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British Film Institute To Digitize 100,000 Old TV Shows Before They Disappear (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Thousands of British TV programs are to be digitized before they are lost forever, the British Film Institute says. Anarchic children's show Tiswas and The Basil Brush Show are among the programs in line for preservation. The initiative was announced as part of the BFI's five-year strategy for 2017-2022. "Material from the 70s and early 80s is at risk," said Heather Stewart, the BFI's creative director. "It has a five or six-year shelf life and if we don't do something about it will just go, no matter how great the environment is we keep it in. "Our job is make sure that things are there in 200 years' time." The BFI has budgeted $14.3 million of Lottery funding towards its goal of making the UK's entire screen heritage digitally accessible. This includes an estimated 100,000 of the "most at-risk" British TV episodes and clips held on obsolete video formats. The list includes "early children's programming, little-seen dramas, regional programs and the beginnings of breakfast television." The issue for the BFI, Ms Stewart added, was also to do with freeing up storage space. "We have a whole vault which is wall-to-wall video. If we digitized it, it would be in a robot about the size of a wardrobe," she said.
The whole point behind Tiswas was that it actually wasn't a kids show.
Bulk digital storage requires a robot? Is she perhaps talking about a device that can access stored digital tape media with a mechanical arm or something? Or is any high tech hardware these days just called a "robot" if people don't know what else to call it?
The article didn't provide any more details, which is a shame, since that sounds sort of interesting to see.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Some of the Dr. Who were already lost, and reconstructed by fans from audio and photographs, though I believe some were found recorded in Nigeria.
Last I heard Benny was to un PC for the English.
Even the torrents were week. Haven't looked lately...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ah Saturday Mornings. On the BBC we had the safe, middle-class, colourful jumper version with Noel Edmonds, Keith Chegwin etc. On the the other side it was anarchy and chaos with Sally, Chris, Bod, Lenny and John. The dying fly; The Phantom Flan Flinger. Lenny Henry got his career rolling on that although I'm sure his will disavow it now. One of the best bits was when he was pretending to read the News as Trevor McDonald and the real Trevor came up behind him. Although stuck for words, his comment "Well hello daddy" was a cracker. All of this of course is completely lost on non-UK people and those below a certain age. p.s. People moan about the UK and how racist it is but if that's so how does a black journalist born in Trinidad become such a much-loved icon ?
Read the diversity related parts of the pdf. ...
"to set agendas", "dual identities", "representation of women"
For both future funding and past works.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I don't know what the future would be like without him
... posterity.
Episodes of Dr Who and The Goodies are gone because they were not on that sort of list. Significant or not a non-trivial number of people would have wanted to see them and even shell out cash to do so. As an example, a restored version with animation of Dr Who "Power of the Daleks" was recently in cinemas.
Choosing a narrow list has already lost us some interesting material so it's probably a good idea not to tightly restrict this time either. There will be gems among all the muck.
100,000? That'll cover, what, 5% of Dr. Who episodes?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Presumably, they plan to digitize it and store it in various places. But, once it's digitized, they can migrate it towards new storage devices relatively easily as well as monitor the integrity of the entire catalog and repair the broken files as need be.
As long as they migrate the content to newer technology regularly, it shouldn't be much of an issue.
The really hard bit is going to be the initial scan and import of the materials and doing so in a way that they get all the possible data off the current copies.
A friend of my sister's worked there and gave us a tour when we visited. He showed us their vault room where they kept all their videotapes. It wasn't very big, so I asked him since there were so many different sporting events going on every day, how long did they save the recordings of these events. He said most of the stuff (local sports, lower-interest stuff like non-Olympics track events, etc) they only kept for a month or two. Pro sports were kept at least a year, longer for more important games. Playoff finals and particularly notable games, they'd keep indefinitely. But most of the "memorable" events could be boiled down to just a few highlight clips (e.g. a world record-breaking long jump).
A shocking amount of stuff gets erased or tossed out simply because there's no space to save it (or need at the time). If you think about everything everyone does every day, it's a mindboggling amount of material which is produced daily, So it's inevitable that a lot of it is going to be lost (hopefully with a summary or end result saved). You have to be obsessive/compulsive to want to save everything.
Historians of the future won't just be concerned about the content, but the media, the format, and how the media degades over time as well.
After all, just because we've got copies of the Magna Carta or something more mundane like a 15th-century grocery list in digital form doesn't mean we get rid of the originals.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Never heard of it until last night. Had insomnia, it's on at 2 AM. Something about a chicken egg and tricking people into thinking it was a real egg. Funny as hell.
Aired in 1954, 4 years before I was born.
Don't worry. They'll just store it all in "the cloud" and it'll last forever.
As the collection gets bigger they will be under financial pressure to delay the updating as long as possible. Eventually that will lead to unrecoverable bit rot and stuff will be lost. We need to spend the money and make a good long term archive medium.
I doubt that strict archival would favour the use of compression, especially if after the digitization they want to remaster the material. They would be best off having all the digitized material be uncompressed since that allows for better post processing.
