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Post by George D on Dec 31, 2011 4:11:56 GMT
I was reading the excellent article about the guy who had recorded Space Pirates 2 and the space landing off air.
The story was fascinating however,it brought up to me a few questions. The first is that its unfortunate that there was no saveable picture from the first moonlanding.
I know many of my earlier video tapes they play best on the machine they were recorded. Should this give us the message that early home video recordings wont be playable today or was that simply a bad one. I would have felt bad if there were lots of missing who but they had deteriorated and not playable.
Assuming that stuff was salvagable, Im curious how through a job was done going through the collection. I know things can be mislabelled and even trailers or previews of who could be of historical importance.
Also, with so much missing from the 1960s there could have been lots of other shows.
Thanks for your time.
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Post by John Green on Dec 31, 2011 15:15:03 GMT
Weren't those customised video-taped he'd literally cut down to fit his machine? I wouldn't be surprised if they were tempremental. I know that there can be problems tracking on VCR different from the one that produced the original tape,but I can't remember whether I've ever had a tape seem blank-that is,where another machine couldn't read any of the information.Or is it an urban myth? I know that VCRs were more choosy way back when-no NTSC or LP playback,no auto tuning.
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Post by George D on Dec 31, 2011 20:11:36 GMT
Some very good thoughts I agree that he used various sources so youre right there could be varying quality of the tapes. I cant comment if the source tapes were better or worse as one might think those used for computers or military would need to be a high quality source. But your right, the tape source could have been "tempermental" Two possiblities Im thinking of are the physical deterioration of the tape and signal degradation. Sometimes tape signals decay on tape due to time. They say tapes are good for 20 years, however, i do have tapes recorded that still play, (alhtough they dont look great) Also some tapes hold up better than others from a chemical composition. On VCRS those heads are moving very fast across the tape getting signal. My thoughts are that one should minimize the usage of older tapes and back up asap. and that its best to make the backup on the first play and test with something not as important. I usually think its best to use the original machine, however the BBC may have machines that can handle these problems well. I have some home movies that i recorded in the early 80s which i need to transfer to dvd, however my current tape player is not tracking right, which means that I probably need to do is get the original machine repaired and use that. My experience is due primarily having VHS and not older format machines where the technology may not be that good. I would be interested in hearing wheather it played ok at the guys house and what their procedure was to try to get a picture out of it. They did play the dr who at his house and they appeared to leave his house thinking the moon landing was a find. I am also curious if they did a thorough review of what he had or simply let him pick through a few boxes. Today would be an additional 10 years of decay however it definately is a facinating story .. something which i would have love to have seen.
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Post by John Green on Dec 31, 2011 20:34:16 GMT
A friend keeps quoting the fact that there were 30,000 different video titles released in the UK in the pre-code period.Should we knock a zero off that? The tapes themselves were worth money then,even blank ones.With the pre=recordeds,rental shops put seals on the edges to stop the actual tape being removed and a cheaper one substituted. It must have been very handy to work in a Poly's audio/visual dept.,or as part of the public sector using tapes. Although VHSs and other formats are still being auctioned,the seller sometimes states 'these tapes have been wiped' rather than 'these are recorded on,but are sold as blanks for re-use'. An auction on at the moment has some unusual format tapes for sale,very early,I suspect,but they say that they've been wiped.
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Post by George D on Dec 31, 2011 21:20:55 GMT
I got my first VCR around 1979 when I was in high school. I would work on the weekends and save up my 15.00 and buy a blank at druckers wholesale. (back then tapes were around 25.00 at most places which would probably be around 100.00 today). Back then i had certain brand names i preferred (like TDK) and i used the tapes just once and kept the shows. Originally i would leave commercials in the programs for their historcal value. A friend then suggested recording commercials separately which i did for a few years, then i went back to saving with original commercials. Somewhere i have most of the Star Trek Next Generations with original commericals.
When I go to markets and sales, i generally look past the pre recorded tapes but do occasionally look through things recorded off air. Usually those tend to be movies, however, if i come across something which looks unique like a tv broadcast, my mouth starts to drool. I once found a copy of the WPIX yule log at a garage sale which at the time was a lost program. Fortunately the original showed up years later..
The sad thing is they cant sell the contents, yet at the same time, its a shame to wipe material on early tapes. Even things from the late 70s and 80s could be a prize as much local material is not saved and much of it is not in circulation either.
While I have recorded many things I do have friends who has recorded lots more in the 80s and 90s. stuff that i dont have and that there may only be one copy in existance.
