This is "Panasonic in Norway: In Search of The Midnight Sun," a 1991 Panasonic demonstration video showcasing early HDTV in Norway.

Join Panasonic in their search for the midnight sun! Due to Norway's proximity to the Earth's Artic (North) pole, Norway experiences sunlight into extremely late hours of the night during a few months of the year (around the Northern hemisphere's Summer solstice in June). Throughout this video, Panasonic's team documents their journey through the scenic kingdom, visiting regional landmarks and colorful locations in Bergen, Sognefjord, Ålesund, Trollstigen, and more until they reach the northernmost coast, Nordkapp, where we'll get to experience the very memorable scene in true HD.

UNIHI is the first HDTV video cassette format. An acronym for "UNIfied HI-Vision," UNIHI was developed by the NHK between 1986 & 1989 with the input & consensus between 10 other Japanese companies including Panasonic, Sony, NEC, Hitachi, and more. Before UNIHI, HDTV recordings could only be made and transported via 1" open reel tapes that were huge, expensive, difficult to maintain, and time-consuming to thread. UNIHI was designed to be a portable, intermediate format which could be quickly & cheaply duplicated and transferred between studios and deployments such as MUSE analog HD television stations, professional presentations, and international production houses. As a result, UNIHI uses a 1/2" video cassette format in a VHS-sized cassette to house up to 63 minutes of uncompressed component analog HD video of fairly comparable quality to the original analog 1" video tape machines. The tape housing and maintainable parts (such as heads) are fairly simplistic while most of the "magic" happens in the electronic domain; a smart move to keep long-term maintenance costs low at a time when technology was rapidly advancing. Unfortunately, UNIHI's existence was short lived. It's mass release appears to have been delayed until at least 1991, and even then it had very little uptake as there were few HDTV deployments that needed the ability to hand off tapes, especially outside of Japan. By 1995, the first (largely superior) digital HD video cassettes were released, and since UNIHI was 1035 line, 60 fields per second only, it was incompatible with the American 720p and 1080i formats.

Unfortunately, the softness and artifacts in the footage strongly implies that the recording is a second or third generation copy of the original.

Enjoy this very special video that was never available to the public in the original HD presentation until now!

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This was captured off of a mechanically & electrically restored Panasonic AU-HD1500 UNIHI video tape recorder which outputs true analog component (1035i) video. Uploaded in upscaled 4K ProRes for extra clarity!

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More of my vintage HDTV uploads can be found in this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3eMpGbSBzjiF1cdU2MkFBAc34D6HONoC

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If you want to follow me for updates or help me afford to build Sun 2 and deploy it into the atmosphere 180 degrees out of phase of Sun 1 for permanent sunlight, please click the link below:
https://linktr.ee/OpWorkshop