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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 6, 2017 19:55:54 GMT
I'm curious. When I used to watch British TV programs here in the US in the early 70s, the image looked very peculiar-a "Flicker plus herring-bone pattern" look with broken motion(but most viewers of "Masterpiece Theater", the umbrella title for British drama shows in the States, probably assumed that they were supposed to look like that as they were period pieces). Anybody know what method(s)was(were)used to covert PAL to NTSC in the late 60s and early 70s? I remember that transfers from the mid-70s on looked better than early 70s ones, and 80s transfers were smoother looking than 70s. Was this because different processes were used, or did they improve on the same old process-getting the bugs out,so to speak!?
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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 7, 2017 16:41:34 GMT
Hokay, this is the best answer I've found: The first video standards converters were analog. That is, a special professional video camera that used a video camera tube would be pointed at a Cathode ray tube video monitor. Both the camera and the monitor could be switched to either NTSC or PAL, to convert both ways. Robert Bosch GmbH's Fernseh Division made a large three rack analog video standards converter. These were the high end converters of the 1960s and 1970s. Image Transform in Universal City, California, used the Fernseh converter and in the 1980s made their own custom digital converter. This was also a larger three-rack device. As digital memory size became larger in smaller packages, converters became the size of a microwave oven. Today one can buy a very small consumer converter for home use. Now, what I'm wondering about is if it is still done something like this(a camera pointed at a monitor, only with a more advanced technique)or is today's Digital conversion completely different from an optical transfer?
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Post by Richard Marple on Nov 7, 2017 20:10:44 GMT
I've heard RTE had to use a camera pointed at a monitor to convert 625 lines to 405 after their analogue standards converter broke down & they couldn't afford to repair it.
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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 8, 2017 2:39:21 GMT
I've heard RTE had to use a camera pointed at a monitor to convert 625 lines to 405 after their analogue standards converter broke down & they couldn't afford to repair it. The thing bloody blew up! So did the three rack analog standards converter involve an optical transfer(camera pointed at screen)or was it something else? |
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Post by markboulton on Nov 10, 2017 18:02:57 GMT
This analogue vs. digital comparison is a bit of misleading really. Analogue doesn't mean optical. The first way of standards conversion was indeed optical, i.e. camera to monitor. But then came electronic delay lines, still analogue, but storing lines of video information in a very crude kind of memory, more like an electrical echo chamber. By clever timing, the analogue electrical impulses of the original signal could be read out in the sequence and frequency required by the other standard. It was better than optical, but still less than ideal, since the delayed signal was an echo of itself, it would look rather hazy, and "ghosty" like sightly bad reception. These devices could only store a small number of video lines for a very short time, only just enough to convert batches of lines at a time as they arrived.
Digital frames stores came along and allowed whole frames (stored as pairs of fields) to be stored and blended appropriately to the needs of the other standard. These probably came into being in the late 70s. There wasn't much change for a decade by when further advanced techniques such as "motion estimation" came into play to try and track objects found within the picture, to try and reduce the shimmering effect seen around moving objects, tracks and pans that were always present before due to still systematically blending lines and frames in a purely linear manner.
