"The Eagle Has Landed" - EXTENDED version

Erm not wishing to hijack the thread with techie Telecine film to video transfer geekiness, but since the sixties we have used the "ghost frame" method of film transfer in the PAL world. This is where a new "25th" frame is created by using one field of the outgoing 24th frame and then one field of the incoming "real" 25th frame (that now becomes the 26th frame). If this didnt happen the sound track would have to be sped up by nearly 5% to match the video.

This wouldnt be too bad for us this side of the pond but our dear cousins in NTSC land would have a real problem as their telly runs at nearly (but not quite) 30 frames a second which means that the film and sound track would have to be sped up by nearly 17%.

This might be acceptable for most film but for musicals, it would mean that 4th octave A (440hz) becomes nealy (but not quite) a 4th octave C... aaaaand that might be a bit noticable...

If anyone wants me to write up a page on how we did it at the Beeb I could bore you senseless for a page or two :p

In other words a 135 min film will run for 135 mins on video (if nothing is cut, that is)


I'll bow to your knowledge on this one.

But coincidentally it was a beeb telecine tech that told me that's how they were still doing it for 24 frame to PAL transfers, (obviously not for any NTSC transfers though). This would of been mid-1990's. Looks like he meant in the past or was just winding me up, me being a stills guy.

It might even have been you!? I was working at TC between 1988-2002.

Lee

 

Ayyy, another Beeb boy. What did you do?

I was at the BBC Open University Production Centre in MK.
I was a Tech Op so we did anything from tape opping to telecine to lighting camera, video effects, the lot. It was a very varied role and folks did specialise. I was mainly rostrum/motion control camera and video effects.

We used to do the frame per frame transfer for things that were shot on film but offline edited on video so that the edge numbers and timecode matched up. The reason for this was that the video and edit decission list would go off to the neg cutters who would have the awsome responsibility of cutting the one and only negative copy of the film and gluing the edits back together. So by the time you get to the end of a 30 minute programme a 4% error could result in some amazingly bad edits ! Thankfully this never happened!

Once the neg was cut it was telecine-ed again onto video for transmission
There was debate upon debate about this subject I can tell you! Thankfully when decent Avids came out this stopped being a problem.

A mate of mine was in the Telecine dept at Telly Centre/White City. He used to tip us the wink when a new Clint Eastwood movie was being broadcast on the Beeb because Mr Eastwood would somtimes come across with his personal copy of the film and oversee the tele cineing.

To my understanding movies were always done with ghost frames as there was no need to go to and fro back to film etc