cv2000 405 lines - can it be transferred?

[RWels]

cv2000 405 lines - can it be transferred?

Lately I've been watching a few recordings from the late 60s reportedly made on cv2000. I'm sure some of you have seen them. This off air stuff was apparently transferred by pointing a camera at the TV.

Now people tell me this is the only possibility, but surely that's not true?

Can someone just confirm my suspicions that the BFI (or other institutions) are able to make more sophisticated transfers?

[Paul Vanezis]

Jan 6, 2009 23:29:11 GMT RWels said:

cv2000 405 lines - can it be transferred? Can someone just confirm my suspicions that the BFI (or other institutions) are able to make more sophisticated transfers?

There are all sorts of problems with CV2000 material. Firstly it's a skip field system. On the face of it that isn't an issue. Secondly, getting a stable playback is a problem due to the age of the recordings and the state of the machines available to replay them. Assuming you could get a stable replay there is the issue of 405 lines. There are few modern timebase correctors that can handle 405 and in fact I've not found one...

...except that I believe I am the only person to have successfully transferred a 405 line CV2000 recording electronically to 625. It was 10 minutes of the 1967 'Cinderella' pantomime with Jimmy Tarbuck. The method I used was thus; the 405 signal went directly into a For-A 330 TBC. From there it went into a BVW-75P beta SP machine in E-E mode which solved the field jitter problem. From there it went Pal into a Charisma DVE to resize it to 4x3.

The final recording went onto a digi-beta tape although I have no idea what happened to it! But regardless, I was only ever able to make that one recording. When there was a break in the recording a further part of it wouldn't go through the same process.

In terms of quality, it was sub VHS by a rather large margin.

Regards,

Paul

[Paul Rumbol]

Paul whatever became of that hoard of 38 tapes for sale on ebay over a year ago and containing BBC shows (TOTP, Its Cliff Richard etc) from the early 70s.
Weren't they cv2000 405 line tapes and unplayable?

[Deleted]

Jan 6, 2009 23:29:11 GMT RWels said:

cv2000 405 lines - can it be transferred?

If the material is unique, contact Chris Perry and Kaleidoscope. They transfer all sorts of obsolete formats like this all the time. I'm sure they will be able to help (or know a man who can!)

[Peter Stirling]

You can try transfering your old 405 line tape recordings by simply playing them out directly into an oldish bog standard VHS 625 line or Philips machine through the video/audio line sockets.
AFAIK Many (if not all) VHS dont recognise any line standard anyway.

But (there is a but)
the drop out compensator will not work as it does not know where to look for drop outs on a 405 line picture.




.

[cperry]

Hi people

The simple answer is that yes, old reel to reel tapes with 405 line material can be transferred.

Results can vary from being very good to being awful, dependent on the tape and its playback.

Most recordings are through a camera pointing at a screen, but I have seen things done through other means. Anglia transferred all its 405-line quad tapes by pointing a camera, so that is the commonest way.

We are happy to look at any reel-to-reel tapes but normally the contents are not very exciting :-(

We will be showing some material rescued from an Alan Simpson CV2000 at the March event, but the guy that did the transfer has spent hours just doing a tiny section so it is a labour of love.

Hope that helps.

c

[RWels]

Jan 7, 2009 10:02:17 GMT @laurencepiper said:

Jan 6, 2009 23:29:11 GMT RWels said:

cv2000 405 lines - can it be transferred?

If the material is unique, contact Chris Perry and Kaleidoscope. They transfer all sorts of obsolete formats like this all the time. I'm sure they will be able to help (or know a man who can!)

I got to see some of this by coincidence, I think it has already been recovered. In any case, I have NO idea who made it or where the tapes are know. But part of it has been around for some time.
OK, I might as well name some of the contents:
Life with Cooper (Holiday in Spain), Benny Hill (end of ATV special with The Seekers and another episode starting with him being carried on someone's back and ending with the red army song and dance group), and incomplete programs: Frankie and Bruce (with Tommy Cooper), The very merry widow, bits of Rolf Harris, the Dick Emery Show, Shut that door, ABC previews, the end of a Hancock show, Up the polls.
Does this sound familiar? Some of it is still listed as missing on lostshows.com, but I strongly suspect it was all recovered some years ago.

Someone else sent me this link, it's a sort of universal video standard converter: www.tech-retro.com/Aurora_Design/World_Converter.html

[Deleted]

Yes, this material is known and has been around or many years, transferred from old off-air reels.

[RWels]

Thought so. Please tell me they made a better copy as well? This type of optical "transfer" is only at a distance the next best thing.

[cperry]

All of that material you list was transferred by Terry Martini using an optical method between 1993-1996. We showed some of that because he did it for us. It was held on 1".

Terry subsequently has dropped out of contact with me and was last heard of in Scotland running a restaurant. The 1" tape has long ago been lost/wiped.

Kaleidoscope hold some of those original CV2000 reels, some of the others are held by a Thames VT engineer I know, some are lost in the midsts of time.

c

[RWels]

So that's it? The camera-on-tv transfer was the best we could get?
I understand watching cv2000 is far from easy, but it is a bit disappointing if nothing better can be done, especially as Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper can be considered famous (not really my personal favourites, but still).

