Doctor Who - The Claws Of Axos (DVD)

[Mark Brown]

The first commercial example of the new Reverse Standards Conversion restoration technique.

An approaching Alien spaceship is detected on monitoring equipment at UNIT HQ, where the Brigadier is entertaining two visitors - Chinn, a civil servant making a security inspection, and Bill Filer, an American agent sent to discuss the threat of the Master. The Ship lands in England and the UNIT team, joined by Hardiman and Winser from the nearby Nuton power station, meet its occupants: beautiful golden-skinned humanoids called Axons.

Special Features
Commentary track
Photo gallery
Production subtitles
Outtakes/deleted scenes
'Now and Then' featurette about the Dungeoness location
Interview with Michael Ferguson (director)
Reverse Standards Conversion featurette




Online Retailers

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Benson's World

[Ben]

Reverse Standards Conversion?

[Mark Brown]

Guest-Ben said:

Reverse Standards Conversion?

From the RT site

'The Claws of Axos' is one of the many Pertwee stories which have had some or all of their original PAL videotapes destroyed
and episodes subsequently recovered from North America as NTSC standards conversions. In the case of 'The Claws of Axos',
episodes one and four were retained on their original PAL transmission tapes, but episodes two and three were recovered as 2"
NTSC quad videotapes from TV Ontario in Canada.

This posed something of a problem. The NTSC tapes had originally been produced by the BBC in the mid-seventies using the
BBC-designed CO6/508 Advanced Field-Store Converter (or BBC MK2B Standards Converter, as it was officially known - its
sister, the MK2A, worked the opposite way, converting NTSC to PAL), an enormous and highly complicated standards
converter which was used to convert the 625-line, 50 field-per second PAL video into 525-line, 60 field per-second NTSC video.
To do this, it produced NTSC fields which were either down-sampled 625-line fields, or were a mix of two down-sampled
625-line fields. So there was a characteristic juddering of any moving object or any camera pans on the conversion, which was
burnt-in to the NTSC video. When converted back to PAL through even a modern standards converter, that juddering is still
apparent and in some cases is made even worse by the reconversion process. Something had to be done.

In late 1993, Ralph Montagu and Steve Roberts were invited to a meeting at the BBC's Research & Development department at
Kingswood Warren in Surrey, to discuss various archive-related engineering projects. At this meeting they raised the question
as to whether it would be possible to somehow 'un-pick' the conversions by utilising knowledge of the original conversion
process and mathematically reversing it - a process they dubbed 'Reverse Standards Conversion', or RSC for short. This would
benefit not only 'Doctor Who', but several other series such as 'Up Pompeii!', 'Doomwatch' and 'Vanity Fair'. Working purely
from a sample of the NTSC conversion, R&D engineer Jim Easterbrook deduced the original conversion process and realised
that it would indeed be possible to un-pick it. A demonstration of RSC , using a short clip from 'Up Pompeii' re-converted in
software, was screened to an audience at the NFT in 1994 and showed that the technique could indeed bear fruit, although it
would need further development and considerable investment in hardware to enable it to happen.

Unfortunately, 1994 was around the time that the BBC started to become rather more accountant-lead and internal accounting
became the new way of doing business within the Corporation. Where previously BBC Research & Development could have
had some latitude for investigating RSC as a philanthropic project which would benefit the Corporation, now it had to be
accounted for and supported by cold, hard cash... which at that time the BBC Archives had precious little of. RSC, although seen
to be a very worthy project, was just too expensive to justify at that time. Windmill Road did however find the funds to archive
the NTSC quad tapes onto D1 digital videotape for future use.

Ralph Montagu continued to keep the idea of RSC alive and a few years down the line found an ally within Research
Department in the shape of James Insell, a young engineer who happened to be a fan of the show. Insell realised that computing
technology had moved on so far that it was possible to implement RSC cheaply as a non-real-time software process rather than
in expensive real-time hardware, yet still provide results in a reasonable timescale. He had rather an uphill battle to convince
his managers (who, having been bitten once in 1994, were understandably not keen to expend any more effort on the project),
but, working on the project in his own time, he was supported by Montagu, who was eventually able to win some funding from
BBC Worldwide. Insell researched the original documentation of the converter and suggested solutions to some of the
remaining technical issuesbefore Jim Easterbrook was brought back in to develop his algorithm into a useable piece of software
- and RSC finally arrived as a functioning process in 2004.

[Ben]

Thanks a lot, Mark. Should be interesting to compare the VHS release to the DVD release then.

I also like the Doomwatch reference - let's hope there's a future for Doomwatch on DVD.

[ethantyler]

Has anyone bought this release yet? How impressive is the restoration work? It'll probably be awhile before I get round to buying this (since there are a large number of Doctor Who DVDs I don't have yet).

I recently bought The Green Death and watched the first two episodes last night. I don't know how much restoration work was done on it, but the quality of the episodes was stunning! Plus, I hadn't seen the story before and it turned out to be every bit the classic it's labelled as.