Just like there are collectors in america im sure there are some in uk also.
One thing that would be great to show up would be a collection of audio recordings off air of british tv in the 50s and 60s. Even a collection of american material would be great, however british material is much scarcer because they destroyed so much more. I would love to find the videos, however perserving the audios can also be an accomplishment
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Post by Brian Fretwell on Jan 1, 2012 20:27:35 GMT
Weren't those customised video-taped he'd literally cut down to fit his machine? I wouldn't be surprised if they were tempremental. Yes I believe, from the old RT forum, that he found tapes too expensive and slit computer tapes to fit the machine.
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Post by Paul Vanezis on Jan 2, 2012 8:57:29 GMT
Assuming that stuff was salvagable, Im curious how through a job was done going through the collection. I know things can be mislabelled and even trailers or previews of who could be of historical importance. Also, with so much missing from the 1960s there could have been lots of other shows. Just to add to what Brian Fretwell said, I and Steve Roberts visited Bob Wallis with Mark Ayres and we took a video camera to document the visit. Mr. Wallis had a few hundred tapes containing off-air material from the 1960's and 70's. Most were recorded on half inch tape which had been cut down from larger two inch tapes that he used to buy second hand from Thames at Teddington studios. The Doctor Who recordings he had (which we identified by the recording dates on the tapes) included some episodes of 'The Invasion' and the repeat of 'The Evil of the Daleks'. All of these had the dates/titles crossed out and initially we thought that the tapes had been wiped, so we checked beginnings and ends. In fact, what he would do was re-spool the tapes, discarding the old recordings he had initially made, because they were on computer tape and extremely poor quality. The only half inch tapes we took away were all either computer tapes, or poor quality ferric oxide tape cut down from Quad. These were a tape labelled 'Moon Landing', another labelled simply 'Dr Who' and a further two or three tapes labelled 'Triton'. The 'Doctor Who' was episode two of 'The Space Pirates', the 'Moon Landing' turned out to be a 'Tomorrows World' special about the flight of Apollo 10 and in fact we have this in the archive. The second half of the tape was the 6am repeat playback of the actual moon landing with new live commentary from James Burke and Patrick Moore. We do have a recording of the sound already. The 'Triton' tapes are I believe all missing episodes of that childrens serial. The big problem with all of these recordings is the quality of the actual recording itself. There was a major head to tape contact issue with the recordings, or the tapes were simply not optimised for helical scan recording. This results in very low RF on the tapes, picture instability and an extremely noisy picture, in fact so noisy that almost nothing can be made out on the recording. We also took away his CV2000 recorder and virtually rebuilt it, an amazing engineering effort of the Pebble Mill post production maintenance staff. Despite this effort, we only got a marginal improvement on the replays. We also used a second very well maintained machine and got no better results. We also took away four Quad tapes which hadn't gone under the knife. Two were blank, one was an edition of Armchair Theatre entitled 'Brown Skin Gal, Stay Home and Mind Bay-Bee' from 1971 which has always existed. The final tape was actually a great discovery, marked 'Horne Colour Rehearsal'. It turned out to be a colour VT recording of the studio rehearsal of the Christmas Day broadcast of 'Horne A Plenty' from 1968. It had been recorded on Christmas Eve and the played in VT inserts were black and white. Not only is it a fascinating insight into TV production methods of the 1960's, but it is also the only moving picture recording of that episode which remains missing. It was screened at 'Missing Believed Wiped' the following year. We were pretty thorough getting his material looked at. We didn't miss anything and even viewed some of his 70's material, including 405 line recordings of 'The Sea Devils' and 'Frontier in Space' and 625 line recordings of 'Pyramids of Mars'. He had lots of Dr. Who but nothing missing. Regards, Paul
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Post by Barry Hodge on Jan 2, 2012 13:33:43 GMT
Thanks for that write-up of the events! I miss the RT forum, and always found it fascinating (more so than the Who episodes, I must admit) and wish it had been set up as a forum like this so it could be revisited, rather than all those spider-trails that led to nothing. Oh well, we have our memories
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Post by George D on Jan 3, 2012 5:46:48 GMT
Amazing article Paul. It sounds like you had an exciting time and I really enjoyed learning more about this facinating experience . You definately filled in a lot of gaps not in the original article. I can tell you guys really went beyond the call of duty to get those shows to play. Sadly, it didnt happen.
Its very regretable that the Invasion and Evil of the Daleks were missing, however from your description, it sounds like it may not have been in a salvagable condition regardless.
