On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, you wrote:
> On 23/10/2000 at 19:12 +0100, Dave Cross wrote:
>
> >This happened with Dr Who. There are still a large nubmer of episodes
> >>missing following a purge in the 1970s.
> >
> >Every so often a missing episode turns up at some far-flung
> >broadcasting company that bought it years ago.
>
> This almost happened to Monty Python too, at which point one of them
> smuggled out some then state-of-the-art VHS-style copies (which were
> obviously of really poor quality) as a final record once the masters
> were wiped.
hah . .now you really are on my territory ;-)
as an ex-employee of Auntie, and on occasion involved in the 'Dr Who'
renovation ... the phrase 'you wouldn;t believe it' comes to mind .. only
last year many spools of original studio material got thrown in the
skip... thankfully a mad colleague had transferred it all onto D3 and
stored it under his desk. The results are on sale through BBC worldwide I
believe ... it was the same guy that restored a doctor who episode that
the BBC had on 25fps film and some American had on 525line NTSC/60hz
tape .. by a complicated process we used the black and white images off
the film and the colour off the video tape to produce a surprisingly good
coloured version of the film recording. Several episodes are missing,
some have been re-constructed from bits of archive.. some are just plain
not there.
Several episodes of Python don;t exist, it was pre-VHS days and
everything was recorded on Ampex 'Quad' format 2" tapes .. and they were
expensive .. so they got wiped and re-used .. several Pythons went that
way never to re-surface AFAIK .. We spent much of last year using our
last remaining VR2000 quad machine to transfer ancient reels onto
digibeta .. the place was awash with tape for months...
One of the last bits of work I did was a restoration of a 1/2" reel to
reel machine .. 405 line !! . as several people had old tapes of
off-air stuff that just didn;t exist anywhere else .. we bodged it into a
TBC to stabilise it .. and then through a Questech charisma to convert it
to 625 line .. getting stable replay was tricky as the guy who made the
original recording had been too poor to buy 1/2" tape .. but had split 2"
quad tape into 1/2" strips ... and added wooden spacers to 1/4" audio
reels to make suitable spools .... !!!
--
Robin Szemeti
The box said "requires windows 95 or better"
So I installed Linux!
