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Discuss everything COUNTDOWN and beyond!
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COUNTDOWN IS BACK THIS JANUARY, 2019 ... ON rage !!!!!
Stay tuned below with regular Countdown full archival information for each Countdown episode rage shall be airing every Saturday throughout January ...
Thanks Jason for the full rundown (which is not on the website!!). I am stunned - I wrote to rage in November requesting 3 Rock Arenas and 3 Countdowns - and they are playing 2 of each of my requests!! 4 episodes in total!!! I am in shock!!!! Thank you rage! 
Seems both us us are getting some of our requests this weekend Clip Magnet 
Who requested the 86 episode? That was amazing as it offered something a little different from outside the studio. I regard this episode as one of the last great Countdowns as watching the 87 eps is like watching a loved one slowly die! The later the episodes the better for me because I discovered my love of music in 86
All the super information (rage logo and song title) is digitally referenced as well on each clip, both in terms of exactly where and when on the screen these will appear. That is why the logo and titles appear at exactly the same point in time each time the clip is played. Last century, supers used to be inserted at broadcast time manually, so they didn't always first appear at exactly 8 seconds into the clip. I remember one night during a rage INXS special, the kid doing the supers must have fallen asleep because for about 30 minutes there were none. That can't happen now unless they forget to encode the tape with this info.
Thanks for this info; very interesting.
A tiny number of clips have been digitised without supers being put onto them; Housemartins' 'Caravan of Love' is one I spotted (no rage logo either).
What I find interesting these days is that sometimes they re-encode videos that have already been digitised. You can tell, as the re-encoded versions are in the less bright/less sharp/with larger font format they've been using to encode clips since some time in March 2012. I think they may have done this in response to someone commenting on the old rage message board that certain older videos had second/s cut off them at the start or end (usually the end)/fading out early, and wondering why this was the case. So I think rage have re-digitised some of these older videos. Madonna's 'Like a Prayer' is one I've spotted (although even more curiously they sometimes air the earlier digitised copy), and now has an extra second at the end. Joy Division's 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' is another, and more noticeable, as it has a few extra seconds at the end rather than its previous abrupt finish.
They also re-digitised all of the videos they aired during the 1987 top 20 shown last year, to commemorate the return of the chart (top 20) being broadcast on rage. I guess they had to do this to change the supers so that each clip was displayed with a chart number beside it.
But what I find puzzling is that last January they re-aired the Christmas 1986 Countdown episode in the newer digital format, when they had aired it in 2009 (and surely it would have already been digitised for that). Why would they have re-digitised a whole Countdown episode?
And if someone here is correct in that all of the Countdown episodes have been digitised, why would they digitise them again from the source tapes for the episodes that are airing now? Unless they didn't finish digitising them until after March 2012. I would love to be a fly on the wall at rage to see why they do what they do
Ah, the days of when rage manually added the supers as the video was being broadcast. Occasionally it resulted in some errors, e.g. this AB Logic 'AB Logic' video from the top 60 in 1993 that is initially shown to be Neneh Cherry's 'Man Child' (sic)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueQAmhCwHBI
I requested the 14 Dec 86 show
The late '86 episodes are great. Like Nathan that was when I had a love of music and started watching Countdown every week, from about August '86 and seeing Madonna at No.1 with 'Papa Don't Preach'. A couple of years ago, I requested the 16/11/86 episode. I recall it didn't appeal to many, but I loved it.
...and the video for 'Baby Wants To Rock' rocks!
The Rock Arena which had the Baby Wants To Rock clip that was previously shown on Rage was the May 29 1984 episode which was shown back on January 5 2002
Thanks so much for explaining all that. It's all very technical but I understand it. Before you explained it I was thinking what will happen when Rage is no more?(I know that's not a very nice thought but like us, nothing lasts forever) as the whole music library of what must be around 100k clips now would all have the rage logo and supers on them and would render the whole library not fit for broadcast. How did you find out about all this detailed information? I could ask you endless questions about the production aspects of Rage, lol. 
My video tape from January 5 2002
I record and keep the full episodes rather than butcher them for individual clips. I have the full episodes of every Countdown, Rock Arena etc that Rage have shown since 1993 as I find that is a more interesting visual collectable as a whole.
