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Post by Alex Taylor on Dec 3, 2017 18:56:00 GMT
Just to nip this one in the bud before things get out of hand - Kaleidoscope have purchased the archive.
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Post by Alex Taylor on Nov 21, 2017 18:28:17 GMT
To confuse things further, i do know that certain episodes of the muppet show aired over here in the 80's as color kine's Yes, I've seen them pop up on eBay from time to time. I used to have three of them transferred to U-matic, too :-)
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Post by Alex Taylor on Nov 20, 2017 22:45:35 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. I can confirm that the PAL 2" copies still exist and have been preserved recently, so good news is that pristine PAL copies do exist of the show. Yes, they've never been 'lost'. Henson took ownership of the programmes after ATV lost their franchise in the early 80s. With the exception of the aforementioned Time-Life releases, where for some utterly incomprehensible reason the PAL releases were done by converting the NTSC tapes back to PAL (!), all UK releases have been from the PAL masters. What's more interesting is exactly what's been seen since 1981... There were two edits prepared of each of the 120 shows, one for domestic broadcast and the other for overseas sales. If you're watching one, the most obvious difference is in the end-credits: the domestic edit's credits are left-justified, whereas the overseas version's are centred. There are other, less obvious differences: the overseas edits incorporate a fade-to-black immediately after the title-sequence and again just before the curtain-call. In the domestic edits, these are either straight cuts, dissolves or wipes - or, in some cases, an additional shot which is not present in the overseas version of the show. Usually this was a cutaway to a stock shot of the audience, but on at least a few episodes there was an extra heckle from Statler and Waldorf which is unique to that edit of the episode. (There was also a cut-down version of the overseas edit which omitted a single sketch from around the middle of the show. This was of course done in order to fit in more commercials; the sketch was always Muppets-only - no guest-star. These edits were for some reason used on the mid-80s BBC repeats. And the first season had a radically different title-sequence to the one familiar from the other seasons; many repeats and releases of these episodes have been re-edited to use a sequence taken from a later season's episode. The Disney DVD set restores the originals.) So we have - or should have - a total of 240 tapes. The set of episodes that's been in general circulation for the last 25 years at least is a mixed-bag, however. The first season is a roughly 50-50 mix of overseas and domestic edits. The other four seasons are comprised almost entirely of the overseas edits. This set has been around since at least the early 90s in syndication and on numerous home-video releases; I have a set of PAL viewing-tapes which contain them, too. At least some of the 'other' edits do exist: the Connie Stevens and Elton John episodes in the standard set are the overseas edits; when Disney put out the Season 1 and 2 boxsets a few years back, they used the domestic edits of these two shows instead. It's likely then that Henson (or now, Disney) have all 240 tapes, but I don't know for certain! The other change, and the more annoying one, is that when Henson obtained the shows from ATV one of the first things they needed to do was to replace the ATV copyright (or ITC for the overseas edits) at the end of each show with their own. Annoying, because the ATV logo and copyright string were supered over the final shot of the closing titles, usually one of Zoot playing the last note of the theme tune on his sax - and so they had to drop the entire shot. This has been replaced on each of the shows with a series of different shots of Zoot over the past few years, complete with the logo/copyright du jour as the company name changed (and latterly, of course, when Disney bought the Muppets). The original shots are, putting it mildly, a swine to get hold of now. There were three basic shots: the one used on the first two seasons; the one used on the third and fourth seasons; and the one used on the fifth. Unfortunately there were also half a dozen shows where a specially-taped shot was used in order to tie in with the storyline of the episode (there's one where the entire cast contract Cluckitis and are turned into chickens, for example!). These shots, being one-offs, are even harder to find than the basic ones. All post-ATV repeats and releases of these episodes just use whichever new shot of Zoot is being used on all the other shows, continuity be damned :-) Again, the assumption is that Disney still have all this material, but as the shots definitely don't exist 'clean' there's little if any chance of ever seeing them again. I've tracked down copies of two of them, but the other four remain elusive.
