BBC News 1999

Was an attempt a few years ago at the News 24 Countdown. Need to fix the masking for the numbers and text. Was really happy with the colour grading. The globe animation needed to be worked on. My suspison was that the motion on the land masses was shared against the World 2002 countdown and other title sequences.


Was interested to see the BBC use a mocked countdown for the 20th Anniversary of the News Channel, done up by another member of the forum.

Also once has a quick run at the 2004 design. Whilst After Effects couldn't do the 3D ribbon, still had a quick attempt with the shapes. Also liked the idea of a clock.

I think your N24 1999 countdown looks better than the original one.

nah. the heavy blurs and complex layering are integral to the original 99 countdown and, so far, none of the recreations have managed to get that right.

No pressure Bail.

'Maps within maps within maps'

Knowing how much blur to apply is a real challenge, even when the best reference material we have seems to have a small blur effect itself.

https://www.tvark.org/?page=media&mediaid=56790
This is the best quality I could find of a countdown in Widescreen from that era, and you may notice that itself has a soft blur everywhere, even the text. Possible from transferring a VHS or DVD recording, and applying in interlacing (hence the subtle jittery and colour banding across the DOG whenever the video is paused.)
Someone may need to correct me on that.

Yup I think that's definitely the problem. Because we don't have a "clean" recording of the original titles without VHS / pal conversion or similar artefacts it's hard to tell which blurs are meant to be there and which aren't.

Plus we've not seen it on tv for 17 years meaning we may be having a Mandela Effect where your recreation is bang on but we're so used to the blur on youtube be think its not.

Sneaky Background, the holy grail for break-filler fans... Took about an hour to render...

Well after catching the end of the stream on Twitch, it spurred me to have a proper go at doing something properly in video. A quick search after the stream led me to find that DaVinci Resolve had a free version that was far from hobbled for my purposes.

After a few days of getting to know the basics, typing out the numbers 00 to 90, and watching my render times grow, I made a 1999 style countdown in Reith.



Attempting something like this does make you appreciate just how much detail is in the original: the scrambling text, the many rows and columns of numbers counting down, the other scrambling numbers counting up to 24, the rings, the globes... even the main numbers aren't as simple as they might seem - the effect that's achieved with them alone is brilliant, and I know that what I've done isn't anywhere near the same.

However, it's been successful so far in being a fun way to fill in spare time, so I have to thank Bail for that - and I hope it will be for a while yet.

It's fun watching people being spurred to do these recreations! Bail really is an inspiration.

That’s brilliant work guys, it’s spurred me on to save money to upgrade my laptops memory capacity

Doesn't include the News 24 countdown or titles, but this collection of the original World titles and idents from the original laserdiscs is probably as good a reference as we'll get.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNX5Z5m-hlSyiHwnV6IzGXw

I'm carrying on with the mock, no commentary just me working on the final shots if anyone wants to watch along.

twitch.tv/lazyorange