Truly Retro,
I LOVE your post! That is so cool that you still record on VHS!
I stopped recording on VHS in 2009 or so, I got a $1,000.00 Set Top Box towards the end of my VHS taping but recorded a few years with it for Digital and found since digital the pixelation has been nightmarish on some years. So I have always had to have a Foxtel back up.
This year I have had a GREAT run with only one pixelation last night on the first 1980 Episode, every other episode has been pixelation free.
Digital has caused nothing but a lot of trouble and too many options.
SD for me works fine as it is so clear compared to what I used to record with so it's cool with me and yes, analogue was a lot more reliable I must say.
I've been very pleased with my picture this year, no digital problems :-)
Its entirely up to you what you do Jason. No one is telling anyone what they can and cant do. I am in my mid 50's, technology isn't something that only young people can understand. While you might not want to learn anything new, maybe some of the others do ?
I collect music videos and have many that are in mint condition compared to what is out there and many that I have improved substantially myself. Lets just say we agree to disagree.
I have collected Music videos for a very long time to and I have many in Mint condition as well.
Personally, I wish they'd bring back analogue TV. I don't like digital TV with all of the pixelation you get sometimes, making it unwatchable. I think it also gives Countdown a more-authentic vibe when you get some interference or something in the background - just like it was back in the 80s! :laughing:
Also, am I the only one here who still records rage on VHS? I don't trust digital technology. I've still got VHS tapes from 1984 that play fine. I wonder how many of your DVDs will still work in 2056! :stuck_out_tongue:
Well the person who has to clean up after me, if any ...
They will have to have at least 3000 vinyls, all my Countdown discs, all the official DVDs, all my hundreds of CDs, all my VHS tapes, Countdown Club Magazines, Countdown Magazines, The Face Magazines, Stiletto Magazines, my clothes collection and everything else.
While I am living, I don't want to have all my treasured Music etc sitting on hard drives and usb sticks. I want to actually hold them, smell my vinyl and look at the art work etc. That's the whole purpose of being a collector! Nothing beats the real physical aspect of collecting, to actually OWN items.
I do find it convenient to be able especially with Countdown episodes to just choose whatever episode I want to see on my WD Hard Drive Box by not having to look for the disc and just press a button and it's there to watch and also so I don't need to wear put the Discs so they stay in tact. But again, if I don't have a tech friend to put on what I have recorded this year from Countdown then it's not a problem for me to just grab the disc and put it into the DVD Player and watch it as I make several copies of each Episode.
this got interestingly off topic lol. So getting back to HD, as i said in my first post, i don't really see the point in recording Countdown episodes on the HD channel since it only results in larger file sizes. And also the source material is far from HD, so it would be upscaled at best. I didn't notice any difference doing switching back & forth from ABC to ABC HD to compare, did anyone else?
In terms of workflows I abandoned analogue as soon as I could. I don’t go for this fuzzy-wuzzy nonsense that analogue is better/warmer/more emotional etc. I hate ghosting, I hate tape dropouts, I hate the crappy resolution of VHS tapes and all their imperfections.
I bought my first digital TV set-top box in 2003 (HD capable too) and it cost me a fortune. That got rid of the crappy analogue TV reception part, but I still had to rely on an analogue VCR to record it. I dumped that in 2006 when digital TV tuner cards that record the raw digital TV stream direct to computer hard disk became affordable. No intervening DVD or other transcoding - the pure raw digital signal - 100% bit-for-bit copy of what was broadcast with zero degradation.
I have never looked back. I don’t miss analogue one tiny bit. I back up my hard drives every week with two redundant copies.
Half the digital channels in the UK are now on a par with low res YouTube.
The HD channels are at least decent quality, but I don't call this situation progress.
On a limited bandwidth quantity over quality now seems to be the name of the game.
But when I compare my recordings of TOTP from BBC Four SD and HD, the HD ones look significantly better than the SD ones, even though the source footage itself is of course SD.
Just to add, I thought both SD & HD broadcasts were interlaced in OZ, is that not the case?
That's what I thought, but in an earlier post Clip Magnet says this:
"The HD channel (MPEG-4) is broadcast as progressive video not interlaced, whereas the SD channel (MPEG-2) is broadcast interlaced. So if the original material is interlaced (most old video material is) then the HD channel de-interlaces it before broadcast. This can result in what looks like blurrier motion and fuzzier stills, and actually removes some of the original motion information in the original material. I don’t like the resultant effect."
Just curious,
Those of you recording ABC HD, have Rage in particular introduced any subcoding into their broadcast? I record retro in one block, then edit later, but I’m finding and only recently that when I skip ahead, every one of these happens at the end of every video clip or similar. Say hitscene is 26 minutes, and there’s a clip before it and after it, i can cue to the end of the clip, then the end of hitscene and so on. Didn’t seem to happen until only recently so I’m wondering if the ABC transmission is now also transmitting the end markers of items from their automation system.
SD Vs HD, depends on your perspective and what you're doing with the video. SD is fine if you are making DVDs, because the SD stream is MPEG, there will be little, if any re-encoding if you are going from PVR (like a Topfield recorder) to PC to DVD. However, ABC has greatly reduced the SD bitrate over the years, I have digital recordings in SD from ten years ago that look great but these days, they just look :hankey:, as more people have HD sets, the quality of the SD feed has deteriorated.
Original broadcasts of Countdown might not have originally shot in HD, but ABCHD is broadcast in MPEG4, a newer format. It should look better, you may even find part of the transferring process at the ABC is upscaling the content digitally before it's aired on Rage.
Another argument supporting HD is if you are uploading to YouTube, YouTube gives a higher bitrate allowance to HD videos, so again, they should look much better on YouTube than uploading an SD quality MPEG2 video.
One area where SD wins against HD is DVD creation. If you are making a DVD from the HD video, you're going from about a 50 frames per second to 25 fps, so when you look at movement in your end product, it will look fuzzy, not to mention with a HD video you're scaling down the video. So SD wins if you're making DVDs.
ABC SD & HD are both 50i so it makes no difference to that aspect of DVD creation
If that's true, then you're going to lose quality creating DVDs from SD broadcasts, I haven't recorded SD for a long time, I just looked at an SD recording from 2014 and that was 25f/s.
50i is 25 full frames/sec, interlaced.
It's what analogue tv was, and it's what a lot of digital tv still is.