Animation and effects have made incredible leaps in technology, but tools like this are unique because they were some of the first to allow real time effects editing. Think how different TV would look without live effects!
I love that he goes in depth and explains it instead of saying 'it's computers n stuff'. It helped to create a new generation that accepted technology, and to understand how it actually worked.
i think its because it was an emerging technology, which at its fundamentals was 'simple' for people to understabnd and explain. But these days, relevant consumer tech has grown in complexity to the point where it becomes kinda impracticle to try explain it on a short TV segment. Plus, the overwhelming amount of imformation we have access to instantly might make it much easier to overlook gems like this. As for what's on TV, only the nose knows. I havent watched it in years
Oh my goodness, I ACTUALLY remember watching this episode as a kid. One of the first things that got me interested in video graphics and getting me to my eventual 25 year career in CGI !
@@TheBest-gj2mz you talking to me or "I.Austin Speiss" ? - If it's me... I'm not sure what proof you'd like from me, that proves I remember watching this episode?!?!?!
Rick Griffis Says the guy who has never been to space himself, and fails to understand that the Earth, as a planet, is spherical, like all other planets. Where else is there a flat planet? It’s okay. Enjoy your part-time McDonald’s job.
@@MrSlanderer Haha did you hear about the dark side of the moon? You belive everything you learned in school you probably belive in the ape theory but it is just a theory
***** the americans have been referring to us as the land down under for at least over 30 years. when the kiwis won the americas cup they referred to them as the "other" land down under.
Film has no defined resolution. Look up "Last Christmas HD" by Wham. They released the original without high resolution but today we can scale up the actual film and look at details up to a microscopic level.
Don't think this is film though; looks more like VHS, which has a far more limited definition than film. (See more>>> ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rVpABCxiDaU.html)
@@AbdulIsik while that is true, in one of the old computerphile videos (I think it was specifically about GIFs?) he talked about having once had a Geocities site with gifs of flames and 3D rotating skulls to make it look badass
@@lajoswinkler yeah that's exactly what i was thinking. in the context of OP's comment it seems like they're just saying this person predicted australian jokes, and literally replacing the word "joke" with "meme" because its somehow different when the joke is told on the internet in the 21st century? I can't remember what the definition of meme is off the top of my head, but I know that its much more vague than "jokes, except computers"
For anyone’s information, the top train was a British Rail APT(Advanced passenger train) in executive or swallow livery respectively. The bottom train is a British rail class 253/254 or commonly known as the Class 43 in its original 1976 Intercity 125 livery.
Honest mistake, the APT has an the original custom livery of its respective class. Later this livery would be used for the Network South East lines in London and southeastern England
This is quite impressive for 1982. In the early 90's we had an MSX computer that certainly couldn't handle CGI like that and that was 10 years later. But I assume that the device in the video was purpose built...
It was an analog device for the most part, as far as I know - didn't actually run a "program" - hence it could operate as fast as it damn well pleased. Downside being it was a big fat box with tons and tons of electronics in it, and it could only do this, and nothing else, what so ever!
Mythricia Hmm, Wikipedia says it was a digital device, and could be programmed in Pascal by attaching an HP computer. Although I guess considering the time it was made I wouldn't be surprised if it was some kind of hybrid with a digital processor calculating the geometry and then using that program an analog video circuit.
***** IT's a DSP, digital singnal processor and they were the only way to get any kind of speed for image processing back in the day. I worked on some medical image scanners back then and we had 6 very large dsp's doing the processing. Programming them was not simple back then.
***** It's the Quantel Mirage - it's all digital - the HP Computer was used to work out the 3D projection maps, and the hardware did the 3D projection from the Input space to the Output space.
This brings back memories for me as I helped install and maintain the equipment described in this video in the early 80's including the the Link 110 camera and the Quantel equipment at BBC Lime Grove Studios in Shepherds Bush. Also Lime Grove produced Newsnight in those days. Quantel based in Newbury Berkshire made the first digital video processing and rendering equipment in the world.
Apparently there's a whole vintage digital scene devoted to restoring and running the quantel system, I'm no expert but i understand they were very secretive with the software which hampers modern day devotees.
Ah Good ol Quantel, their equipment cost quite a bit and as computers were becoming more mainstream they realised the problem and even tried to sue photoshop to maintain its supremacy, luckily it didn't work out..
