the picture would see visible combing when displayed untreated on a progressive display (CRT televisions could handle this just fine, as they, like the tape, were also built around displaying interlaced video). To address this problem, a variety of deinterlacing methods were introduced— first in the TV sets, then by the broadcasters themselves— to ensure that the image would look clean on the LCD monitors of today. The most common method was to use software to separate each pair of interlaced frames and fill in the gaps, leaving the resulting footage to look twice as fast as it would on an interlaced display. Thus, the "soap opera/costume drama effect" chiefly describes footage that runs unusually smoothly, at the cost of seeming distinctly "off" to audiences acclimated to 24-30 fps footage in TV shows and movies.

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Examples are far too numerous for a comprehensive list, but include:

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British examples

Other examples