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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 Alex Taylor on Aug 23, 2016 20:13:18 GMT
It's an automated system! If it looks like BBC content - which it clearly does - then the system flags it. There is no evidence that the BBC have 'claimed copyright' as you put it. The system flagged it, possibly correctly, possibly in error - we simply have no way of knowing until and unless the copyright holder stands up and confirms it. The systems are not infallible - false positives and false negatives happen all the time.
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Post by Alex Taylor on Aug 23, 2016 18:57:38 GMT
It's an automated system. "The BBC" don't have someone sitting at a screen obsessively refreshing YouTube in case something interesting's been uploaded!
Detecting audio content and detecting video content are two completely unrelated beasts. There is no 'one tool does everything' here. Two tools - in fact, given how the algorithms work, almost certainly many many more than two - running to different schedules and priorities. No conspiracy needed.
Why is it so important that you know, and know now, anyway? If there's something to this then we'll hear about it sooner or later.
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Post by Alex Taylor on Aug 23, 2016 18:04:07 GMT
You appear to be assuming that the system is foolproof and instantaneous. All the evidence shows that it is neither! Automated content-identification is a very long way from being an exact science, and there's never been anything to suggest that YT/DailyMotion/whoever are able to detect in real-time such that infringing material is tagged as soon as it's uploaded.
The fact that both the separate audio and video streams *were* tagged indicates that the system worked correctly.
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Post by Alex Taylor on Aug 23, 2016 16:35:50 GMT
I am unclear what if any point is trying to be proved here!
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Post by Alex Taylor on Aug 22, 2016 18:11:28 GMT
...an extraction on a failed foot canal. That is one hell of a way to get a tooth pulled! :-)
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Post by Alex Taylor on May 10, 2016 21:42:47 GMT
And we have another find!
'Beginnings', 'You Can't Do That Without a Hat', 'The Thirty-Minute Work Week' and 'I Don't Care' have all been found. Domestic off-airs as usual, but from what I've seen of them so far they're in reasonable shape.
9 to go...
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Post by Alex Taylor on May 8, 2016 10:01:09 GMT
No. Almost all the episodes survive, albeit mostly as a collection of domestic off-air recordings - see the link in my signature for details :-)
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Post by Alex Taylor on May 5, 2015 8:57:49 GMT
Oh, not again :-( Just as well I hung onto my recording, then!
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Post by Alex Taylor on May 5, 2015 8:39:51 GMT
Does anyone know what happened to this? Amazon are listing it as 'unavailable' now.
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Post by Alex Taylor on Jan 20, 2015 13:02:44 GMT
Missing outright: Beginnings (tx 7 Jan 84, repeated autumn the same year) You Can't Do That Without a Hat (tx 4 Feb 84, repeated autumn the same year) The Thirty-Minute Work Week (tx 11 Feb 84, repeated autumn the same year) I Don't Care (tx 14 Apr 84, repeated autumn the same year) Gobo's School for Explorers (tx 9 Oct 88) Manny's Land of Carpets (tx 5 Feb 89) The Trial of Cotterpin Doozer (tx 12 Feb 89) The Voice Inside (tx 19 Feb 89) A Tune for Two (tx 26 Feb 89) Wembley's Flight (tx 5 Mar 89) Mirror, Mirror (tx 19 Mar 89) Ring Around the Rock (tx 11 Jul 90) The River of Life (tx 8 Aug 90) In addition most of the surviving episodes exist only as off-air domestic recordings, many of which are missing their opening/closings. www.nightshade.org.uk/fraggleuk.html
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Post by Alex Taylor on Oct 29, 2014 23:21:26 GMT
I'm definitely not seeing anything like that - Firefox reports a 'connection was reset' error; IE just reports that it is unable to load the site, no reason given. Avast's own logs show no evidence that it's done anything at all - in fact, having just checked, I don't have its web-filter enabled anyway.
Very strange...
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