Hyperland and Doctor Who (Was: 70's computers

[Fred Cisin]

>>> Modern computers are just to play with on the web and read mail and
>>> download DR WHO.
>> Remember when "personal" computers were on a par with model trains for 
>> "practicality" and "usefulness".
>> I've got the Doctor Who MP4 files on a SATA III drive plugged into a 
>> Seagate GoFlex-TV streamer.

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018, ben via cctalk wrote:
> Since this is the CLASSIC **** LIST I only watch the 70's Dr Who :)

Not sure, then, how to categorize "Shada".  It was a [Tom Baker] Doctor 
Who story, written by Douglas Adams.  It was being filmed in 1979, 
intended to air in the first couple of months in 1980.  But, a labor 
strike caused it to not get completed.
I'd call that "70's".

In 2003?, a reconstruction was done, to complete it, using narration by 
Tom Baker to fill in the missing pieces.  Is that still "70's"?

Later, in 2017, it was reconstructed again, using animation for the 
missing scenes.  That was released on DVD in UK almost a year ago.
The USA release was delayed until last month, and played once on BBC 
America.  Amazon.uk has had it available on DVD for a year; amazon.com 
(USA) should have it about now.  Is that still "70's"?

There were a LOT of Doctor Who episodes that got lost.  At one time, 
videotape was more valuable for re-use than the expected unlikelihood of 
further re-runs.  When it became profitable, BBC began reconstruction from 
VHS, re-transcoding from overseas copies, random archeological finds, etc. 
A major project.  There are still quite a few unaccounted for.
Consider: how would you recolourise something being reconstructed from B&W 
16mm film?  Besides manual and/or computer assisted Turner style 
recolorization, they developed ways to recolourise working from artifacts, 
such as the B&W 16mm film being high enough resolution to be able to 
differentiate the grey images of the RGB pixels of the colour screen that 
it was filmed from!


OB_ON-Topic:  In 1991, Douglas Adams, Ted nelson, and Tom Baker made a 
pre-WWW (or at least before WWW became popular) 25 minute BBC documentary 
about what the internet would become, called "Hyperland".  None of the 
high-quality studio copies are extant.  I talked to Ted Nelson last week; 
he has/had a studio VHS somewhere, but can't find it; leaving the mediocre 
ones on WWW, such as archive.org, as the only ones.  He asked me whether I 
could digitize VHS; I assured him that I would improve my capability for 
such, or have it done commercially.   "Hyperland" is NOT available 
commercially in any format.

Last year, I created an .SRT file for it!
It is now FINALLY possible to watch "Hyperland" with captions/subtitles!
I needed a lot of help from a friend with good hearing, but we got it 
done!
(copies available on request)
(caption .SRT files consist of an arbitrary sequence number (like last 
columns on a punch-card), a start and stop time, and lines of text.  When 
actually used as NTSC closed captions, the text is transmitted as two 
bytes at a time in line 21 of the verticsl retrace interval)

I use ANYDVD and Handbrake to transcode MY DVDs to MP4, always with 
captions/subtitles.  So far, all of mine fit [now barely] on a 7mm SATA 
2TB drive out of a Seagate "Backup Plus Slim", which fits into Seagate 
GoFlex-TV.


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com