Category: Blog update

Digitising film archive in HD: 2020

Seen for the first time in HD, it’s Morphy Day c1972. Digitised from 8mm film you’ll see Morphy Day, as you may never have seen it before. Well, you might have seen it, but only if you had viewed the actual 8mm colour film, but that’s unlikely.

Morphy Day was filmed on Super8 for inclusion in STOIC’s news programme called TOPIC. Sadly the spool is undated, and I’m not surprised. They were extremely bad at archiving; unless of course I moaned at them. This spool, along with some others, seems to have slipped through the net. So, I’m second-guessing at a rough date of around Autumn term of 1972.

Recently, I bought, for myself, an 8mm film scanner. This is not a projector, but rather a device to capture each film frame, one by one. A standard 50 foot reel of 8mm film takes about 30 mins to capture in HD. As I have many reels of my own film in both Standard 8 and Super8 formats, it was a worthwhile purchase. Having completed all of my personal films, I’m moving on to the archive collection.

The film scanner has a built in screen to show the frames being scanned, but I connect it to an external monitor to see better whether I have the exposure and other adjustments set correctly. Then it’s just a case of sitting back and waiting for the scan to end. I make some adjustments to exposure and colour in post-production after the scan is complete. The end result is vastly improved over the previous version that I put up in 2016 and of course it’s now in HD.

Colin Grimshaw July 2020


 

Interferon Pilot Plant: 1980

In the February 2019 blog, about Imperial Biotechnology Ltd, I included a Thames Television interview with Dr Trevor Langley. Through the current digitisation of the STOIC archives I now have something home-grown about the pilot plant. In May 1980 Tracy Poole (now Dudley) reported on the current work being undertaken and also interviewed Prof Brian Hartley (16 April 1926 – 3 May 2021), a former Head of Department in Biochemistry.  He was then overseeing the entire project.

The pilot plant was ultimately closed and dismantled in 1994 and was finally refurbished as the Flowers Building.

Colin Grimshaw February 2020

 

Vision from the past

We will be having some newly discovered items coming up in future blogs. I’m now slowly working my way through many boxes of videotapes from the extensive archive of STOIC and digitising then. If you recall, I managed to save these from being trashed many years ago when STOIC had to clear out their space for rebuilding. If I hadn’t had the college archives take the lot, then they would, by now, have been recycled!

Why is this collection important to Imperial? Well, in the TV Studio we had a specific remit and that was to record what was required for teaching, promotion and so on. All of these jobs created income for the studio and we could not just go off and record what we wanted to, without someone paying for it. However, STOIC could and indeed did just that. Therefore, in their archive we have interviews with not just students but with people like Rectors, Admin Staff, College Secretaries, Professors and so on. These, in some cases, are unique and now invaluable to us.

At present I am digitising a U-matic videotape that has a 40 year old recording of the then Student Union President Chris Fox (seen on the screen above). On the 15 March 1979 live on STOIC, from the college TV Studio, he chatted to Paul Johnson. I’ll be showing that in the next blog. Getting these videotapes to play back is not always that easy. Tapes are showing their age and tend to shed oxide and clog the video heads. This then requires the lid to be taken off the machine and the heads and guides, cleaned (photo on right).

Once the tape will play back from start to finish it’s then time to adjust the video levels before capturing onto hard drive and finally onto DVD. When these tapes were made, the cameras were within a category called ‘industrial’ and sometimes ‘educational’. They had pick-up tubes, not chips, as in these days. Lighting was basic and sometimes crude. Our ability to adjust these cameras individually was limited to say the least. Therefore, when replaying these tapes here in 2019 I have to almost ‘ride’ the video signal and adjust it, as the cameras switch around on the recording.

The final DVD then resides in the tape box and the side marked accordingly. That will mean (hopefully) that even if the tape can’t be played back in the future the DVD will be. It’s worth pointing out that the quality of a DVD is higher than the original videotapes would have ever been. Therefore we have not lost any quality in using this method. And, when the time comes, we can further transcode from the DVD into MP4 for web use. Not only is there a problem with the actual tapes playing back, but even more vital are the machines to play them on. Maintaining these machines is now vital and using them to transfer tapes onto new media is a big task for everyone with a videotape library. For example, the BBC, over many years have done this same process to digitise the whole of its archive, both videotape and film.

Colin Grimshaw June 2019

Imperial Biotechnology Ltd: 1982

In 1982 all the talk around campus was about the Fermentation Plant in the Bio-Chemistry building. The plant had been transferred to a private company to be called Imperial Biotechnology and employing its own members of technical staff. The plant was set up initially to satisfy the needs of Sir Ernst Chain in the 1960’s. There is excellent footage of the building and the plant in my previous blog where the Queen Mother opened the building.

