[QuadList] OT?-BBC recovers color from B&W kinescopes--old tapes next?

[Tony Quinn]

A C&P  of a reply made elsewhere


In message <11633EB4-FE6E-4CE7-A8B5-084C956669AD at tedlangdell.com>, Ted
Langdell <ted at tedlangdell.com> writes
 >BBC Viewers in the UK will get to see a 40-year old episode of "Dad's
 >Army" in color this weekend, long after the original Quad PAL color
 >videotape was wiped after being transferred to a 16mm film copy.

This was a couple of weeks ago

 >It isn't clear whether the monitor used in the BBC tape to film
 >transfer was a color or monochrome monitor. Or whether that makes a
 >difference. The major dependency is whether the chroma dots are in the
 >filmed image, which is the result of telerecording technicians not 
 >using a filter to kill the chroma dots during the tape to film
 >transfer.

It will have been a special monochrome monitor (actually with a
strikingly bright blue short persistence phosphor) in a Marconi 16mm FPD
intermittent motion Film Recorder. I dealt with them peripherally in the
early 1980s whilst a BBC Trainee Engineer (the department called
"TelRec" (short for Television Recording) comprised VT, TK (telecine).
And FR (Film Recording). By the early 1980s there was a chroma trap in
the video chain to prevent exactly what has been recovered. As Ted has
pointed out what has been recovered is the very "dot crawl" that we find
offensive on such material.

The recordings were made (as monochrome negs on Kodak 7374) for overseas
sales of popular programmes. It's almost 30 years now, but if anybody
has more questions about how we went about these things - ask. I'll
relate that which I can remember - I have good memory when prompted.

I was somewhat underwhelmed by the final material - it looked like poor
standards conversion, but I suppose that anything is better than
nothing!!