Welcome to my forum connected to countdownmemories.com
Discuss everything COUNTDOWN and beyond!
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Countdown Episodes * 70s & 80s Australian Music Programs * Music Video * Molly
Trading * Collecting * Archival Information * Record/CD releases and more .........
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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 ...
I have an 80s vinyl collection that numbers about 10,000 and I enjoy it and will continue to do so while I'm still on this side of the grass. I doubt it has much value financially but I enjoy it for what it is. I'm not that big a fan of downsizing everything onto HDs and living in an empty little box. I still enjoy reading the physical copies of my music magazines and have 1,000's of them from RAM, Juke, Countdown, Smash Hits, No.1 etc. I enjoy my clutter.
I love my clutter as well. But I only love organised clutter... My clutter is organised and I much prefer to read my Countdown Magazines, UK Smash Hits, RAM'S etc than seeing scans on social media. I want to smell the paper and have it in my hands.
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:
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:
I also find watching shows that weren't recorded in HD (like Countdown) are useless on the new large digital TVs as they look pixelated and poor quality there but when I watch them on my old analogue TV I get a great picture.
I stopped recording on VHS 10 years ago and will probably be forced to stop recording to DVD when they faze that format out. I still have a lot of video equipment though and find it useful quite regularly. I have at least 10 working VHS VCRs, a couple of Betas and a few U-Matics. Just in the last two months an AFL club contacted me to convert a U-Matic tape from 1978 and then a pile of Beta's from 1981-1985 arrived for transfer as well as many people no longer have these machines. The 1981-85 footage was also labelled as football but I found a near complete episode of Rock Arena on one tape from 1984 which will never get shown on Rage as it was a Beatles Special and Rage no longer play Beatles. There were also snippets of music programs or clips on those tapes such as Wrok, Nightmoves, Hey Hey etc.
Video tapes do degrade over time but you can always still get an image off it. Once a fault occurs with DVDs or digital the whole file seems to go.
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?
The snobbery of recording to Disc is so ridiculous, I am not interested in current music videos so getting a Blue Ray Recorder and recording in HD is absolutely pointless. The quality is hardly bad quality, compared to when i was recording ion VHS with sometimes bad reception in the 90 during January's, recording onto DVD is a trillion times the improvement!
Like Nathan etc I will still with my DVD Recorder, recording in other formats is of no use to material that was recorded 40 years ago or even 30 years ago!.
And like Nathan, if it means having to record in 16.9 I'm not interested. There is already the Watermark in the black box and HD is even worse with it's HD signal and the ABC logo!
I had to replace my blu-ray recorder though in mid-2019, after the previous one (after just under 4 years' use, which isn't that much - but I did use it a lot) crashed on me and became temperamental with recording. I upgraded to the triple-tuner model (meaning you can record 3 channels at once). I was worried actually that blu-ray recorders were being phased out (they probably are), e.g. JB Hi-Fi seem to have them as 'special order' on their website. I know people use SD cards, but I haven't yet looked into that.
I have gone discless since early 2017. I transfer files from DVD-RW onto external hard drives, and then re-use the DVD-RW. I still have all of my earlier DVD-R's, but have backed up most (still have a few hundred to go) of them as individual video files on external hard drives (which I then make a back-up copy of when they're full and store it off-site).
The main advantage of storing the videos as files on a hard drive (or cloud storage, if you use that, but I don't currently) is that you can access them at any time without needing to e.g. find the disc they're on. You can also generate lists of a drive's contents automatically, without needing to keep a list of what you have got manually. You also don't need to find space for hundreds of discs each year, which is what I would have had to do had I kept keeping everything on DVD-R.
My main worry with keeping things on DVD only is that the discs may become unreadable at some point. This happened to me with a batch of DVDs I used in 2009, from a 'good' brand (TDK). They were all from the same spindle of discs, but some of them were unreadable by 2013. This has not happened (that I am aware of) with other recordable DVDs I have used. The discs were stored properly, in plastic cases, and do not have scratches, dust, fingerprints etc. on them. I don't know why they stopped working.
Hard drives can also go kaput, of course. That hasn't happened to me yet, thankfully. You always should keep a back-up on a separate drive though just in case.
'It can't, though, as far as I'm aware, record rage in 4:3'
You are very right on, my friend tried so many ways and set it to record in 4.3 on rage and though the function is there, it doesn't not allow one to actually record in 4.3, only playback in 4.3 which defeats the purpose of a 4.3 setting if you want your final recording to be in 4.3 which you and I and others I know through my Forum still want.