This news item from the Thames Television News archive is a report from April 1982, it shows the Fermentation Plant and includes an interview with Dr Trevor Langley who was instrumental in the formation of the company. See also my additional post from 2020 which includes an interview with Prof Brian Harley.

 

Colin Grimshaw February 2019

2019: Year TEN of Video Archive Blogs

Well here we are in 2019 and the 10th year of the Video Archive Blog. The first real blog of the year is coming up next and that will be a bigger than usual read too.

I’m still finding interesting video gems to post and there are masses of new videotapes to be viewed and digitised during 2019. I just have to get to them and sort them out. Assisting me now is the original card index files started by STOIC the student TV service (right). Amazingly, their original archive has more ‘college’ events than the TV Studio’s own archive. STOIC covered just about anything and anywhere, to fill the news programmes. There are interviews with college personnel and administration that I never had the opportunity to record myself. They also captured and covered more college events than I did, so these are true archive gems.

By now you’re thinking ‘why didn’t the TV Studio cover these things rather than the students?”. Well, the answer is simple, I wasn’t allowed to. We had a remit to charge for any work we did in the college TV studio, so unless someone was paying me, I couldn’t do the work! It’s sad to know that the only coverage of some important and unique college events are only on STOIC tapes. So, fortunately those tapes are now held safely and, as I mentioned previously, I also have access to the two-draw card index that I’m now slowly scanning into digital.

Scanning the cards is somewhat time consuming as there is no easy way to be able to autoscan them. I’m scanning them in batches of four on a flatbed scanner and creating continuous PDF files of each batch of A through to Z. I’ve got as far as “N” at this time! If you click on the photo that I took (left) you can see that even this particular card I’m holding shows an interesting 1980 interview with Prof Anderson about the UROP project. I seem to recall that it stood for Undergraduate Research OPportunities. There are no other such interviews, so this is also unique. How long before you’ll get to see it remains unknown, but keep watching as I go into year TEN…

Colin Grimshaw January 2019

Imperial Institute @ 125: 1893

This is a quick and extra post to celebrate the 125 years of the Imperial Institute. There are many references within the blog to both the Imperial Institute and the Queen’s Tower, some of which I have linked here. However, today in 1893 is when Queen Victoria attended the official opening ceremony. These actual photos show the scene just prior to her arrival with all the flags and bunting displayed around the building’s entrance.

A special piece of music was written for the day by Sir Arthur Sullivan and was entitled Imperial March which is not to be confused with anything relating to Star Wars for which there is music of the same name. Below is a YouTube link to that piece of music, which was first performed 125 years ago this very day. In the photo over on the left you can see Queen Victoria. If you click the image you can see it full size. Look below the canopy and you will see her, still dressed all in black and sitting on a chair.

Of course, all that remains of the buildings is what we now call the Queen’s Tower. The bells of the now free-standing tower are still rung on special occasions. Even while the building was slowly going into disuse it was made famous in a brief sequence in an Ealing Comedy,  The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953), where a shot is clearly seen of the steps from the building’s main entrance. The building was not actually featured as the institute but rather as a ‘museum’.

Colin Grimshaw May 2018

New Discoveries from the past

And yet more STOIC discoveries from 48 years ago. I was at Imperial yesterday and came across something I’d forgotten about and had really meant to do something about years ago. It’s another batch of 8mm films from the STOIC 1970-1972 “TOPIC” and “IC Newsreel” programmes era. A lot of it was shot on colour film stock, even though we only had black and white TV. All manner of things are there too! More of this once I can get them digitised.

And, just for a change, today I’m digitising two Betacam tapes that are now 16 years old. Commemoration Day 2002 was when Lee Kuan Yew was made a Fellow of Imperial College. The tapes I’m digitising are historic, as it was the first time a Commemoration Day had been recorded in its entirety and that was initially because of the special Fellowship being awarded. I have to say that they are all playing without errors – amazing!

More on all of these, soon…

Colin Grimshaw March 2018

Imperial College TV Studio: 1970 film

This post is a real example of something I thought, like many videos, was lost for ever. Just for fun, back in 1970 I shot some black and white 8mm film of the fledgling TV Studio. We had the ability to add an incredibly small magnetic stripe to the edge of the film allowing us to create a sound track. It’s all rather amateur because I had to record the track in ‘real time’ and put it directly onto the sound stripe, hopefully in sync with what was happening, as far as the pictures were concerned that is.

old-studio-1968The film gives a behind the scenes view of what we had then created in the studio. We had little or nothing to work with and the original cameras were basic to say the least, but we managed. That’s me in the picture on the right with one of those cameras. You’ll see the array of old monitors and the Ampex video recorder too. Nothing really exists from that period except the rare recording with former Rector Lord Penney. I did however shoot some film from the TV screens and although there’s a strong flicker it does at least record what was going on.

