[geeks] 1080p TV broadcasts?

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:44:37 +0300, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> The BBC faced with tiny budgets even erased and reused video tapes.
> Many of the Doctor Who episodes from that era were destroyed and lost

The BBC viewed the early Doctor Who episodes as very low status
compared with some of their other programmes. And the tapes weren't
overwritten until the 1970s as part of getting rid of "unusable"
material intended for 405-line transmission. It certainly wasn't a play
once and then destroy policy.

> They were often found on film because in the 1960's the only reliable
> way to convert the old system video (440 line?) to US (525 line) or
> the new UK standard (625 line) was via film.
> 
> It was not until the 1970's when UHF TV took off in the US and hungry
> for programing, they bought the rights to old shows and showed them
> over and over again.

A quite possibly surprising amount of early TV shows were mastered on
film for a variety of possible reasons :-

a) For artistic and quality reasons ... those artistic types can be
   pretty fussy :)

b) For technical reasons related to the BBC running two simultaneous
   broadcasting standards from 1962 until 1985 (405-line B&W, and 625
   line colour). As you say it's probably a great deal easier to
   convert to the different standards from an original on film.

c) For sales to other countries ... BBC started selling abroad at least
   as far back as 1961. 

d) For 'futureproofing' ... the BBC had already gone from Baird's
   240-line system to 405-line, and then on to 625-line. They may well
   have expected further developments if not at home at least in other
   markets. 

I don't know how much TV was originally mastered on film, but certainly
"The Prisoner" (ok, that was ITV) was originally on 35mm film.


-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
  sigmonster: core dumped