I grew up with the start of it the 1990s raves were a new thing but not necessarily better than anything today. There was good music and fun events but also a lot of bad shit happened – overdoses, gang involvement, sexual assaults of young women, police raids and a lot of people became estranged from their families and non drug taking friends and/or suffered mental health issues due to drugs. Events do still happen but it is a lot harder to put on an modern event without a license especially in areas that were heavily targeted in the 1990s.
The real reason why early 1990s videos look “better” are technical ones; portable video equipment of that era was bulky and heavy compared to today, people at raves were suspicious of it as the Police also used it (and a camera operator would have to be careful themselves the were not searched and had their tapes seized for evidence). those who made videos of raves tended to be people who were both media and tech aware, and paid attention to such things as lighting, focus etc (you needed a lot of light to get a good picture, because the computer chip inside the camera was not as advanced as what you find today).
the brightest parts of the event would be chosen for a final edit from a longer tape of the whole rave (or you would only haver a black screen with some flashing lights). Soundtracks were often recorded separately to the footage and “wild” (not synchronised) or a separate long shot of a DJ playing (filmed with a fixed camera) was recorded, and footage of dancers, lights “cut over” this leaving the soundtrack of the DJ.
As the DJ’s sets were usually around the same BPM, a skilled editor could do this in such a way that it looked like the whole lot was sychronised. Even then, until the late 1990s doing this involved a lot of fiddly work with a complex arrangement of equipment that took a long time. (Video was then recorded on various kinds of cassette tapes, all with different formats and often the picture resolution was less than a cheap mobile phone camera, but the analogue electronics meant it did not look “blocky”). Although by the mid 90s you could do this with domestic video cassette recorders, it involved very quick work with about 3 remote controls at once.
Those who had access to such kit and knew how to work it were either serious AV enthusiasts electronics/broadcast engineers, working for “yoof TV” productions or at University studying media/film making.
Today we have lots of online video sites, and equipment to convert an analogue video signal from a tape into the digital computer data which once cost £800 is now £35. So these same people now in their 40s are putting these videos online, but when you convert them it also shows up the limitations of the analogue video format – for a variety of reasons the picture can be misaligned, blurred and noisy or the colours washed out or too strong, and then looks rough on modern HD TV monitor even if it looked decent on your 1990s equipment
However the capture equipment usually comes with free or low cost software that has settings for “enhance video/denoise”. These use very clever maths to process each frame of the picture and take away all the bad stuff and rebalance the colours, often with a bias to the “warm” colours and often also combine the two fields of an analogue video picture into one frame. This makes the end result looks brighter and sharper, almost like the 16mm movie film that was used in the 1980s by lower budget film makers. Even younger people who may never have encountered smaller format analogue movie film notice this difference.
90% of recent rave videos are from some youth using a mobile phone set on full automatic mode who has taken so much ket that s/he can barely stand upright and see straight, and even those who do have a decent HD camera do not realise the settings can be altered for different shooting conditions, and often just copy the whole raw footage to youtube without editing it (This also means the feds can use it as evidence because they can match up the timecodes and other markers, some cameras even embed a unique serial number into the file).
I am not sure why, as they could do the same things as in the 1990s but a lot quicker and easier and make their videos look much better and more secure…
