Damn I love havinf to ave tha telle on fa eedin ours jus ta see tha bloody qeen getta bonk on tha noggin an ave a mere bleedin crimmus jus anotha thing ta tax us fo innit
@Doodlesthegreat if we had a dollar for everytime we've gotten an email from some crazed Dr. Who fan who believes the Periscope Film vaults must contain "lost" episodes of that show -- we just tell them to go back in time using their TARDIS and explain to the BBC folks that recycling tapes isn't a great idea.
I just realised that the VT area was located below the fountain at Television Centre. It was famously prone to flooding when the fountain was operating.
Yet, the format wasn't released by the time this short film was made. By that point, they were using 2" Quadruplex videotapes to record stuff onto, and bulk-erase their programs from them to make room for other programs, due to how expensive the format was.
These days it's mostly been replaced with Protools (or other digital workstation) and that one guy with the Cheetos dust beard. Oh the good old days of editing by hand. ✌😎👍
Processes are good. Outsourcing to creepy people isn't. Having the option to go through a process is ideal even if there's a shortcut. So many people have no idea what they're slapping together now with tiktok that its pointless to make anything for that platform, its just trash. If they had to think about it, maybe they'd be making something thoughtful and impressive instead of essentially just getting kicked in the nuts and screaming over and over and over.
hard to believe they actually cut magnetic tape back in the day, i really thought that was only done with film, and that when magnetic tape came up they used like 2 recorder to record on a new tape to stitch a program together and nor like really cutting it...
The problem with analog tape, and analog recording in general, is that if you make a copy, the copy isn't exact. It loses resolution to some extent. In video recording, the second generation copy is noticeably fuzzier than the original (or first generation) copy. A third generation copy is the last one that is usable. Anything beyond that will be too blurred and fuzzy for production work. Audio tape is a little more forgiving, but the 3rd generation rule still is a good one, though with excellent equipment you can often do four generations and still have reasonably acceptable quality. Magnetic tape was usually brown, or rust colored, because it was clear film coated with rust particles. Splicing tape was normally white, so you will have about a half inch (1.5cm) of white on the back of the tape at each splice. It was said that the master for Wendy Carlos' first record was almost completely white from the number of splices. I've still got an audio editing suite set up in my living room. I haven't used it since the 1980s, but there are three tape recorders, a mixer, and a splicing block in front of the central playback machine sitting there. Splicing was probably the most common form of editing until about the turn of this century, when digital recording became common, and the recordings could be copied without loss.
@@thomasmaughan4798Yes, I do too, and yes, I still have that album on LP. We are probably vaguely similar in age. But I figured I'd catch hell from the PC Police if I used the name Walter. And besides, they probably wouldn't recognize that name.
@@lwilton "I figured I'd catch hell from the PC Police if I used the name Walter" I was sort of hoping for that, but how likely are the woke crowd to be watching an ancient training film? Well, now we know.
@@thomasmaughan4798her name is Wendy and if you can't give her the basic amount of respect to use her preferred name and pronouns, give away her records. What her music has to say obviously means nothing to you. Its not like you have any excuse, she was out back then too.
625-line. At the time this film was made, IIRC, 405 was only being retained as a legacy format for folks with older TVs and in far-off rural areas where they didn't have great UHF coverage-the format conversion was literally pointing a 405 camera at a 625 screen.
@@eddievhfan1984 Playschool was a BBC2 programme, so it would have always been made in 625 line. I believe it began to be broadcast in Colour in May 1968.
I dunno, it looks kinda complicated ? Like how did they know where was what on the thousands of feet of tape ? I mean they didn’t use that special liquid. I guess it was a time estimate or exact time ?
The tape reel cases would've had notes on them the engineers could reference, and there would be integrated tape counters on the machines that could be referenced as well. There's also the edit pulse system, and using one of the audio tracks as a "cue" track as well. However, one thing that sucked with the 2" quadruplex tape system you see here is that they could not do picture-search rewind or fast-forward-the machines would only play back regular speed video with any synchronization. You wouldn't often see more than one individual program recorded on a single tape, however, so it'd all be the same material.
There is another upload of this film on YT with slightly better colour but worse sound: th-cam.com/video/gUA4ike-KYs/w-d-xo.html I think the Periscope transfer is cleaner, though. I think elsewhere I read that this film was made in 1967 or 1968 going by the date sticker on the tape heads. It's great to see Play School in this video. It was a popular programme for the under-5s that ran from 1964 to 1988. I grew up in the 70s and well remember tuning in as a toddler to watch. The male presenter is Brian Cant, a stalwart of children's TV in the UK for many years. He sadly passed way a few years ago.
