BFI to digitise 100,000 British TV programmes

I get that, but what I just cannot grasp is that we are often told that obits are prepared sometimes years in advance, and yet still, these days even when elderly stars pass away, we're still treated to dodgy YouTube rips.

Well no doubt obits are fully prepared in advance for people that most might consider important people of note or people who are generally held in high regard by the general public. But clearly that can't be everyone 'on the telly' can it, some obits have to be prepared on the day of transmission using the material to hand.

I understand a bolt out of the blue like Victoria Wood, or even someone that had been out of the public eye for a long time like Jean Alexander but the likes of Ronnie Corbett or Cilla Black surely would have had a pre-prepared package, or at least some clips ready?

Perhaps I'm taking too much of a lead from Drop The Dead Donkey where they'd pop in and edit an obituary if they were ever at a loose end, sometimes to cheer themselves up

The shrinking cost and increasing capacity of data storage means that recording 'everything' is possible these days, and is done.

For the last 10 years the BBC has 'recorded' the output of it's TV and radio channels onto servers which are accessible via a web interface. It's done by keeping the transport streams that are broadcast so the quality is off-air rather than broadcast quality, so not really an 'archive' but it's all there if needed.

I'm sure several of the members here will have access to it (I know lots of non-BBC people who have access), it's a very good system made better now that they're linking it with subtitle data to make it properly searchable

The big problem these days isn't really the keeping of programmes, it's the metadata that makes the archive usable and searchable.

It was for a long time the forgotten part of archiving. I've worked at places where management have bought in big whizzy server or other data storage hardware that will keep everything automatically, but forgot that it needs someone to catalogue it so that everything useful can be found. There are automatic ways of doing it, as I mentioned in the last post subtitle data is quite useful, but keywording and shotlisting still needs humans to do.

Odd how the BBC "dish out" access. Being a BBC employee is not enough, length of service is not related either it would seem.

There is a service which is available to Universities and other educational establishments who subscribe which gives access to a pretty comprehensive archive of BBC broadcasts from recent years

http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/bob

They only really dish it out to people who need it as part of their work (basic archive research, development, programme research etc). They also allow indies making BBC shows to use it if their reason is just. The problem (or the sheer joy) of the system is that for some reason your account lasts for about three years before it expires meaning that (like me) you have free access to a treasure trove of literally every programme broadcast on the BBC over the last decade.

I think there are users outside of this group. They are like gold dust it would seem.

As a case very much in point, didn't they do exactly that and come up with a better PAL decoder a few years back which then got used on all then-future (and eventually, all previous, re-released) Doctor Who DVD transfers?

Not quite the case.

The BBC are replaying D3 (and 1"/2" transfers to D3) in digital composite, but then decoding them to digital component via the amazing BBC R&D TRANSFORM PAL decoder. This generates stunningly good - close to component quality - decoded pictures which are then losslessly recorded as data to LTO tape AND dubbed to Digital Component DigiBeta.

The lossless LTO 'file-domain' copy is a lossless recording, but of the component NOT composite signal. AIUI it isn't the digital composite signal, or the raw data, but the digital component copy that is losslessly recorded.

HOWEVER - the TRANSFORM PAL decoding process is mathematically reversible, so you can play the lossless component data back through a reverse TRANSFORM encoder and accurately recreate the PAL composite digital source signal, just in case a better PAL decoder comes along again in the future. In reality I don't think many (any?) reverse TRANSFORM encoders exist in hardware, but it would likely be a software process - as would any future improvements in PAL decoding allied to it.



I hope they use PAL TRANSFORM decoders for PAL composite stuff (though the BBC own the only ones in existence I think - and they are based on a lousy hardware platform with dodgy PSUs - which is the same as the old COM^3 Composite Compatible Component gear from the mid-90s) and an archive quality lossless format (There is a lot of traction for a couple of open source lossless codecs in archive circles these days I believe)

Let us hope they don't do what one broadcaster, who will remain nameless did. Took their 2" Quad B&W recordings and fed them straight into an XD Cam deck's composite input. Cross chroma/luma artefacts baked into the archive copy of a B&W show... If they'd just used the analogue component Y input they could have avoided that...

Well I think enough time has passed.



I often wonder what became of the TVS archive. Is it really lost? Is it still somewhere in Maidstone, or perhaps the BFI have it?