test please delete

[NickFitz]

Tonight's entertainment was something I've always wanted to see: the BBC's 1954 adaptation of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring Peter Cushing as Winston Smith and adapted by Nigel Kneale, which has just become available on Amazon Prime Video. Excellent stuff, despite the limitations of TV production in the day and the fact that it's had to be upscaled from 405 lines, with notable performances by André Morell, Yvonne Mitchell, Donald Pleasence, and Wilfrid Brambell as both the old prole Winston talks to in the pub, and the party member Winston sees being hauled off to Room 101 when he's first taken to the Ministry of Love by the Thought Police.

Apparently this recording was of the repeat performance (most of it, of course, was performed live) a few days after the first showing, which had scandalised the nation, leading to questions in the House. Prince Philip had said to the Press that he and the Queen had watched and enjoyed it, with the result that the repeat attracted the largest television audience since the Coronation the year before.

There's more about the production on Wikipedia

Fortuitously, I re-read the book two or three weeks ago. Kneale did a good job of the adaptation, I thought, remaining very faithful to it within the obvious constraints of the medium.

Highly recommended.

Goodnight all

[DoctorStrangelove]

17.3 in here, 13.9 now & min in the laundry room.

Another glorious week begins.

Having brilloed the teapot to death yesterday, I'm wondering what a cup of tea from a shiny clean teapot tastes like.

Dark, with hints that the rosy fingers of dawn might possibly be on the way.

Stone me 405/25i upscaled to HD.

That must look very soft indeed.

The technology of the day involved photographing the screen of a monitor.

Was the line structure of the picture at all evident?

IIRC they may have used spot wobble to reduce it.

Spot wobble
On some larger TV screen sizes, the scanned lines were not fat enough to give 100% coverage of the CRT.

The result was a lined picture with darkness between each horizontal scanned line, reducing picture brightness and contrast.

Larger screen sets often used a spot wobble oscillator, that slightly elongated the scanning spot vertically at high frequency to avoid this line separation effect without reducing horizontal sharpness.

Spot wobble was also utilised when making telerecordings of 405-line programmes.

So now we know.

Met a chap on the bus that I last worked with 30 years ago at Siliconix.

He got a doctorate from this slough of despond about 20 years ago.

I assume that, like me, he's close to retirement.

Our combined success can be defined by our use of bus passes.

Today's tedium is increased by a Faculty "Away Day" which, fortunately, is on the ground floor of this building.

If it was any further away I wouldn't bother going.

[WTFH]

Morning all Some thin high level cloud, which may well burn off. 300g of ceps from this morning's walk.
Yesterday after picking up the Eglu and cutting the grass, I picked our two old apple trees (one cooker, one eater) which didn't have much of a crop this year, but what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in size. Took the apples and combined them with some from a neighbour's tree, crushed and pressed them and now have about 8l of apple juice which will soon be going into demijohns with a bit of champagne yeast.

Then went round to friends for dinner, which involved Muff Liquor gin, copious amounts of wine and Captain Morgan's Private Stock. The Wife (tm) was driving. Lovely meal.

[original PM]

Morning All

17th anniversary came and went this weekend with minimal fanfare.

kind of grey and over cast in manchester - not that cold mind you

suffering a bit - tennis elbow diagnosed by doc on Friday and managed to stub/break big left toe on saturday.

if I was a horse you would shoot me.

[Zigenare]

Morning all!

Day 6 of Permydom.

04:30 drive down to Sunny Worcester.

Apparently they're going to lend me someone from the systems team to do some testing for me...

Back home tomorrow evening. Bolton on't 'ill the rest of the week - which is nice

Payday on Friday, that should be interesting...

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Sunny with high haze slightly bracing out: 14°C. Still over 20°C in here, so the Victorian builder's strategy is starting to pay off

[NickFitz]

Stone me 405/25i upscaled to HD.

That must look very soft indeed.

The technology of the day involved photographing the screen of a monitor.

Was the line structure of the picture at all evident?

IIRC they may have used spot wobble to reduce it.

It did indeed look very soft, particularly as on my TV it's upscaled to UHD, aka 4K - approximately ten lines per scan line of the original

The lines weren't noticeable, as it had been post-processed in some way for modern release, according to a brief disclaimer shown on a card at the start. There are two or three momentary bursts of what looks like interference - a rash of dots for half a second or less; and sudden changes in the overall light level when cutting from one scene to another often take a moment to settle, as the exposure or aperture or maybe even the screen that's being filmed adjusts itself to suit. This is very noticeable on things like posters bearing the party slogans, which appear prominently in the background of many scenes and are sometimes burnt out and can't be read until the light level has settled.

But the performances are so gripping that one soon gets drawn in and stops noticing stuff like that except when it's particularly obtrusive

[NickFitz]

It did indeed look very soft, particularly as on my TV it's upscaled to UHD, aka 4K - approximately ten lines per scan line of the original

And thinking about it, that's not even accounting for the vertical blanking interval, meaning there were even fewer displayed lines on the original

[DoctorStrangelove]

And thinking about it, that's not even accounting for the vertical blanking interval, meaning there were even fewer displayed lines on the original

Indeed.

Some of the peculiarities are due to the Emitron and Super Emitron tv cameras of the era, which were pretty primitive.

It's amazing it's as good as it is, all in all.


In other news, now bored tulipless with the faculty "awayday". .

[NickFitz]

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