@@Gannett2011 And about that Play School thing, the version in the film is the British version hosted by Brian Cant, not the well-known Australian ABC version (as a coincidence, both versions premiered at around the same time, but the British version is no longer showing on TV, since 1988). But I can agree that this is all a short film from 1967 all along. This is the US NTSC version distributed by Time-Life Films (slowed down to 23,976 FPS).
Because you don't have a deep enough understanding of the 20th century and its inner working machinations to think of anything besides a popular conspiracy zeitgeist when looking at something that only vaguely hints toward something similar in composition.
Amazing how all these techniques and machines worked. It sure made you feel smarter and more important than just booting up Adobe Premier.
Its a lot more fun than the software, and once you bought the equipment, you didn't have to keep paying forever or else have it taken away.
@@SnepperStepTV20-year old Photoshop still works. Or you can switch to Affinity Photo.
*Premiere
@@SnepperStepTV Vibes on the software licensing fees, although IIRC, you were still beholden to Ampex for replacement parts.
When the BBC was still something of a national asset.........
_International_ asset. Would we have won WW2 without them?
Damn I love havinf to ave tha telle on fa eedin ours jus ta see tha bloody qeen getta bonk on tha noggin an ave a mere bleedin crimmus jus anotha thing ta tax us fo innit
Nice to see footage of Brian Cant with the Tudor cloak who was part of people's childhood for so many years.
Since this film was made, many VCR's have 4 flying heads. Back up and record perfectly synchronised. Editing is a snap.
Those 2" Quadruplex VTRs, you mean. Those were the Ampex VR-2000 VTRs.
Though helical scanning did the most to support that.
"And be sure to tape over all those _Dr. Who_ episodes, because nobody is going to care 70 years from now."
LOL!
Its called being able to go back and make more than would have existed. Jeez, don't they teach anything in limp snark youtube comments class anymore?
That was literally the first thing I thought of when I saw the title
@Doodlesthegreat if we had a dollar for everytime we've gotten an email from some crazed Dr. Who fan who believes the Periscope Film vaults must contain "lost" episodes of that show -- we just tell them to go back in time using their TARDIS and explain to the BBC folks that recycling tapes isn't a great idea.
😅😅
This is such a cool film. What a palaver it was when doing cuts. They must have been thrilled when better editing kit turned up.
Yes but they couldn't afford it: th-cam.com/video/npExd1D6mtI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=AUMRTw9n26V03FZ9
I just realised that the VT area was located below the fountain at Television Centre. It was famously prone to flooding when the fountain was operating.
The fountain was kept empty when I was there!
They would have loved DigiBeta. Make as many generations as you like.
Yet, the format wasn't released by the time this short film was made. By that point, they were using 2" Quadruplex videotapes to record stuff onto, and bulk-erase their programs from them to make room for other programs, due to how expensive the format was.
These days it's mostly been replaced with Protools (or other digital workstation) and that one guy with the Cheetos dust beard.
Oh the good old days of editing by hand.
✌😎👍
Processes are good. Outsourcing to creepy people isn't. Having the option to go through a process is ideal even if there's a shortcut. So many people have no idea what they're slapping together now with tiktok that its pointless to make anything for that platform, its just trash. If they had to think about it, maybe they'd be making something thoughtful and impressive instead of essentially just getting kicked in the nuts and screaming over and over and over.
hard to believe they actually cut magnetic tape back in the day, i really thought that was only done with film, and that when magnetic tape came up they used like 2 recorder to record on a new tape to stitch a program together and nor like really cutting it...
The problem with analog tape, and analog recording in general, is that if you make a copy, the copy isn't exact. It loses resolution to some extent. In video recording, the second generation copy is noticeably fuzzier than the original (or first generation) copy. A third generation copy is the last one that is usable. Anything beyond that will be too blurred and fuzzy for production work.
Audio tape is a little more forgiving, but the 3rd generation rule still is a good one, though with excellent equipment you can often do four generations and still have reasonably acceptable quality.
Magnetic tape was usually brown, or rust colored, because it was clear film coated with rust particles. Splicing tape was normally white, so you will have about a half inch (1.5cm) of white on the back of the tape at each splice. It was said that the master for Wendy Carlos' first record was almost completely white from the number of splices.
