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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

Not even just films. The BBC was notorious for taping over old programmes to save money on tape and thus there's early episodes of Doctor Who that are lost along with some classics such as episodes of Hancock's Half Hour.

I'd suggest that tapes should be digitised and that way they're far easier for the public to watch and categorise them so that other hidden gems can be found again.

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Are you willing to pay for it?

I've been involved in getting the archives of a small-time newspaper digitized and it's not cheap in terms of either time or money.

There's a near-infinite amount of decaying and fairly rare analog media out there--and much that has been lost as companies have gone out of business, etc. It's not realistic to digitize all of it.

> Are you willing to pay for it?

I'd be happy for some of my tax money to go to a historical preservation project.

Maybe it'd be feasible to get members of the public to volunteer to do some of the digitisation - that should reduce costs, but I can imagine it would be difficult to keep track of where all the originals are and quality of the digitisation.

I have no idea how you'd crowdsource something like that outside of a local group of some sort who could come into an office and volunteer.

The reality is that there's a near-infinite amount of stuff that could be digitized and someone needs to make a call about what's worthwhile. At some point you're just digitally hoarding and spending a lot of time/effort/money to do so.

Some of your tax money—assuming you pay US federal taxes—is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Preservation_Fou...

I'm in the UK, so I'm not contributing towards that.

We've got the British Film Institute (https://www.bfi.org.uk/) but that's a charity and part funded by funds from the National Lottery (that I don't play as it seems to be a voluntary tax on the poor).

What are the costs like? Are they mostly staff?

It's a mix. For loose issues, it's mostly people's time. We have a large format scanner and it takes maybe 10 minutes per ~16 page issue or so once you get into the flow. For bound volumes, they'll really need to get sent out to somewhere that has specialized equipment and that will cost $1 to $2 per page.

I'd be inclined to donate some CPU/HDD but I'm not paying for the copyright.

Wikipedia has a whole fascinating article on lost (and in some cases recovered in peculiar ways) Doctor Who episodes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

I see it as cultural Darwinism. Remember Sturgeons law. 90% of everything is crap. Culture is mostly like casual conversation and ephemeral

I probably have more of a preservationist urge than most people. But, at some point, you really have to accept that you're not going to preserve (and properly index, provide access, backup, etc.) every word, photo, or video that's been put on media in some form.

Doctor Who fans are probably the most aware of this. It’s hard to say which is the more stunning fact: how much of early Doctor Who was lost or how much of the lost managed to be recovered later.

Correct me if I am wrong, but weren't some of the lost episodes recovered from copies that were illegally made by people recording the show off their TV? I can't help but feel that the costs to preserve these things would be much lower if we just let fans do the backing up.

Not really, as home videotaping was not yet available. There are audiotape recordings from broadcast that were used for some recreations (there are some stories which were recreated with animation and the original soundtracks or still photos either from broadcast or on-set). Most of the recovered copies were film copies that were sent overseas.

What’s really wild is how in some cases, what was able to be recovered was a segment that was censored before broadcast as the film that was broadcast was lost, but the segment that was cut managed to survive.

I remember reading about the efforts to restore colour to material that had only been preserved in black and white.

Before magnetic tape for video really became feasible (1970s), to make a record of television broadcasts, the BBC (and many other broadcasters) would film a quality TV monitor with a film camera. Black-and-white film recordings exist of a number of Doctor Who episodes originally broadcast in colour in the late 60s and early 70s.

Black-and-white analog televisions, like used in the BBC telecine recorder, receive the same signal as a colour TV. They receive a signal with colour information, encoded at very high frequency within the otherwise black-and-white compatible TV signal. On a black and white TV, that high frequency colour information, shows up as fine variations in texture with repeating patterns. Shift the phase of the colour carrier, and the colour changes for an appropriately equipped colour decoder, and the pattern shifts on a B&W TV. It's almost imperceptible really, which was the hack that allowed compatible colour TV. But it's there on the B&W display. And it's preserved on the film recording, too. That colour data can be recovered with appropriate software:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_recovery#From_chroma_cr...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/dec/11/digital-v...

The BBC does have a project to digitise the archives, partly because you just can’t get the players anymore for obsolete formats like D3 (…which most of the old analogue 2” quad library was transferred to when that became obsolete).

Although just having a digitised archive doesn’t mean it can all be made public ally available, there are lots of rights issues and so on (writers and actors will want to be paid etc.) that prevent mass access to the archive.

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