The film captures the changes into something that was to become more like a TV Studio. I had the film, but had never bothered to try to get it on video. When the studio closed in Feb 2007 most of the equipment was put into a skip, but I made sure I kept the Eumig 8mm sound projector as this would be the only way to play back the sound track. This actual projector was used to record the track in 1970. I never thought I’d be able to rig it all back up and get the sound track off, but I did. A little bit of modern post production has improved the sound a little. So, here for the first time in 46 years is that film which captures another small part of the Imperial College history.

Colin Grimshaw November 2016

New discoveries coming soon…

College Orch 19828mm grab 1970Keep checking the Video Archive Blog for some newly discovered videos from 1970 and 1982.

See the origins of the college TV Studio in Electrical Engineering when it first started in stunning black and white! Also see a very youthful Richard Dickins conducting the college orchestra way back in 1982 in the college Great Hall.

Every week I seem to find something new, hidden away on a reel of videotape.

ILEA Channel 7 Network: 1968-1979

ILEA LogoIn the late 1960’s and running through until 1979, the ILEA (Inner London Education Authority) ran and operated it’s own unique analogue cable television network. By the time of its closure it had linked together all of its 1,400 schools & colleges within the London area and also universities, including Imperial. It was Europe’s largest closed circuit television network. The system was installed and operated by the GPO Television Service, but by the time of privatisation and renaming as BT, the network was doomed, with closure looming. We had connection to the cable network in the early 1970’s when the University of London created and operated its own Audio Visual Centre. ILEA Channel 7 Caption Programmes made by the ULAVC were recorded in their own TV studio, based at 11 Bedford Square in central London. Transmissions were all made from videotape by the ILEA TV Studio staff at the Battersea main hub. In the case of programmes made by the ULAVC a separate Channel 7 was operated for their exclusive use. ILEA’s own programmes for schools were on channels 2, 3 and 4.  The ILEA studios and recordings were all to broadcast standard using 2 inch Quadraplex videotape whilst the ULAVC ran on IVC 1 inch videotape. As can be appreciated, all of the programming across the channels was therefore carried out from pre-recorded videotape. But, the network could be run live from any of the three studios at the Battersea main hub. Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Around 1976 I had the brainwave idea to suggest to the ULAVC that we make and provide some programmes from the Imperial studio. The only materials that might be of interest to other universities were perhaps some of the STOIC output which was gaining popularity with the introduction of celebrity interviews with those like film director/actor Mel Brookes and housewife-superstar Dame Edna Everage, otherwise known as actor Barry Humphries, seen in the photo on the left with Mark Caldwell in the Imperial TV studio. Several videotaped programmes were made with the specific idea of being shown on Channel 7 (Terry-Thomas was one), but I then went a step further and suggested we do something live! After I’d consulted with the ULAVC ILEA Battersea Studio 1977 and then the ILEA Battersea operations staff we got a transmission slot and studio access. On 17 February 1977 a pilot programme called London Luncbreak went live on the air from the ILEA Battersea TV studios. The photo on the right shows main presenter James Sinclair during the live transmission. Because of a connection I had with the then BBC “film night” TV series, I managed to get Barry Norman to the studio to take part in the live transmission. Three further programmes were produced in the ‘London Lunchbreak’ series, but our enthusiasm was dashed when we heard the very next month on 31st March 1977 that the network was to close in early 1979. ILEA Battersea Control Room 1977 There was little point in continuing when the end was close. We had left it too late to get involved with the network, perhaps a couple of years earlier would have been better and given us a few more transmissions? Over on the left, in the gloom,  you can see me directing one of the live programmes at the ILEA Battersea studios. The videos below are a recording of the pilot London Lunchbreak which includes a sound fault during a film clip! Remember that this programme was totally live from  the ILEA studios. Also, the very last programme made and transmitted over the network by the ILEA, containing a rather large number of old programme titles (jump to the end when you get to that part). The ULAVC never made a farewell programme but continued its videotape operation, but with no cable output. ILEA continued in a similar way until, like the ULAVC, it was totally closed. Both the ULAVC and ILEA had converted into colour production by 1980, however, the now old GPO VHF cable network was only just capable of transmitting high quality colour (it was originally designed for analogue black and white in 1967). So perhaps it would have been difficult to continue with a poor technical service? However, I managed to capture a rare c1977 test transmission from ILEA in colour. It was made on Channel 2 and I was told that the ULAVC loaned ILEA a colour camera to make the live test, which seemed to work as far as I can see, that’s the last video down below.

Oh, and then there was Westminster Cable TV and another opportunity for live TV, but this time from Imperial College’s own TV Studio; but that’s yet another story, so far untold…

Colin Grimshaw November 2015