I've still got an audio editing suite set up in my living room. I haven't used it since the 1980s, but there are three tape recorders, a mixer, and a splicing block in front of the central playback machine sitting there. Splicing was probably the most common form of editing until about the turn of this century, when digital recording became common, and the recordings could be copied without loss.
@@lwilton My generation knows him as Walter Carlos. I still have "Switched On Bach".
@@thomasmaughan4798Yes, I do too, and yes, I still have that album on LP. We are probably vaguely similar in age. But I figured I'd catch hell from the PC Police if I used the name Walter. And besides, they probably wouldn't recognize that name.
@@lwilton "I figured I'd catch hell from the PC Police if I used the name Walter"
I was sort of hoping for that, but how likely are the woke crowd to be watching an ancient training film? Well, now we know.
@@thomasmaughan4798her name is Wendy and if you can't give her the basic amount of respect to use her preferred name and pronouns, give away her records. What her music has to say obviously means nothing to you. Its not like you have any excuse, she was out back then too.
A film about video editing which was shoot on film 😊
👍
Is this 405 line system A ?
625-line. At the time this film was made, IIRC, 405 was only being retained as a legacy format for folks with older TVs and in far-off rural areas where they didn't have great UHF coverage-the format conversion was literally pointing a 405 camera at a 625 screen.
@@eddievhfan1984 Playschool was a BBC2 programme, so it would have always been made in 625 line. I believe it began to be broadcast in Colour in May 1968.
@@eddievhfan1984 In the UK, broadcasting in UHF was in 625 from the start, but 405 lived on VHF until 1985.
…and be sure to chop up almost the entire 1963 Beatles Liverpool Empire performance purely for “training purposes”.
I dunno, it looks kinda complicated ? Like how did they know where was what on the thousands of feet of tape ? I mean they didn’t use that special liquid. I guess it was a time estimate or exact time ?
The tape reel cases would've had notes on them the engineers could reference, and there would be integrated tape counters on the machines that could be referenced as well. There's also the edit pulse system, and using one of the audio tracks as a "cue" track as well. However, one thing that sucked with the 2" quadruplex tape system you see here is that they could not do picture-search rewind or fast-forward-the machines would only play back regular speed video with any synchronization. You wouldn't often see more than one individual program recorded on a single tape, however, so it'd all be the same material.
@@eddievhfan1984 Thanks for the explanation !
There is another upload of this film on YT with slightly better colour but worse sound: th-cam.com/video/gUA4ike-KYs/w-d-xo.html I think the Periscope transfer is cleaner, though.
I think elsewhere I read that this film was made in 1967 or 1968 going by the date sticker on the tape heads.
It's great to see Play School in this video. It was a popular programme for the under-5s that ran from 1964 to 1988. I grew up in the 70s and well remember tuning in as a toddler to watch. The male presenter is Brian Cant, a stalwart of children's TV in the UK for many years. He sadly passed way a few years ago.
This was filmed on Friday, September 29, 1967. Therefore, this short educational film was made in 1967.
@@northernplacecorporation September 29, 1967 was a Friday, but I think we can agree the film was made in 1967.
@@Gannett2011 And about that Play School thing, the version in the film is the British version hosted by Brian Cant, not the well-known Australian ABC version (as a coincidence, both versions premiered at around the same time, but the British version is no longer showing on TV, since 1988). But I can agree that this is all a short film from 1967 all along. This is the US NTSC version distributed by Time-Life Films (slowed down to 23,976 FPS).
@northernplacecorporation
This is internal BBC training film not intended for broadcast so I'd presume it would have been shot at 24fps?
@@martinhughes2549 More likely shot at the frame-rate of 25 FPS, and was slowed down to 23,976 FPS.
I take it colour video hadn't been invented at this point?
Why am I thinking about the Zapruder film as I watch this?
its shot 16mm film
Because you don't have a deep enough understanding of the 20th century and its inner working machinations to think of anything besides a popular conspiracy zeitgeist when looking at something that only vaguely hints toward something similar in composition.
It was standard 8mm (not "Super 8" or 16mm ) But yeah, it was cine film and not videotape.@@rods6405
Interesting video, but yuck get rid of that cigarette. I don't care if it was the 'thing' back then it is gross no matter when!
9:25 handsome editor!