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?
If you are a person who records new material which I have no interest in and you are extra fussy and get right close up to the screen, HD will look slightly clearer on a Joanna Lumley special for instance which I just saw a few minutes of minutes ago on ABC.
I recorded it in SD as a test for 'NEW MATERIAL' again ... not that I collect NEW MATERIAL as I have no interest in it and it looks a little clearer on the actual Channel on ABC HD than the recorded version, but very slightly ... again .... if you put your head right on the screen but not when you sit back. It would slightly Upscale it at best with very little difference for Retro material and if that is only what you record and keep then the comparison from SD to HD is virtually nothing from rage.
But again, because I only collect Music Videos from rage from the 70s and 80s on their VAULT Specials and of course COUNTDOWN and ROCK ARENA in January, I see absolutely no difference in picture.
And of course, for me, I record in 4.3 Pan and Scan as I don't appreciate having bars on my 70s and 80s videos and surely don't appreciate it on Countdown and Rock Arena. How people collect Countdown's with bars on each side with a logo is beyond me, it is utterly vile. Don't start me on those that record rage and Countdown with a huge black box around a miniature small square picture. Even if I wanted to record in HD for Countdown, Rock Arena and 70s and 80s videos on 'rage' VAULT Specials, recording in HD doesn't allow you to have 4.3 full picture, it forces one to have bars so the point of any slight upscale would be ruined for me by bars on the actual final recording.
Also, one's TV Settings also plays a HUGE part in Picture for Countdown Episodes and 70s and 80s Music Videos. Many people don't even go to their TV Settings and work out what looks best. On my Panasonic TV, Cinema Mode and me carefully calculating what each setting should be on with Contrast, Brightness etc plays a huge part on how a picture can look for items like Countdown, Rock Arena and rage videos from the 70s and 80s.
Like Nathan, if I am forced to record something in 16.9 because rage play an 80s video and stretch it, I can barely bare the abc logo being there and seeing HD next to it makes it even more worse, that is more graffiti. But luckily, usually in a VAULT special on rage, there are usually only two or three videos that are stretched and they are usually common videos like Vienna from Ultravox, which I already have on Ultravox and Midge Ure DVDs anyway.
Yes, this topic started getting onto Vinyl which has nothing to do with the original topic.
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:
I also find watching shows that weren't recorded in HD (like Countdown) are useless on the new large digital TVs as they look pixelated and poor quality there but when I watch them on my old analogue TV I get a great picture.
I stopped recording on VHS 10 years ago and will probably be forced to stop recording to DVD when they faze that format out. I still have a lot of video equipment though and find it useful quite regularly. I have at least 10 working VHS VCRs, a couple of Betas and a few U-Matics. Just in the last two months an AFL club contacted me to convert a U-Matic tape from 1978 and then a pile of Beta's from 1981-1985 arrived for transfer as well as many people no longer have these machines. The 1981-85 footage was also labelled as football but I found a near complete episode of Rock Arena on one tape from 1984 which will never get shown on Rage as it was a Beatles Special and Rage no longer play Beatles. There were also snippets of music programs or clips on those tapes such as Wrok, Nightmoves, Hey Hey etc.
Video tapes do degrade over time but you can always still get an image off it. Once a fault occurs with DVDs or digital the whole file seems to go.
Everything you said is SPOT ON.
Wise man :relieved:
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.
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.
But I have noticed that when rage gets 'new' old clips out of the ABC Archive and adds them to its own library, when they digitise them they are increasingly de-interlacing it in that process. Have a look at the Rock Arena repeat from a couple of weeks ago - it is all de-interlaced to be progressive, not left as interlaced as it was originally :hankey:
ABC has not reduced the SD bitrate. That is a false claim.
I looked at the MPEG stream data for some SD channel clips I recorded in 2006. They were peaking around 5.7-6.3 Mbps. I looked at SD channel clips recorded in the last few weeks, they were peaking around 5.9-6.6 Mbps. And I record the raw MPEG stream directly to hard disk. I do not use a DVD recorder, so no transcoding, no converting. These are the true, raw bitrates as broadcast.
Note the bitrate varies depending on the content. Fast moving content needs a higher bitrate. Very slow moving content might be as low as 2 Mbps.
The HD bitrate is much lower, around 3.5-4 Mbps, because H.264 is a much more efficient codec than MPEG-2, even though there are more pixels to encode.