One thing I do in my business is I ask for referals. When people have old tape film collections, Im curious if the question is ever asked, "do you know of any other film/video collectors who may have something?" It would be awesome if he knew other collectors from that time who may have recorded shows also.
We know the Moon landing was unplayable. Was the space pirates 2 unplayable also? (not that it matters we got a nice print of that-just curiousity)
Also, when you went through the who episodes assuming they were playable, were there nice tidbits such as trailers?
Thanks for sharing your story.
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Post by Jim Exley on Jan 9, 2012 8:31:24 GMT
Yeah, I remember enjoying that story when it was first published. For some reason I wasn't previously aware that's how the Kenneth Horne programme surfaced, so - well done!
Still on the subject of domestic recordings, I came up with another question (probably rhetorical) over the weekend. It's generally known, I think, how series 5 and 6 of Steptoe came to survive. Is it equally possible that any Who episodes could have been dubbed to 1/2" domestic formats for writers or production staff during the late sixties and early seventies? Just a thought, and I'm sure I'm not the first!
Thanks, Jim
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Post by Daniel Smith on Jan 9, 2012 12:43:59 GMT
I remember Bob Monkhouse had his own personal archive going back years with some material previously considered missing. Not Dr Who sadly.
I wonder if there are other like-minded TV stars who were wealthy enough to have early recording equipment available. Sure it's been mentioned enough though.
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Post by Ross Mann on Jan 9, 2012 23:38:20 GMT
I know many of my earlier video tapes they play best on the machine they were recorded. Should this give us the message that early home video recordings wont be playable today or was that simply a bad one. I would have felt bad if there were lots of missing who but they had deteriorated and not playable. Quote- George D 31/12/2011 Yes, I have that same problem. Unfortunately when my old VCR died years ago all the tapes I'd recorded on it were virtually unplayable on any other VCR, even one that was exactly the same as the one I'd used to record these tapes with. It was a damn shame too, I had heaps of awesome music clips and live stuff by some of the greatest guitarists of all time- drat !! I think that's what killed my old VCR - continuous rewinding and slo-mo playback when I was learning how to play guitar!! Sorry bout the dodgy cut and paste style quote up the top of this reply too by the way I didn't want to quote the whole post
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Post by John Green on Jan 10, 2012 0:03:42 GMT
If you take the case of John Mills,a book was produced 'Still Memories' of photos his family life including all sorts of famous faces,plus on location stills of Hayley Mills on the first day of filming Pollyanna. A TV special featured footage from his home movies taken over the course of decades. So what I'm wondering is how many relatively wealthy showbiz people pointed their 6 and 16mm cameras at the TV to record their finest moments such as 'This is Your Life'? There was have been tremendous temptation. As for the video tapes that will only play on one machine,I'd heard rumours of that sort of thing,but I'd feel quite silly if it turned out to be a tracking problem,after I'd disposed of the tapes.
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Post by Jim Exley on Jan 10, 2012 9:00:12 GMT
I did once have occasion to get my hands on a Sony CV-2100ACE (later 625-line version of the CV2000 mentioned earlier in the thread). There was one (Sony branded) tape with it, but it suffered from the well documented 'squealing' problem, and I couldn't get a stable playback for more than a couple of seconds before the tape would jam. I did determine there was nothing of value on the tape, but I guess that's another issue that would affect the chances of recovering material, unless baking the tape is an option.
@ross, I've had the same trouble, with VHS-C tapes that wouldn't track properly in anything other than the camera on which they were recorded. It's typical that it's nearly always the irreplaceable stuff that's affected!
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Post by Ross Mann on Jan 10, 2012 14:30:42 GMT
I did once have occasion to get my hands on a Sony CV-2100ACE (later 625-line version of the CV2000 mentioned earlier in the thread). There was one (Sony branded) tape with it, but it suffered from the well documented 'squealing' problem, and I couldn't get a stable playback for more than a couple of seconds before the tape would jam. I did determine there was nothing of value on the tape, but I guess that's another issue that would affect the chances of recovering material, unless baking the tape is an option. @ross, I've had the same trouble, with VHS-C tapes that wouldn't track properly in anything other than the camera on which they were recorded. It's typical that it's nearly always the irreplaceable stuff that's affected! Always the way ain't it lol. I experienced more or less the same thing you described. I could only get these tapes to work for a few moments before the tracking would go to s##t, the machine I had back then was fairly old and lacked any "Auto Tracking" feature (not sure if that would have anything to do with it, I'm no expert) When I took it to the repair shop the guy told me to chuck it coz the parts would have been dearer than a new VCR!!
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