Throughout the 20th century movies and television shows were recorded on a variety of film mediums.
Major motion pictures were shot on 35mm film (and some big budget films were shot on 65-70mm film).
Television shows were typically shot on 16mm film. Very low budget television shows and movies were shot on 8mm film.
You can see below the relative comparison of different film gauges:
The thing about film is that it’s incredibly high “resolution”. We put resolution in quotations because film doesn’t technically have a resolution in the sense that a digital display or capture device does. Film has no pixel count.
Film instead has grains. The very nature of film is that it is a transport medium for a chemical emulsion that, when properly exposed to light under controlled conditions, captures the scene before the camera lense in incredible detail. Long before we were talking about pixels, even the simplest of film cameras was capturing millions upon millions of pixels in the form of film grain which yielded high levels of detail.
How high a level of detail are we talking? Because film and digital video/photography are not analogous it’s essentially impossible to say “a film frame of X size has Y resolution” and the very topic has been the subject of some controversy over the years.
Having the previously said in consideration, you can still assume something like, 35mm film, the kind of film used for most old movies, being easily considered around 20 megapixels or greater in resolution. The lesser used but absolutely enormous 65-70mm film, could be converted into something like a 30-40 megapixel image. Ben-Hur for example, was shot on 65mm film.
Standard 16mm film has roughly half the surface area of 35mm film and can be considered around 10 megapixels or greater in resolution. 8mm film, the film many old home movies and budget films were shot in, varies the most widely in quality but typically depending on the equipment used and the film quality can have anywhere from 1-5 megapixels or so. As an aside, many people think of the blurry and low-quality home movies their parents or grandparents shot on 8mm film back in the 1960s and 1970s as representative of 8mm film but those low-quality films are really more representative of the low-quality of consumer cameras and consumer film they were filmed with.
All that being said, isn't difficult to image how easy is to transform an 35mm film with 20 years or more in a beautiful looking High Definition Blu-ray edition of an old classic.
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