If you can get good quality sources the compression isn't the end of the world, particularly for something you might not otherwise save. Uncompressed 1080p is around 3Gbps. Compressed is what around 4Mbps, a factor of nearly a thousand different.
The real problem is the poor quality sources. Noise compresses badly. Sure you can at least use lossless compression, but that's what maybe a factor of 10 at best. (I'm too lazy to look it up, but I think that is in the ballpark.) If space is a consideration, you might have to process the video before saving to try to reduce noise. Some things like animation can take some fairly targeted filtering. It seems wrong to try to process it rather than save it as is, and maybe there really is space to just save it all uncompressed, though I'm less than certain that is the case for everything.
Obviously if it is the really important stuff then save it all uncompressed and never lose that data, no matter what you later make of it.
JPEG 2000 is good for 10:1 lossy compression of almost all material without visible artifacts. Lossless JPEG 2000 is more like 2:1 or 3:1, but it depends on the material. See: http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/still-image/documents/Snyder.pdf
Just encode it into laser pulses and beam it several directions into space. Then as soon as we invent faster than light travel, we can zip out a little ways past where the laser has reached and just wait for it.
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The Basil Brush Show
Is that with or without the running defense of iOS?
Boom boom.
Assuming these are half-hour episodes, that's 50,000 hours of video or 5.71 years. Digital storage is pretty cheap these days, so labor expenses should be more than storage media. How does this come to $14.3 million?
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The BFI are scanning these so they can ascertain/renew/monopolise the distribution rights. Some of the still-missing material could be very valuable due to the fact the BBC/BFI currently DON'T have access to it. This is an effort to minimise the ability of others to lay claim to similarly rare material, whilst bringing the rest up to (copy-protected) DVD-retailable quality.
Such a process resulted in the losses I gave as examples above. An afternoon drama for children didn't seem all that important culturally so Dr Who episodes that could be making money for the BBC were thrown away.
The easy way to preserve old content is to restore the public domain, and limit the current infinitely extended copyright.
Currently, most every audio and video recording ever made is copyrighted and extended every few decades to protect the interests of a few large companies.
As a side effect, preserving old media is often illegal without permission/licensing (which may be impossible), even if the media is abandoned.
If there was a reasonable limit on copyright duration, then preservation occurs naturally by the public.
In the current model, public preservation is strictly prohibited and prevented with DMCA and similar, and old media may just disappear.
But that would be stealing from Disney, you dirty commie hippy!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You forgot to include the sharks. They must fit in there somehow.
It will be digitised and then stored on 2 different tape formats - currently IBM TS1150 and LTO-6 in Spectralogic tape libraries. There are systems for regular data integrity checks and a migration path.
I totally agree. Just because I don't like something, doesn't mean millions of other people don't want to see it.
Sadly too much has already been burnt by the BBC :|
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This is the case on quite a few fronts. I was working for a television station in NZ a few years ago, and they were literally throwing out Beta tapes of original programming.
Also, classic staples for us nerds such as Le Monde Englouti (Spartacus and the sun beneath the sea), some episodes simply don't exist anymore in the english dub.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Firstly, I hope they pick some easy to encode / decode format like DV with PCM audio for archival. It's not space efficient like MP4, but it's less destructive on the information being digitised. I used DV on my VHS tapes.
On another point, isn't this what people are using Youtube for, as a big archive... oh, but the users haven't paid the copyright cartel their cocaine money the film/tv/record industry shoves up it's collective nose, so the uploads get "monotonized", blocked, or entire Youtube channel gets deleted.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I always hope this Quartz Glass storage that can last for claimed billions of years can make it to a product.
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
We then get into the file formats issues but solving half the problem is a good start.
Who do you think is going to fly the rocket?
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Don't forget Glam Metal Detectives. Me and my dad took a trip down to London to watch that again a few years ago. There was one joke we referenced for years and we went all the way down there to see it again as you can't buy the show, it's not on youtube or any of the bigger torrent sites. We got a little room, a shitty TV, crappy headphones and the tapes. We watched it all til it came on and it was worth every second. She loved it!
What's that? We're number one in Backupland? That's good, we're playing there next week.
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But that's not really how this works. You just pay for a service like Amazon Glacier, and it's a constant renewal fee.
I'm not sure I can think of a digital storage medium that has been proven to last 200 years.
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No, I'm not joking
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Technically Ogham and other runic writing lasted for millenia.
So that is a good point.
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An afternoon drama for children didn't seem all that important culturally so Dr Who episodes that could be making money for the BBC were thrown away.
As much as I like Dr. Who, I could never honestly claim that every episode was "important culturally". What, "look how culturally relevant those worms in the green slime are!" Now, the "Upperclass Twit of the Year Award" contest might have been a statement about British culture of the day, but hey! We've already got all the Monty Python episodes available -- because people would pay for them.
