Pat Heigham
In those days (middle 1960s), 2" Ampex tape was physically cut and spliced, the programme was charged £90 per spool of tape, which was not a cheap deal at that time.
Peter Cook
If I remember correctly, the 90 quid was only charged to programmes IF the tape was cut. If not cut it was returned after TX to be bulk erased and reused. It was deemed possible that apart from dropout, jointing tape at an edit point could come apart. This is one of the reasons why archive of that period is so patchy and scarce. Not much was transferred onto film. There are of course some (true) stories of tapes being erased before TX.
When you think that in 1963 I was on £10 a week the cost of a 90 minute reel of 2" tape was eyewatering. How many gigabytes of memory is now required for 90 minutes of HD? And the cost of that must be a tiny fraction of 9 weeks earnings.
Pat Heigham
Absolutely right: only charged to the programme if cut. I didn’t know about tapes being erased before TX, anyone lose their heads on that?
The practice of wiping tapes for re-use of course affected any archiving, but no-one thought ahead about it. A lot of DVD releases have come about from telerecorded versions on film, discovered after being sold overseas.
When one thinks of a blank Blu-Ray disc costing pennies, now! But how long will the photosurface system last? Every so often, the library would have to be updated to the latest storage media – time/money etc…..
I’m in touch with a couple of guys who look after archives – Simon Vaughan (Alexandra Palace Historical Society) and Charles Norton (BBC Archives) who are desperate for any material that anyone has, even unofficial!
Mike Jordan
BBC Film Library (ex Windmill Road) have been busy transferring tape based recordings (all formats up to Digi-beta) to a computer based system.
They record as a pure digital version of the analogue recording without any standards etc changes so as to not degrade them any further in case they are needed to be shown in some future format (4k version of 405 lines or even 30 lines anyone?)
These are then stored digitally on tape under a system still being used by big companies and not expected to go out of use for a very long time.
There used to be several skips at WMR FULL of 2”, 1” etc etc tapes going to landfill or somewhere. I had quite a few mini-dv tapes out of there (whilst going down for a free “Radio Times” before they moved to Perivale) in perfect condition and used them myself. WMR is now completely flat and new houses/flats are being built on the site.
