To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Florence, Oregon dynamiting a beached whale, the owners of the original film footage had it expertly restored and scanned in glorious meaty wet 4K. Now you can discern individual falling chunks of blubber and everything.
Linnman and Brazil captured the original unedited footage on 16mm color reversal motion picture film. They recorded the audio track live, on location, on a magnetic stripe directly on the film using an attached microphone. As opposed to the degradation that happens with video tape from making a copy of a copy of a copy, the original 16mm film — what was shot that day on the beach — still projects a crisp image with bright vibrant colors. KATU donated the original 16mm footage to the Oregon Historical Society in the late 1980s. The footage has been transferred over the years to various video formats, but this is the first time it has been scanned at 4K resolution — or a display resolution of approximately 4,000 glorious pixels across the horizontal. The film was transferred by AV Geeks in Raleigh, North Carolina, on behalf of the Oregon Historical Society.
The restored footage is a whopping 2.4GB and it looks like the Oregon Historical Society's website is not in any mood to let me download it promptly. KATU has uploaded it to their YouTube channel, however, and the embed is at the top of this post.
The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.