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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 11, 2017 3:18:10 GMT
I'm curious. When I used to watch British TV programs here in the US in the early 70s, the image looked very peculiar-a "Flicker plus herring-bone pattern" look with broken motion(but most viewers of "Masterpiece Theater", the umbrella title for British drama shows in the States, probably assumed that they were supposed to look like that as they were period pieces). Anybody know what method(s)was(were)used to covert PAL to NTSC in the late 60s and early 70s? I remember that transfers from the mid-70s on looked better than early 70s ones, and 80s transfers were smoother looking than 70s. Was this because different processes were used, or did they improve on the same old process-getting the bugs out,so to speak!? It must have been painful to watch? LOL .The Masterpiece programmes must have been not originally intended for export as many UK programmes that were intended for NTSC audiences actually had dual camera (NTSC/PAL) set ups so that separate recordings could be made for different territories (The Tom Jones and Liberace shows etc) Until about 1970 the only way you could transfer one standard to another was either use a kinescope or point a camera at a monitor -if they were not synchronised properly then all sorts of disturbances would be seen. Around the late 60s I think Snell and Wilcox introduced the transcoder which meant relatively good copies could be made from one to the other..the BBC were demanding this as popular shows like 'The Andy Williams Show' were coming in from the States on NTSC and were looking distinctly fuzzy with jagged movements. The "Masterpiece" shows definitely weren't intended for Stateside distribution-they were purchased after the fact by the Public Broadcasting System, though as the years went on the series' began to be co-produced by PBS and the British channels. It wasn't so painful to watch that UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS couldn't become a huge hit here, as it did, but when PYTHON began it's run here in '75 I really wished that the episodes looked better than they did-new transfers using the more advanced techniques(but missing some scenes)didn't appear until circa 1980. I also remember THE BENNY HILL SHOW looked perfectly fine when they started syndicating it here in 1979. They also started taping THE MUPPET SHOW in PAL only and converting it to NTSC about 1977. |
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Post by Alex Taylor on Nov 12, 2017 11:10:25 GMT
The original Muppet Show PAL-NTSC conversions were fairly crude - just dropping lines to get down from 625 to 525, and repeating fields to get from 50 to 59.94. This was done for all five years of the show's run. On the upside, this is fairly easy to unpick - handy as some of the original trails for the shows now only appear to exist via these conversions.
Later conversions, such as the abominations put out on the Time-Life VHS releases in the late 90s, were nasty smeary messes done with blended fields. Utterly unwatchable.
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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 12, 2017 15:41:08 GMT
I'm curious. When I used to watch British TV programs here in the US in the early 70s, the image looked very peculiar-a "Flicker plus herring-bone pattern" look with broken motion(but most viewers of "Masterpiece Theater", the umbrella title for British drama shows in the States, probably assumed that they were supposed to look like that as they were period pieces). Anybody know what method(s)was(were)used to covert PAL to NTSC in the late 60s and early 70s? I remember that transfers from the mid-70s on looked better than early 70s ones, and 80s transfers were smoother looking than 70s. Was this because different processes were used, or did they improve on the same old process-getting the bugs out,so to speak!? It must have been painful to watch? LOL .The Masterpiece programmes must have been not originally intended for export as many UK programmes that were intended for NTSC audiences actually had dual camera (NTSC/PAL) set ups so that separate recordings could be made for different territories (The Tom Jones and Liberace shows etc) Until about 1970 the only way you could transfer one standard to another was either use a kinescope or point a camera at a monitor -if they were not synchronised properly then all sorts of disturbances would be seen. Around the late 60s I think Snell and Wilcox introduced the transcoder which meant relatively good copies could be made from one to the other..the BBC were demanding this as popular shows like 'The Andy Williams Show' were coming in from the States on NTSC and were looking distinctly fuzzy with jagged movements. About a decade ago, the UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS DVD's sold in the States(from A&E)were taken from the OLD transfers from the early 70s, and there were a lot of complaints about the quality on the web. A&E couldn't be bothered to go back to the British source material. Since then, Acorn Video has put out an upgrade! |
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Post by peterleslie on Nov 13, 2017 17:22:45 GMT
The two large studios at ATV Elstree - C and D - were equipped for simulataneous recording in both NTSC and PAL from the studio camera output, from the end of the 60s onwards, at about the time colour arrived (the only British studios so equipped at the time). So for shows like 'The Julie Andrews Hour' - 1972- conversions were not necesary nor was recording twice or using different cameras simultaneously as had been done in the 1960s - there was a PAL master and an NTSC master ... with the video tape numbers having /PAL or /NTSC added to the end of the tape number.
