BBC BASIC strikes again
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I watched a remarkable thing last night. During the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who many of the original tapes were wiped as a cost saving exercise. (The tapes themselves were £100's of pounds each, and the storage was expensive too). Many of the colour prints were recovered from overseas customers, or from the hands of private collectors and so eventually every JP episode exists in one format or another. Unfortunately there are 13 episodes that only exist in black and white. There was an effort back in the early 90's to 'recolorise', (American Spelling as it was an American firm that did this), a couple of the black and white episodes, and they did a good job, but there was a lot of colour clash. Sometimes it was due to scanning differences between NTSC and PAL systems, or there were timing differences between the 24fps of film and the 25fps of TV etc. Then, quite recently, when watching what is known as a TeleCine Transmission (Basically for some foreign sales they pointed a film camera at a TV Screen), one chap noticed that the TV picture kept trying to put colour into a black and white film. This guy is a genius, because he realised why. When the B&W film was being made from a colour image, it captured colour data in the image, even though there was only a black and white scale. Each pixel from the TV image was captured, and if they could be read, they could be interpreted and recombined into the original colour image. He designed a system that scanned each frame of the B&W film, and attached a corresponding value to each part of it and lo and behold, thence came colour! It took a while, (24 fps x 24m30s x 6eps = 211680 frames), but they did it. The year was 2009, the computer was an Archimedes and the language used to write this remarkable program? BBC BASIC! Seriously Cool that a 25 year old version of BASIC, on a 22 year old machine can do this. All Praise Be on old tech!
------------------------------------ To eat well in England, you should have a breakfast three times a day. W. Somerset Maugham 1925
"The year was 2009, the computer was an Archimedes and the language used to write this remarkable program? BBC BASIC!" Sorry to rain on your parade, but although it was 2009 and it was BBC BASIC, the machine was in fact a fast PC running BBC BASIC for Windows (and with most of the number-crunching done in embedded 32-bit assembler code). Nevertheless, I agree that it demonstrates the power of BBC BASIC even today, but not an obsolete computer like an Archimedes! The newest example of the Colour Recovery application is of the pilot episode of Are You Being Served?, to be shown on BBC2 on New Years Day: http://colourrecovery.wikispaces.com/Processed+programmes Richard.