Steps - 5, 6, 7, 8 © Sony Music 2022
Remastering the line-dancing smash hit 5, 6, 7, 8 presented a lot of challenges because the only available copies of the music video were on analogue tape known as Beta SP.
Analogue tape can lose a bit of quality every time it is copied - and 5, 6, 7, 8 had been copied a lot of times!
Shortly after its release in 1997, the record label decided to make some changes to the music video. The editors took the analogue tape into an edit suite, tinkered with it, and then put the improved video back on to analogue tape.
It looked fine in 1997 - but the resulting copy was not a great source to remaster in 2022.
So, we searched the Sony Music archive to find the original rushes from the music video shoot.
We found two Beta SP tapes with all the rushes from the shoot: the clearest copies of the material we could find.
We then recut the video shot-by-shot and cleaned up any dust, film scratches and tape sparkling before upscaling the video to high definition.