The British Film and Television Yearbook of 1969 gives the details (Page 487).
As an example of the two masters, the 'Thriller' episode 'Sleepwalker' has the tape numbers 1788/76/NTSC
for the US and 1788/76/PAL for the UK ... source Kaleidoscope Publishing.
Often the two tapes would be different edits, with the US programmes structured for many more advert breaks and carry end titles listing 'For ITC Wide World Distribution' after 'An ATV Colour Production'. The NTSC tapes would not have the ATV zoom ident or endboard, but the 'spinning diamonds' ITC Presents/ITC Production variants.
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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 17, 2017 4:15:20 GMT
With the Julie Andrews Hour I think with filmed entirely in NTSC- Julie had a bigger following in the States than in the UK and so UK viewers had to put up with 2nd generation conversions.. I read that the Julie Andrews Hour was taped in the US, not England. |
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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 17, 2017 4:22:19 GMT
The two large studios at ATV Elstree - C and D - were equipped for simulataneous recording in both NTSC and PAL from the studio camera output, from the end of the 60s onwards, at about the time colour arrived (the only British studios so equipped at the time). So for shows like 'The Julie Andrews Hour' - 1972- conversions were not necesary nor was recording twice or using different cameras simultaneously as had been done in the 1960s - there was a PAL master and an NTSC master ... with the video tape numbers having /PAL or /NTSC added to the end of the tape number. The British Film and Television Yearbook of 1969 gives the details (Page 487). As an example of the two masters, the 'Thriller' episode 'Sleepwalker' has the tape numbers 1788/76/NTSC for the US and 1788/76/PAL for the UK ... source Kaleidoscope Publishing. Often the two tapes would be different edits, with the US programmes structured for many more advert breaks and carry end titles listing 'For ITC Wide World Distribution' after 'An ATV Colour Production'. The NTSC tapes would not have the ATV zoom ident or endboard, but the 'spinning diamonds' ITC Presents/ITC Production variants. The buzz here in America, when THIS IS TOM JONES was eagerly watched by swooning fans, was that there were "two versions" of the show because UK TV permitted racier pelvic moves from Jones than US TV would. Most Americans had no idea that there were different video standards involved, so they couldn't guess that racy moves weren't the main reason. |
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Post by peterleslie on Nov 17, 2017 9:25:43 GMT
With the Julie Andrews Hour I think with filmed entirely in NTSC- Julie had a bigger following in the States than in the UK and so UK viewers had to put up with 2nd generation conversions.. I read that the Julie Andrews Hour was taped in the US, not England. Yes, the weekly Julie Andrews Hour was taped at ABC studios in Hollywood, now the Prospect Studios. However the five Julie Andrews specials that followed cancellation of the series (in Sesame Street/Christmas/Julie and Jackie/Julie and Dick in Covent Garden/My Favourite Things) were taped at ATV Elstree simulataneously in NTSC and PAL. |
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Post by Peter Bradford on Nov 17, 2017 12:31:29 GMT
The original converters were broadcast cameras pointing at precision monitors.
The first fully electronic convertors (BBC mid/late 60s) did indeed simply drop lines to get the required number of lines of the output standard or add a black border around the picture if you didn't have enough - but this situation didn't last long before a second generation convertor was implemented that got rid of the black border. In both cases field information was calculated by dropping or repeating frames.
Bosch introduced their optical converter. ATV certainly had one at Elstree. Though I think it fell into disuse by the early 80's. Mention is made in another post of the entire UK series of The Muppet show being made in NTSC and converted - black borders around the picture. Don't think that can be true - The Muppets were made in the studio that had a Grass Valley GVG 300 mixer (the first in the UK I believe) and whilst that mixer was available to buy in Pal or NTSC I do not think you could operate it in both standards. When I saw the show being 'whizzed around' the network circuits in the UK it was Pal and obviously produced in Pal (I spent many years operating broadcast standards converters)
Then it went further and we had the ACE and DICE converters (ITA derived I seem to recall - late 60's/ early 70's?) that improved further on the temporal aspects on conversion (intra field if you like - think motion).