[cperry]

I feel that if Terry was reading this thread he would be a little hurt by the dismissive tone of your last posting :-(

To get these CV2000 tapes to play at all is something of a miracle. The signal is so unstable that the camera pointing at a screen method is the ONLY way it works, anything more sophisticated is too good and the signal looks awful. I'm sure that experts in this field, like Paul Vanezis, would agree that it is a labour of love, very hard work taking hours and hours to get just a few minutes of good playback.

Terry was a enthusiast like ourselves who spent hours of his own time transferring these reels in the days before computers, DVD, HD and digital convertors. He did the best he could. He copied out the results widely and the stuff knocking round on the video circuit is VERY POOR quality compared to the much, much better original Kal holds. And if the 1" turned up I'm sure you would see an improvement again.

Sadly, Terry's involvement ended when his equipment was loaned to the NFTVA and they returned it broken, so he chose not to help them again and found other interests.

It's worth pointing out as a side note that what you see on Youtube/video trading is sometimes so many generations down from the original that people mustn't assume it's the master copy, or indeed people mustn't assume that its a missing show. Many things do exist in private hands but people choose not to return them, preferring to post on Youtube or stay silent about what they've got. Someone, somewhere bought a missing Dr Finlay from Paul Foster just before Christmas, but it hasn't been returned, proving that people with a love of old TV will still have missing material that is not shared publicly. I think the efforts of people like Terry Martini should be applauded, not criticised.

c

c

[markboulton]

Christopher, I think you're getting on a high horse unnecessarily here. R Wels was bemoaning the lack of available technology - not criticising an individual. I don't see any knocking of Terry in his post, so I really think you should have thought twice before going into the rant that you did.

We know 405-625 conversion of broadcast tapes used to be commonplace. Therefore the question "is pointing a camera at a TV screen really the best we can get" is perfectly valid. Maybe R Wels thought that CV2000 was a broadcast format or near enough in terms of quality. Perhaps you could have given him the benefit of that doubt before being so defensive.

It is true that in the 1980s, 405 - 625 conversion of Quad tapes was commonplace, and it isn't now. Surely it's perfectly reasonable for people who have NOT had the privilege to work in the industry for the past 30 years to ask, quite simply, "why?".

It is telling that the shows that DO survive from a 405-line VT source, such as Please Sir, Nearest and Dearest, etc., are mainly transfers from 1"/D2 dubs made in the 80s or early 90s (evidenced by PAL chroma artifacting on what is otherwise black-and-white content). The two most plausible explanations being, (a) the 405 original was falling apart and was chucked after 1"/D2 transfer, or (b) the conversion equipment was more readily available then than now. Indeed, a factor seems to be that regardless of whether the source is low- or high-band, conversion is not as easy a task now as it was then.

I think all R Wels really needed to know is that CV2000 was a very low-band format compared to Quad, and maybe to point out that the way the broadcasting industry has changed since the late 80s/early 90s is that VT conversion, back then, would have most often been done in-house at the BBC or ITV companies concerned, who still had their huge studios and facilities departments, which would still contain a goodly portion of the equipment that had resided in the building since the 60s or 70s. Only the Centrals and Granadas of this world would have been likely to still have old kit that would do such a job knocking around in their concrete castles, which could easily be brought in to an Edit Suite, and an old VT machine patched in (remembering of course that the so-called 'redundant' staffing lavels of yester-decade allowed old boys who knew the old equipment to stay on, looking after it, keeping it operational).

Nowadays such operations have to be performed at a facilities house who will not be kitted/staffed out for such operations, unless you were willing to pay for them to go out and find the right equipment/people from scratch, which would be prohibitive (whereas before it could have been done for a nominal 'overhead' cost).

[RWels]

That's right. I was simply surprised that we can restore colour signal from chroma dots, but we seem to be walking on all fours here. I didn't want to be dismissive about the efforts done just to be able to play the tapes again, but surely, everyone including Terry would prefer a more sophisticated way to rescue this kind of recordings, if only it were possible. Unfortunately, it isn't.
And "people mustn't assume it's the master copy" is a curious remark here, as you've just told me that there isn't a better way to recover this material. So the optical "transfer" IS the master copy now. This was exactly my point in the original question. Don't take it out on me!

It doesn't matter what the quality of the original was, optical "transfer" will always be inferior on principle. But if nothing else can be done, so be it. I just wanted to say it's a pity that it's so near impossible to bring back these tapes from oblivion. I assume the hardest part wasn't even the 405 lines but the cv2000. It's sad to hear that it may have been easier to produce 10 years ago than today!

What I assumed was that somewhere at the BFI and two or three other locations, there is the equipment to perfectly restore the really difficult or extinct media, like N1500 or reels of video tape such as the CV2000. You always assume there's someone somewhere who can still play any old format. I didn't realise these things are quite so hard to do!

In fact, on a different forum someone from Down Under said he could connect a CV2000 to a DVDrecorder, but I didn't catch how far he got with it, if he had actually completed a reel-to-dvd transfer that way. If he insists he can, I'll ask for a sample or put him through or something. Come to think about it, he's registered here already.

[Rich Cornock]

could these people help?

www.vtoldboys.com/