Returning continuity

[Paul Varley]

This may sound silly, but I was wondering if any in vision continuity footage, notably 80s Schofield/Crane CBBC and late 80s/early 90s CITV (Tommy Boyd etc) has actually been returned to the archives of ITV and the BBC from private recordings, seeing as few were ever recorded officially.

If this is not unheard of, then I was considering returning some of my 1992 CITV clips, all of which can be seen on Youtube. They are of VHS quality but it's not like there're going to be regularly repeated, there're just historical pieces of TV I feel should belong in the official ITV archive.

Any thoughts on this?

[Ray Langstone (was saintsray)]

Yes, get in touch with Kaleidoscope, and return them to them. Kal make sure everything is copied and preserved. I can provide contact details for them, as can many of the people on this Forum. PM me if you'd like to do this.

[Paul Varley]

How would I send them. Send a broadcast quality (or as high quality as is possible with knackered 18 year old clips) capture via Email or send them on a DVD.

I'm certainly not parting with the original videos they are on

[Dan S]

Ha, yes, I'd not send the original copies of anything through the post. Things get lost and I've heard the odd horror story of the only copy of something going missing.

For stuff that's unlikely to be repeated the best thing anyone could ever do (in my opinion) is to put it on youtube (as you said you've done) which would ensure it'd be seen by others. Returning a copy is a nice gesture (assuming the TV companies even want it), but it's a shame that so much old stuff in the archives will probably never be seen. The BBC should put their entire archive on youtube then all the old shows & clips can be seen once more.

[Deleted]

If you are serious about returning material, loan the originals to Kaleidoscope (who are totally reliable) and will give your masters back. Sending a copy on disc etc. is not really a suitable way of doing it as a transfer will need to be made from the best copy that is existing.

[John Wall]

I've got a combined VCR/HDD/DVD - converts VHS videos well:-)

[Paul Varley]

'Best copy that is existing'. The quality of these clips are not exactly HD, so the difference will be very very minimal, if any at all, if copied off a VHS- DVD rip. I really do not want to let go of the originals in any way (they could go lost in the post more than anything)

The reason I want to return it is because the clips are of historical interest, this one in particular www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L2DssqURE4 and represent a nostalgic era of TV. These could be used in compilation shows, or any random show ehere they could be seen as useful (kids TV history show or something)

And out of interest, I have heard about something being retuned going missing on multiple threads, what was it?

[Rob Moss]

Rather than recording from VHS to DVD, are you able to capture the footage on a computer at all..? Uncompressed video files on a data DVD would be better than compressed DVD recordings.

[Jeremy Williams]

I went through a phase of recording CBBC and CITV continuity in 1992/3, two reasons were:-

1) I wanted to see if i could record a whole season on Blue Peter (Gave up after a few weeks!)

2) CITV were showing The Tomorrow People, then the awful Delta Wave! (Sometimes taped the whole of a CITV afternoon starting with the ITN News and Regional News through to 5pm when "After 5" started in the Carlton region (got a few of them as well!)

Hopefully next year i will have enough money to buy a more powerful PC and the software to transfer VCR's to the PC, so i can put them up on You Tube, but as i say, this will take time!

[Robert Belford]

I need to find some time to do this. Just at a quick glance I have the whole of the 1982 series of Grange Hill, 22 episodes of The Really Wild Show and 17 Pink Panther Shows - most of which would have been recorded on timer. There could be some good continuity in there.

Jeremy - what kind of PC do you have? I have a KWorld USB capture device which I got from Maplins for about £30. It came with PowerProducer which can capture real-time MPEG. I think a lot of the technology is in the capture device? I use it on a cheap 1.73Ghz Celeron laptop with 2Gb RAM running Vista, capturing MPEG2 at 720x576. Aldi also does one made by Medion for about £20 though I haven't tried it.

If you want to capture as an AVI instead you can use the free VirtualDub software with various compression codecs. This works with a wide range of capture devices. I use the PicVideo MJPEG codec (not free) which is light on older processors.

An alternative is the HuffyUV codec which is free and gives great quality but big file sizes as it is uncompressed (about 10 mins on a DVD disc!). The laptop can't cope with HuffyUV compression at 720x576 but an old desktop PC from 2002 running XP can. Possibly it's down to the speed of the hard drive.