BBC2: 1970s Idents, Presentation & Programmes

Remember that until the creation of S4C in November 1982, welsh language coverage of Welsh International rugby union matches would, almost certainly, have been on BBC2 Wales, suggesting national opt outs in the 1970's. Also I am sure that in the 1970's and up until the late 1990's the Melrose sevens were shown on BBC1 Scotland during the day, with the latter stages on BBC2 Scotland.

Owning a pile of Wales Radio Times from the seventies and early eighties, I can confirm they didn't do Welsh language coverage.

I liked the way BBC2 showed the "ribbon" 2 ident ======2====== at the start of I Love 1979 at 9pm (21:00) tonight. They even showed it form upwards left to right, complete with the fanfare:

Doo-da-doo-da doo-da doo-da doo doo dew

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvbvel0lPdo

Just what I expected and wanted.

The next programme starting at 10pm was an old edition of Top of the Pops from some time in 1977, and not surprisingly that began with the stripy cylinder 2 as used 1974 to 1978.

Just because you expect it and want it doesn't make it happen.

Another good sign off from Phil last night.

I've noticed a couple of other things about the 1979 recreation aside from the face of the 2 being a gradient instead of solid, that are not right... Two nitpicky things with the left-hand double lines, and the 'progressive' motion.

I won't try and spell it out here; best illustrate it with a video (can't just now, but perhaps 'at a later date')

Only just seen the 79 copy. They'll never quite get it right. It's not really a very easy one to do. It was interlaced, the shapes it made at the end of the lines being drawn out were quite irregular, the colours are quite hard to get right. Video copies, even the ones found on DVD such as in Look Around You 2, are never quite perfect enough to see what you're trying to copy. I know, I put in the hours to try and get my Flash version right, and was never happy!

Have you seen Dave Jeffery's most recent attempt at the stripey 2, mulder?

It's been great though for them to have gone to the effort of showing all three idents over the season (including the lack of 'BBC' in the anno on Saturday, all very old school). Now if only they could get their current pres right.

You sure about Look Around You 2 as quality goes? The symbol in the episode intro continuity is as good as I've ever seen. The edges aren't smooth, but I was under the impression that's how the computer drew it.

I've viewed other examples of similar quality, but nothing better. When it's a tape recording off analogue, the colour can be a bit variable - for example, the double stripes appearing more red-orange than the tan-orange seen here and on the DVD. I would assume they used a better source than a domestic format for the episodes?

Well, the LAY2 copy has a stripey pattern pulsing over the orange bars for a start, so getting the right colour out of that isn't easy. Getting the gradient right on the 2 itself is always going to be tricky too, as it would be with any gradient. It's a very sharp picture in comparison to VHS for example, but it's still a bit blurry and so it's still not easy to trace it perfectly. I wanted to get the exact shape of the fat pixels out of it, but you can't. A similar effect is possible by putting Flash Player into low quality mode, but it's not the same

I'd like to see a bitmap dump of each frame from the memory, but that'll never happen unless the hardware still exists, still works and somebody the gear to do the dumping. Creating a new widescreen digital version from that would be a piece of cake, you'd just add the extra frames for the extra length of the lines and have the original frames sandwiched in between.

One thing though, the NTNOCN DVD helped to show that the top line on the clock has a darker shadow than the bottom line...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v281/deej_mulder/vlcsnap-2012-05-18-15h48m17s126.png

...which I could never tell from a VHS.

Didn't the 1979 Bbc2 animate off screen too?

Wow, very well observed there - and I see what you mean about the noise on the orange now, it's not really strong but when you're looking for a solid reference it's not ideal - maybe if there was a way to take the colour selection from multiple frames and calculate an overall value, could give an accurate result... Or even 'average' the clip to give a solid colour using a temporal filter?

And the NTNOCN clock has a more apparent (and common) problem, in the ghosting...


It did indeed, yes.