Then Quantel got in on the act and designed the DSC 4000 (early/mid 80's). Things were improving all the time with regard to motion interpolation and judder was really becoming a thing of the past. The DSC4000 had an additional, optional unit' called 'Silk' which improved motion interpretation even more.
There were some other manufacturers too, Avesco introduced a very nice converter at the lower end of the price range (AVS 6500?) - mid/late 80's. One of it's major selling points was that it could handle a very jittery input source like a VHS machine.
Snell and Wilcox introduced their really advanced range of convertors in the 80's - Alchemist etc. Really top notch in all aspects and even staring at the input and output simultaneously on broadcast monitors you would be hard pushed to tell the NTSC and PAL sources on either end. They are still the market leaders.
Doubtless there may have been a few other manufacturers but as far as I know these are/were the market leaders.
PS. Julie Andrews recorded a special at Intertel's studio at Wycombe Road, Stonebridge Park, London. The special guests were ... The Muppets. A favour they later returned when they became a success for Lord Lew up at Elstree.
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Post by stevenkassell on Nov 18, 2017 3:51:30 GMT
The original converters were broadcast cameras pointing at precision monitors. The first fully electronic convertors (BBC mid/late 60s) did indeed simply drop lines to get the required number of lines of the output standard or add a black border around the picture if you didn't have enough - but this situation didn't last long before a second generation convertor was implemented that got rid of the black border. In both cases field information was calculated by dropping or repeating frames. Bosch introduced their optical converter. ATV certainly had one at Elstree. Though I think it fell into disuse by the early 80's. Mention is made in another post of the entire UK series of The Muppet show being made in NTSC and converted - black borders around the picture. Don't think that can be true - The Muppets were made in the studio that had a Grass Valley GVG 300 mixer (the first in the UK I believe) and whilst that mixer was available to buy in Pal or NTSC I do not think you could operate it in both standards. When I saw the show being 'whizzed around' the network circuits in the UK it was Pal and obviously produced in Pal (I spent many years operating broadcast standards converters) Then it went further and we had the ACE and DICE converters (ITA derived I seem to recall - late 60's/ early 70's?) that improved further on the temporal aspects on conversion (intra field if you like - think motion). Then Quantel got in on the act and designed the DSC 4000 (early/mid 80's). Things were improving all the time with regard to motion interpolation and judder was really becoming a thing of the past. The DSC4000 had an additional, optional unit' called 'Silk' which improved motion interpretation even more. There were some other manufacturers too, Avesco introduced a very nice converter at the lower end of the price range (AVS 6500?) - mid/late 80's. One of it's major selling points was that it could handle a very jittery input source like a VHS machine. Snell and Wilcox introduced their really advanced range of convertors in the 80's - Alchemist etc. Really top notch in all aspects and even staring at the input and output simultaneously on broadcast monitors you would be hard pushed to tell the NTSC and PAL sources on either end. They are still the market leaders. Thank you! I'm chuffed to be getting this information straight from "the Horse's Mouth"! Doubtless there may have been a few other manufacturers but as far as I know these are/were the market leaders. PS. Julie Andrews recorded a special at Intertel's studio at Wycombe Road, Stonebridge Park, London. The special guests were ... The Muppets. A favour they later returned when they became a success for Lord Lew up at Elstree. Thank You! I'm chuffed to be getting this information from "the Horse's Mouth"! |
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Simon Collis
Member
I have started to dream of lost things
Posts: 536
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Post by Simon Collis on Nov 19, 2017 21:42:24 GMT
The sad thing is that the quality of standards conversion mentioned in the first post here actually sounds a lot like what AXN use here in Portugal. Weird pixels getting left over from movements. Someone will turn and half their nose floats in space briefly. It's very disturbing.
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