To be honest, there was no market for Dr. Who episodes before the VCRs became ubiquitous. BBC didn't imagine making more money off of them when they were thrown away. How do we know that? Because now there is a market for old shows and we have DVDs of the complete series of Dukes of Hazard, as just one example. And I already have a DVD of several episodes of Do Not Adjust to go with my box set of MP.
I think the issue is not whether such things should be digitized to protect them, but who pays for it. Using lottery funds is not the right source. And trying to paint it as a grand attempt at improving diversity in film is, well, silly.
I think the issue is not whether such things should be digitized to protect them, but who pays for it. Using lottery funds is not the right source. And trying to paint it as a grand attempt at improving diversity in film is, well, silly.
Preserving our cultural history is certainly something you would expect governmental involvement for, and lottery funds are a common form of public funding. Its not much different than historical preservation of architecturally significant buildings or the preservation of national parks. Sometimes private groups are involved in these endeavors, but government institutions are usually also involved.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Don't forget this is likely all standard definition - so you're only starting with about 1/4 of the data that today's common formats would have.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Preserving our cultural history
Well, see, that means you assume that old TV shows are "cultural history" and I don't. The fact that there was a chimp co-host of a morning TV show might be "culturally significant", but digitizing every program he was in doesn't add to that history in any significant way.
Historical preservation of buildings is a burden put upon the owners, not the government. I find it rather intrusive to have a government that tells the owner of a building that they cannot replace the old energy inefficient windows they have with modern ones because it won't "look like it should". Why should the government tell anyone what kind of windows they can have, especially when it's an improvement that will save the owner money AND help the environment?
It appears to be film not tape so the resolution will be whatever it is scanned at with a practical limit of a few times the grain size on the film. That's still not going to be a massive amount of data per reel especially if it's monochrome.
On the flipside I've been trying to avoid most on the content of the 80's since I was 12 but it's being broadcast on repeat. Can we just let it go now?
The people who make decisions in programming now love that stuff because they grew up on it so we are stuck with it. Now you know how we felt about seemingly endless 1950s and 1960s nostalgia with a pile of disappointing and pointless remakes.
I don't know where those figures come from but they are a pile of rubbish. The digital master of a movie could probably be held for well under a $100 a year. An LTO7 tape has a raw capacity of 6TB and costs around 120USD, keep in a cool room has a shelf life of over a decade. Consumes *ZERO* power during that time. A huge 10000 slot library so it can be recalled without human intervention will consume around 1kW of power. Though to be fair a single frame would consume pretty much the same.
Whoever came up with that $12,000 a year needs the sack for gross incompetence.
I was a VTR engineer, for several of many before my conversion to IT commodity analyst / writer, I kept old quad format VTRs in working order. The BBC of all the national broadcasting companies, was the last to migrate content to Type C 1", which almost universally replaced quad format VTRs - tanks that they were, the quad machines (4 heads on a small very high speed spinning cylinder - most of them looked like....hmmm. Google it. The BBC kept more content on Quad than any other broadcaster, one reason being that they had some of the best studio maintainers on the planet - one of my mentors was a former BBC engineer and I know for a fact that he taught some technical knowledge that is long gone now, save for his students BBC dont lose TTSS or Smiley's People or any of the Le carre materials dramatized in the 1960's.
"I'm not sure I can think of a digital storage medium that has been proven to last 200 years."
Nor can I - and I do backups + long term archiving as part of my dayjob (*)
However I CAN point out that having it in a readable digital format means you can migrate to newer generations of storage _as long as you do so before the older format readers die_
(Practically, at the moment this means migrating from LTOn to LTOn+2 when you acquire the LTOn+2 equipment and verifying the SHA256 checksums haven't changed)
(*) LTOs are claimed to last for decades but good luck finding a working LTO2 drive in 50 years time and in any case that's a tape that's written ONCE, then stored under carefully controlled conditions. They're only good for a claimed 162 complete cycles and experience has shown it's more like 50 so don't just go archiving your last generation of heavily used backup tapes.
"It appears to be film not tape"
It's a mixture of both. The "traditional british way" of doing things was film for outdoors (with film union rules) and tape for indoors.
That changed starting in the 1980s when equipment got portable enough that you didn't expensive outdoor broadcast rigs to make it doable.
The coercivity of older magnetic media is low enough that the magnetisation of adjacent layers of spooled tape has a long-term effect on what's recorded without any other factor being taken into consideration. This shows as increasing smeariness of the luminance (image) and progressively worse colours (low frequency information (highly visible), recorded on a high frequency subcarrier(easily distorted)). If there's film stock or still photos then this can be used as the base for video restoration but it's not always easy.
WRT cultural importance: As others have noted a lot of "fluff" got deleted, which turned out to be highly valuable cultural artifacts. The priorities of media management are not the same as cultural historians - as one for-instance, old breakfast TV footage may turn out to be a valuable resource for working out the changing clothing styles or the social penetration of how such styles permeate through a society of the era, despite the content itself being pretty much irrelevant for anything else.