BBC Rewind

[ppppenguin]

https://bbcrewind.co.uk/

Lots of BBC archive footage. Multiple search terms seem to be logically ORed together which isn't very helpful. Putting for example "Alexandra Palace" in quotes treats the words as a single term. Found a nice clip of a public visit to the newly opened Crystal Palace transmitter and another of the opening of a transmitter station at Belfast with what looks like a pair of CG1 transmitters.


This screencap from the Crystal Palace film would be unimaginable today.

[peter scott]

It's strange that the sound is missing on quite a few recordings although they would originally have had sound.

Peter

[ppppenguin]

It's likely that many of these pieces would have been on film. It was common to use SEPMAG, a separate magnetic film, which would have been played using a sound follower, servo locked to the telecine. It's possible that the vision survives and the sound doesn't. Also a fair number of pieces would have been shot mute, with commentary and music dubbed afterwards. If this wasn't done, or the sound dub doesn't survive, we've just got the pictures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_follower
https://www.pebblemill.org/tag/sepmag/

[Mike Watterson]

I remember SepMag in 1970s when BBC bean counters destroyed millions of £ in heritage to save a few thousand on tapes (sepmag, radio audio and video tape). Then decided to to also destroy many 16mm film archives to make a small reduction in storage costs. SepMag tapes were reused.

I only watched the telecine and SepMag being set up.