Re: Are the BBC's master tapes demagnetising ?

In message <VA.000000c4.00654942@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Roderick Stewart <rjfs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
[snip]
As I suggested before, for various administrative or non-technical reasons the copies available today may not be the originals. Also, the people involved in the copying may not have been born when analogue recording was the normal thing in broadcasting, and will have had no training or experience in its use. Copying almost anything today is a simple matter of pushing a button, which may lead many people to expect all recording equipment to work this way, but it didn't always.

To get an idea of what is required to bring even 1980's material up to scratch, have a look at the DVD release section on the Doctor Who Restoration Team website.

http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/

You'll see considerable work is required to correct tape dropout and also remove cross-colour and cross-luminance artefacts as well as other problems. If you have seen the Doctor Who DVD's, you can see fine work is being done. But obviously this takes time and money that can't be afforded to a one off repeat of a second rate comedy show.

The Allo Allo episodes looked like they have been zoomed to 16:9 but had also second or third gen copies that had been run through a poorly set "enhancer". The chroma levels looked very high and alot of chroma noise was evident on the 2 minutes I saw.

The pictures looked better originally as the entire transmission chain was PAL and there wasn't alot of conversion between formats going on. Also digital TV shows up these artefacts more.

Modern footage can look crap as well. Question Time is derived in PAL and looks shocking (although they recently started adding artificial sharpness to the picture to fool us).

--
Marcus Durham
.

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