|
Post by Qasim Yusuf on Aug 9, 2018 12:11:08 GMT
I was reading the timeline section on the website The Destruction of Time and I noticed that it says that in the case of Planet of Giants 4 (the original studio recording tape), The Crusade 3, The Celestial Toymaker 1 2 3 4, The Gunfighters 2 3 4, The Savages 1 2 3 4, The Smugglers 1 2 3 4, The Tenth Planet 1 2 3, The Power of the Daleks 1 2 3 4 5, The Enemy of the World 6 and The Seeds of Death 4, the fates of the master tapes are unknown. Does that mean that there is a chance of a few of these episodes being in private collections or possibly taken home by employees or is it simply a case of the paperwork for the wipings no longer existing?
|
|
|
Post by Richard Bignell on Aug 9, 2018 12:26:08 GMT
All that's referring to is the fact that the paperwork listing what dates those specific tapes were wiped has not survived, not that the master video tapes went walkabout.
|
|
|
Post by Qasim Yusuf on Aug 9, 2018 13:55:07 GMT
A real shame then as any missing episodes being found let alone on their original broadcast tapes would be an amazing find.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2018 21:21:43 GMT
On this subject, is there any record as to which programmes the master tapes were reused for (e.g. the 3:10 from Ascot is taped over The Power of the Daleks ep1)?
Have any of these master tapes - such as the 1975/76 (?) tape that once held Fury from the Deep - survived to this day? If so (and one's clutching wildly at straws here), will there ever come a day when some sort of technology can recover the original recordings from the magnetic tape by removing the various layers of later recordings??? Or was there a wiping process used (before the tape is ready for reuse) that guaranteed that the Doctor Who serial was 100% gone, no trace there anymore, nothing residual in terms of a signal to recover..?
|
|
|
Post by ianphillips on Aug 9, 2018 23:28:40 GMT
On this subject, is there any record as to which programmes the master tapes were reused for (e.g. the 3:10 from Ascot is taped over The Power of the Daleks ep1)? Have any of these master tapes - such as the 1975/76 (?) tape that once held Fury from the Deep - survived to this day? If so (and one's clutching wildly at straws here), will there ever come a day when some sort of technology can recover the original recordings from the magnetic tape by removing the various layers of later recordings??? Or was there a wiping process used (before the tape is ready for reuse) that guaranteed that the Doctor Who serial was 100% gone, no trace there anymore, nothing residual in terms of a signal to recover..? I doubt it. I'm not an expert on the exact process of wiping, but from what I hear it's a bit like melting an ice sculpture. You could collect the water and refreeze it to create something new, but you can't un-melt it.
|
|
|
Post by garygraham on Aug 10, 2018 1:19:26 GMT
Did any of the episodes have physical tape splices in them as that is a reason why a tape wouldn't have been wiped and reused.
|
|
|
Post by Stephen Cranford on Aug 10, 2018 5:26:04 GMT
I know that tapes were reused, but not erased prior to recording the new programme. I was a very close friend of JNT, and I remember that he told me that at times he would reject 2" tapes that were destined to record the show, as they were second hand and had material already on them. (When he had "paid" for a new one. Of course, they would have been immediately erased by the new programme, but could this mean that in theory there could be some portions of Dr Who left (maybe not a finished edit, but perhaps a studio recording) at the end of another programme? I suppose we will never know.
|
|
|
Post by Qasim Yusuf on Aug 10, 2018 8:37:38 GMT
What could have happened to the 35mm film print of Power of the Daleks part 6 then? All of the other 60s episodes recorded on 35mm exist so it probably wasn't junked.
|
|
|
Post by Chris Wilkinson on Aug 10, 2018 9:07:06 GMT
What could have happened to the 35mm film print of Power of the Daleks part 6 then? All of the other 60s episodes recorded on 35mm exist so it probably wasn't junked. That episode was held for a period in the Film Library, but later removed. This is one of two episodes (the other being Master Plan #4) that I believe exists somewhere, probably in a private collection considering the high novelty value of holding missing 1960s Dalek episodes. The fact that there is no 'official' explanation for what happened to these prints makes it all the more intriguing.
|
|
|
Post by simonashby on Aug 10, 2018 19:23:21 GMT
This has been talked about before. I seem to remember that the only surviving tape that one held Doctor Who is a Blue Peter episode. The tape once held Enemy of the World 3. If it were recoverable, we'd possibly have the most pristine 1960s episode if nothing else! Was a few years ago, so maybe some more information has come to light since? I doubt it. I'm not an expert on the exact process of wiping, but from what I hear it's a bit like melting an ice sculpture. You could collect the water and refreeze it to create something new, but you can't un-melt it. But 20 so years ago people would have said Chroma Dot recovery was impossible, no? I'm open to any new technology disproving our common perceptions. The difference here though is that people knew the signal existed, but never thought it could be decoded. Here, there is no evidence that the signal exists in the first place. I guess it's for an expert to answer though.
|
|
Simon Collis
Member
I have started to dream of lost things
Posts: 536
|
Post by Simon Collis on Aug 10, 2018 21:19:13 GMT
The difference here though is that people knew the signal existed, but never thought it could be decoded. Here, there is no evidence that the signal exists in the first place. I guess it's for an expert to answer though. I've seen the ghosts of previous recordings peeping through on domestic recordings, I don't suppose it's beyond the realms of possibility that a sufficiently clever programmer could come up with a way to try and "look underneath" the top layer of a recording. (I suspect I'd be willing to try, given a sufficiently clean, uncompressed recording but I'm not a mathematical genius and have little experience of decoding video formats...) I suspect that the quality would likely be very poor though - even if it could be done at all - and probably worse than any TR in existence. There was a program called "Ontrack Data Recovery" that relied on drive errors and kept rereading sectors, moving the hard disk head around, trying to find traces that hadn't been overwritten. Horrendously complex but it worked. Then OnTrack got bought and the program disappeared from sale...
|
|
|
Post by garygraham on Aug 11, 2018 3:37:02 GMT
Were all episodes recorded to video? Apparently in the 1960s the BBC recorded some drama direct to film as a telerecording?
|
|
|
Post by Robbie Moubert on Aug 11, 2018 13:22:14 GMT
It was common practice for tapes to be erased before being re-used. I remember using a degausser for that very purpose at the COI. You had to remember to take your watch off before using it!
|
|
|
Post by John Wall on Aug 11, 2018 22:56:16 GMT
This has been discussed before, seems there was specialised equipment to thoroughly wipe tapes before reuse.
|
|
|
Post by Chris Wilkinson on Aug 11, 2018 23:11:49 GMT
It is certainly possible to recover erased material from hard drives because of the existence of residual data. Last summer I managed to recover documents, images, videos and audio files from a laptop of mine that had been 'wiped' by the computer's internal software over and over again eight years prior. Not everything came back, but a good majority did without corruption. When something is wiped via software, it isn't physically destroyed - it is designated for overwriting. Naturally, disk space that has been overwritten several times has less of a chance of returning something old.
Videotapes are different since the material isn't wiped using software. The content of the tapes are physically wiped through degaussing. Considering these tapes were designed to be reused for other programmes, they would surely have done a good job of wiping them to ensure nothing remained for the next use. If there was a way to get anything back, maybe the answer lies in reversing the polarity of the neutron flow...
|
|