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e-Serendipity

 
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iwarburton



Joined: 08 Dec 2006
Posts: 2133
Location: Northumberland

PostPosted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:47 am    Post subject: e-Serendipity Reply with quote

Way back in October 1960, a family friend, Canon Clarence Wolfe, was the subject of This Is Your Life, with Eamonn Andrews. Canon Wolfe had worked tirelessly over many decades in running an orphanage within the Episcopal Diocese of Inverness. In those days the show sometimes featured unsung heroes to intersperse with celebrity subjects.

A week ago, by pure chance, I came across the show on YouTube.

Actually it isn't the original broadcast, which, needless to say, the Beeb destroyed shortly afterwards. But the soundtrack is there, possibly courtesy of a domestic tape recorder of the day, and they've cleverly put up a montage of photographs to run in sequence with the sound.

There are one or two drawbacks; it isn't absolutely complete and, whilst Eamonn Andrews can be heard clearly, other participants aren't quite so easy to catch. But I was moved almost to tears to hear this again after almost half a century and, as virtually all the participants must now be dead, it's a memento to treasure (Canon Wolfe himself died around 1967).

What treasures have you found online by accident?

Ian.
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colby



Joined: 06 Feb 2009
Posts: 1216

PostPosted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:07 pm    Post subject: Re: e-Serendipity Reply with quote

iwarburton wrote:
Actually it isn't the original broadcast, which, needless to say, the Beeb destroyed shortly afterwards.


They probably didn't have a recording of it at all. Shows like this went out live and to record them to expensive videotape was, for the large part, out of the question. Only "key" shows were recorded and retained in the archive - usually after the exec producer committed to setting aside a budget to purchase (ie: save) the tape itself. If no such provision was made any recordings that were made were bulk-erased and put back into the pool. In the early 70s a roll of Ampex videotape of the sort used by broadcasters cost around £200 and in 1960 it was all very new.

Often, where TV studio made shows were to be sold to other networks around the world, they were recorded to film using a special electronic-to-celluloid conversion process - and that's how many classic serials have been retrieved.
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John W



Joined: 07 Dec 2006
Posts: 3367
Location: Warwickshire, UK

PostPosted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 6:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As a collector/researcher in popular music inter-war years I've been fascinated by how many FILMS exist of dance bands and artistes from the 1920-s and 1930s and folks kindly pout them on youtube.

Okay a lot of them are already available free in low-quailty video from British Pathe but there's many high quaility films that people own and they've digitised them for youtube.

For me absolutely fascinating, but I'm afraifd one day Youtube will be forced to remove some or all of those old film clips. So I'm trying to find a good simple way of saving youtube videos to my PC. There seems to be a large number of ways to do this if you google but some sources seem a bit dodgy and offer software to do it etc., and I haven't tried any yet. Plus youtube has apparently been putting things in place to defeat some of the download tools.

John
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Helen May



Joined: 10 Dec 2006
Posts: 19374
Location: Cheshire

PostPosted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John

Some of the software that enables you to record sound streaming has video add ons. I use Total Recorder (not free but when I bought it was only about $12) and there is a video add on which I thought about but have never got round to upgrading.

The sound streaming recording is simple to use but I'm not sure about the video.

H
_________________
88 - 91 FM this is Radio 2 from the BBC!

I said it live on air in the studio with Jeremy Vine on 10/3/2005
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colby



Joined: 06 Feb 2009
Posts: 1216

PostPosted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Although professional film-to-video conversion is very expensive (but high resolution) it's pretty easy to get film onto video in an amateurish way - simply point a video camera at a projection screen. It's awful - but awful is OK for YouTube where you can find more rubbish quality video than you'll need in a lifetime.

Converting video properly isn't difficult, but it does need good compression software otherwise it just looks rubbish after YouTube and others have crushed the hell out of it on the way in. Ideally, it needs to be MPEG4/H.264 in order that it can survive their Flash encoding, and there's lots of really low cost software that can do this now. Just throw your DVD or camcorder recordings at it and you'll get what YouTube needs.

However, I agree with John in that there's far too much copyright material on YouTube and I'm surprised the uploaders are allowed to get away with it. I honestly think that most people are stupid in not having a clue about uploading what they don't themselves own or have the right to share, but what the heck.
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