This system is digital optics processing. Back in the early 90's I was doing field support on some ADO systems (Ampex Digital Optics). This was in the early generations of these special effects systems. Very complicated internally, and very expensive at the time. What was not shown in this video, the ADO system if it had enough RAM installed, it could zoom in to a picture and interpolate to keep the quality very acceptable in order to pick out details. Naturally there are limitations to how much it could zoom in, but it did a very good job at it. The ADO system was originally developed for the US armed forces. They were looking for a way to be able to take digital satellite photos and do transpositions for perspective shifting. They wanted to be able to take a digital photo from above an object and if there was enough detail in the photo to be able to shift the perspective to see what it looked like from on the ground. Once this got going permission was granted to allow this technology to be used by television broadcasters. With today's technology your home computer and your cell phone can do this very easily in resolution of 4K video. The devices of today are using high density nano technology. A cell phone of today would have hundreds of thousands of times more processing power than an ADO system from the 1990s. Back in the 90's if someone told me that in about thirty years from then someone could have a pocket device that only costs a few hundred dollars that can do what the ADO is doing and even a lot more, I would have told them they were nuts! The ADO at the time was costing in the range of $500K just for the base model, and required a fair amount of support systems outside of it.
When did it become cool or whatever you want to Call it definitely not creative but when did it happen why does everyone feel the need to copy what was said in the video we all watched already why why why OMG
Well, that's something. It's a Quantel Mirage! You are looking at $300-400k of digital video effects goodness. Weighing as much as a washing machine and draining an ungodly amount of power. We had a follow-up model to this at WPIX in the late 80s. Doing anything beyond the build-in effects was complicated and normally involved a 'poor' guy punching in coordinates for half a day.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 I doubt it. There's a PDP-11 inside the box, plus a load of dedicated hardware to encode and decode and a lot of very expensive ram. This box could input a full motion, full resolution 625 line composite TV signal and wrap it round a shape IN REAL TIME! I know, I used to use one for a living.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 No you couldn't. The Quantel Mirage was released in 1982, ten years before the video toaster, and the video toaster had exactly zero real-time 3D effects. The Amiga and Video Toaster are the two most overrated pieces of computer equipment ever made. The Mirage is a lot more impressive for its date than the Video Toaster, which was basically a 24bit graphics card and an RS232 interface.
Thomas, because people are philistines! Old TV shows are cropped, movies get frame interpolation and DNR turned up to 11, music is range dynamic compressed to death. I wonder that colorized black and white isn't more common.
@@SomePotato I mean colorized stuff is kinda different. Looks a lot better in my opinion. It's also basically a new artform, taking and coloring every single frame.
It's so cool watching this introduction on how computer graphics work when they were a new thing. It's amazing how far we've come Also, that presenter's British snark levels are through the roof XD
It took about 4.5 years for Ivan Sutherland and his brother Bert Sutherland along with the TX-2 team to create the very first 3D CAD program at MIT in 1959. Computer graphics were already 23 years when this video was filmed. Funny how fast the improvements speed up later on in time, compared to how slow the progress was for the first couple decades, lol.
For the ones who are more technical, I believe this hardware uses a technique called "Bit blittering", which is very fast compared to GPU computing. Like a programmable asic for graphics. The Amiga, not coincidentally, had this capability, which is why it was so good at graphics for the time.
I’m probably the only person here who was more excited that that they had managed to blag the actual BBC1 globe from the “noddy” presentation suite and have it shown in all its glory. It might be a spare unit (which is still cool) but I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a very nervous member of staff waiting to take it back to be plugged back in ASAP!
Awesome and shows how far we have come. Remember, the state of the art always will end up looking comically simple years later, just as your awesome new iPhone will look clunky in 10 or 20 years.
the simplicity in those older videos is gold! this is exactly how nowday computers work aswell, those basic effects are all made by just re-arranging the pixels. i really wish i could live thru 70s and 80s .. i was born in 90s, but i really wish i was born in 50s.
If the bbc still made programs of this quality, paying the licence fee wouldn't seem so bad. At the moment I don't get a huge deal from my contribution.
Em Te Say no to the Goons! the Tv license is a scam, refuse to pay it and when the Goons come knocking at your door *do not give them any details* they don't have a leg to stand on*
It's funny. In Israel there's recently a lot of debate about the public broadcast channel. Many of those who are for its closure say that if at least it was good like the BBC then it might've had justification for its existence.
