My mastering engineer chum who works at BBC Archive pulled an all-nighter to recover the tapes to bring us this on Friday night, instead of a repeat of an ABBA compilation.
“1960s It Girl-turned-arthouse singer Marianne Faithfull exudes charm in a performance in front of an intimate audience of friends and fans at LSO St Luke’s in East London.
A great band accompany her for an eclectic mix of songs from her critically-acclaimed covers album Easy Come Easy Go, including The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife 3, Morrissey’s Dear God, Please Help Me, Dolly Parton’s Down From Dover and Randy Newman’s chilling In Germany Before the War.
There are also dips into the past, with her first ever live performance of the original 1960s arrangement of As Tears Go By, and the early Jagger-Richards song Sister Morphine.”
Overseas AWers, PM me for ‘help’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00jzk8b/bbc-four-sessions-marianne-faithfull
Thank you for this, Mr F – needless to say, I missed it on Friday.
Thank you @fentonsteve, I really enjoyed that
One for later this evening, I reckon.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Not related to Marianne Faithful, but here seems as good a place as any to post…..
@fentonsteve – question for your BBC mastering chum regarding BBC iplayer content…. I often find that with ‘archive’ series, they will post the whole series once it is being shown on TV. However, the iplayer files will be in Standard Definition until it has been broadcast, after which it will ‘upgrade’ to high definition (at least 720p). Why is this ?
For example – if you try and download the series “Going Straight’ which they have just started to reshow, the first episode is 720p, the rest are still standard definition.
I know it’s a first world problem, but just puzzles me.
Erm, dunno, is the (my) short answer.
Out of curiosity, I checked. Episode 1 (broadcast last Tuesday) is 1280 x 720, whereas Ep 2-6 are 960 x 540. Ep 2 is broadcast tomorrow night.
I think they were recorded on SD tape, not film, so the ED resolution will be due to upscalers.
I was thinking along those lines. A program made that long ago isn’t likely to be in very high resolution unless upscaled.
I suspected they were upscaled (but I would think that the BBC would do a better job of upscaling than my TV etc etc)
So are programs that are broadcast automatically upscaled these days – I have programs that were downloaded years ago (and so before they used to dump everything on iPlayer and only post after broadcast) that are SD.
All of the BBC channels are available in “HD” (actually ED, 1280 x 720) on Freeview, so I suspect they are upscaled in the broadcast chain using real-time scalers from the likes of Grass Valley. There won’t be super-computers doing multi-pass delta-sigma conversion, it has been possible to do broadcast-quality scaling in FPGA since I last worked in broadcast equipment (20 years ago now).
I suspect everything archive in SD is upscaled for broadcast on the HD channels, and everything live is filmed in HD and downscaled for broadcast on the SD channels. They were already doing Eastenders and the News in HD for several years before I packed broadcast in to go and do mp3 players.
Well, here’s the answer nobody (except Chris) has been waiting for, from my chum at Aunty Beeb:
“I made these! We make pillarboxed widescreen SD. God knows what iPlayer do to it. Ep1 may have been previously ballsed up by early iPlayer processes etc. happens sometimes”
Thanks
In an effort to be even more dull, would these originally been recorded on U-Matic? Low Band, Hi-Band or SP?
Hi-Band was launched in 1976, and these were first broadcast in March 1978, SP was 1981, so I’m guessing SP.
Crikey, seeing a BVU-870 SP deck takes me back. “Can someone give me a hand to shift this bastard machine off my bench?”
28kg. This is why my back is the way it is.
Plus flight case……
Now on Youtube for those of us overseas
Watched it last night – very good and superb musicians with her.
This is worth a look.
wow! this is superb. Thanks for the heads-up
Thank you for these!