Germany here... our public programs are realy bad and cost 20€ per month... for each house hold.. I was in England, and actualy enjoyed the BBC program, they even got good entertainment for the younger generation.
It's surprising that they used to teach about all this technical stuff on TV to general audience and non-expert public. The demos are very professional and easy to understand. They don't make such programs now. People want entertainment stuff more than educational.
I can still remember very vividly the first CG logos and animations for German telly stations in the 80s. I was doing graphics stuff myself at the time on my trusty old 8 bit Atari machines, so I was very aware of - and excited by - the changes.
Sounds about like how far back I was too, remember downloading digitized songs on the C=64 from BBS. Thinking how amazing it was that a computer could play a song. And the songs were just short few second clips. Remember the screen doing crazy noise when it played those types of songs.
@@Trev359 Yeah, because a spinning water ball in space that retains all its water, and has people living upside down makes sooooo much more sense than than a flat and non-rotating earth... Got any scientific proof thats backs up your fundamentalist BELIEF in a spinning water ball in space? I'll be waiting... (You won't ever find any)
Just to make it clear: this wasn't the most advanced CGI back then, it was just the more affordable one, that would soon become the norm on television. 2D and 3D computer effects appeared in movies (albeit in short sequences) in the 70s. By 1982, far more complex CGI like "Tron" was already possible.
Most advanced or not, don’t forget that this wasn’t being funded by blockbuster movie venture capitalists…It was being funded by British Television viewers, so a balance between performance and value for money would always be at the top of the table. 🇬🇧📺😇
+Aidan Lunn (Ferguson Videostar) How was the conversion from 625 which everything was filmed at, to 405 actually done real time? Was stuff just cropped off or did they point a 405 camera at a TV screen (a-la Apollo 11) or something like that?
Tommy59375 They used a fully electronic method of conversion, relying on electronically storing the incoming video signal, interpolating the information down from 625 to 405, then converting the sync pulses from 625 to 405 by 220 of the line sync pulses and spacing them equally. The frame sync pulses stayed as 405 and 625 both had a framerate of 50Hz. Interpolation was the process of combining the information from video in lines on the 625 system to form new information in lines on the 405-line output. It was to avoid the effect of "stepping" on sloping surfaces seen on the screen. So if you were watching Bob Monkhouse or May Bygraves-era Family Fortunes, it was so you could read the information on the dot matrix board on there. Without interpolation, 220 lines would simply be dropped from the picture and the board on FF would subsequently be unreadable! There were two broadcast-level 625->405 converters, both developed by Pye for the BBC. The original analogue (but fully electronic and all-transistor) Pye CO6/501 or 501A was introduced in 1963 so that anything made by the BBC (for BBC2) or foregin broadcasters in 625 could be shown on the 405-line BBC1. The BBC decided, for technical reasons relating to the upcoming colour technology and repeat potential of BBC1 material on BBC2, that ALL new programmes broadcast on BBC1 from January 68 had to be made in 625 and subsequently passed through a converter on transmission for the 405-line equipment in BBC1's transmission control to cope with. The 501A was a slightly modified version used by the ITA, firstly installed at each of the ITV contractors in the mid-60s to convert any material made in 625 to 405 for their own transmission controls to contend with, then once the ITA instructed all of them to make the switch to colour on 8th September 1969, in rreadiness for ITV's colour service to begin in November that year, they were moved to the 405-line transmitters themselves, to take in a 625-line feed. This process involved the converters - usually a set of four racks about the size of a large wardrobe - being de-rigged, packed up, transported (some in excess of a hundred miles), unpacked and rigged up again at the transmitter(s) between closedown and start of schools programmes the next day - a huge feat of engineering undertaken in just under 10 hours! The one main problem of the 501/A was that it could be unreliable and so regularly needed maintenance, and the transmitters themselves, that they were feeding, were so old that they couldn't be remotely controlled from a distant site as was becoming the norm for newer stuff around that time. In other words, either every transmitter site had to be manned at all hours or they had to risk leaving this tempramental piece of machinery for long hours. So the BBC, ever looking to be economical, developed in conjunction with Pye possibly the world's first piece of digital video hardware - the CO6/509, in the spring/summer of 1969. This used the absolute latest sets of chips to convert the 625 signal from analogue to digital, do the 625-405 conversion/interpolation in the digital domain and then convert back from digital to analogue, at 405. This not only resulted in space-saving economies (the 509 could easily fit into the boot of a hatchback as opposed to needing a large Transit van for the 501), it also meant it was much more reliable and needed much less maintenance. They used these at their more remote 405 transmitter sites, the ones easier to access and regularly or constantly manned had the 501s from BBC studios around the country, including TV Centre, installed. So things stayed relatively easy for the next 10-15 years until the early 80s then the age of the equipment began to cause problems - real problems as the age of the equipment meant that parts were often no longer available. Even by the early 70s, engineering staff were reduced to scouring electrical junk shops for parts that might be useful. During daytime testcard transmissions, they'd turn the power down on the transmitters to preserve the valves as long s possible. By the late 70s, a type of valve was being hand made because the BBC were the only customer that manufacturer (Mullard, IIRC) had that ordered that type! All this said, the BBC, save for a severe black-level problem on their Wenvoe 405 transmitter in South Wales, scored full marks for technical quality right until the end of 405 in January 1985. ITV was a different story. Their 501As were just getting worse all the time. Their Croydon transmitter, carrying Thames and LWT, was the worst. By the end that had a severe mains hum bar through the picture and no sound on one converter for one transmitter at that site, the other had good sound but no picture at all. The one at Winter Hill carrying Granada had problems where the horizontal and vertical hold controls would slip. As that was an unmanned site by that time, this necessitated sending someone out for the regional control centre at the Emley Moor mast near Huddersfield to Winter Hill near Bolton, to only make a slight adjustment to a couple of controls! The Burnhope site in Co. Durham, carrying Tyne Tees, developed wiggly vertical lines down the screen! The Lichfield site north of Birmingham, carrying Central, gradually lost power as the transmitters by the end were quite simply worn out! More severe problems occurred at the Dover (TVS) and Mendlesham (Anglia) transmitters - both of those sites transmitters or converters had broken down completely and repair was not a viable option. So they closed early, Mendlesham in the summer of 1984, Dover a few months early of the 405-switch off, in November 1984. But the worst luck came at Caldbeck, near Carlisle, carrying Border TV. A colleague tells me in September 1983, that site suffered a lightning strike, which damaged the transmitters, but destroyed the transmission aerials atop the mast. Getting the 625 service from there back online was no problem, but because no spare 405-line aerials were available by that time, 405 was closed early there. This was probably more significant than you think - as VHF signals are better at negotiating topography like hills and moorland, up there in the Borders there were still many isolated communities or cottages where the only reception of TV was 405! The IBA got hundreds of letters about the closure of 405 from Caldbeck! These are not all of the faults that the ITV 405 transmitters had, just the ones I am aware of. It was a merciful release when 405 finally closed in January 1985, it can't have lived on much longer!!!
Aidan Lunn That was a very interesting read and thanks for taking the time to write it all out.. I can only assume you would have worked for one of these companies ;)
As someone who didn't grow up with this show, I'm astounded with the detailed explanation of the technology along with the assumption that the audience /isn't/ stupid. I'm jealous.
I'm mesmerized to learn that a batch of transition & morphing effects accessible with a click of a button on a digital software installed in our computer used to be one physical box of hardware specifically invented to make those effects.
This one took me back. I used to love Tomorrow's World. To a kid growing up in the 80s it really felt like we were starting to live in the future. But I'm surprised we could do this as early as 1982. Anyone else notice the dirty fingerprints on the top of the world map display board though? All this hi-tech wizardry on display yet no-one thought to use a low-tech damp rag.
We already in the future from their perspective and for young yourself. Though we still don't have flying car like in "Back to the Future" movie, we have a smartphone that beyond their imagination.
there is no such thing as a British accent, this particular accent is Queen's English, which was spoken by most media hosts and narrators at the time, but is pretty posh and pretentious by modern "commoner's" standards.
In origin was the Quantel Paintbox, then came Silicon Graphics with their workstations, and then NewTek with their Video Toaster: from that day the world never been the same
I wanted to be a model maker and graduated filmschool at the start of the digital age. 😩 I’m a landscape gardener now after working in graphic and digital effects for 15 years. Just couldn’t stand sitting all day in front of 3 screens. Prefer to get my hands dirty!!!
