So I’d like to go back in time to October 1966 and nip across the pond to London, so I can record the last Doctor Who serial featuring William Hartnell as the First Doctor (and thus preserve the now-missing last episode which show the first-ever Time Lord regeneration).
But I’m concerned. I’ll be bringing a small TV and a 1980s-era Betamax recorder, nicked from my 1980s-era house. (See, I said nicked because London).
Anyway, will I be defeated by PAL vs. NTSC?
Not if you nick a PAL-standard Betamax.
I have dealt with PAL files in the digital era, in which case they are usually playable but have no color or washed-out color. From my pre-digital knowledge, I don’t think you’ll be able to successfully tune a PAL station nor record it on an NTSC recorder/tv. Nick… carefully.
(And that’s why the Russians used the French-developed SECAM… neither PAL nor NTSC systems could tune its signals, and more importantly, the SECAM sets used in the Soviet Union couldn’t tune the signals of the rest of Europe.)
As to your goal… all I can say is “There are some things mankind was not meant to know.” Chortle chortle.
PAL and SECAM TVs could sometimes be used to watch the other format, in monochrome. This is because, strictly speaking, PAL and SECAM (and NTSC) are purely about how colour is encoded alongside an existing monochrome TV signal. As long as the underlying format is the same (frame rate, resolution, etc.) the standards are compatible, albeit without colour.
Bricker’s problem with equipment of that vintage would probably be its inability to handle 50 Hz, 625-line pictures, offset frequencies used for broadcast audio, etc.
It is possible to convert PAL recordings to NTSC. Back in the mid '90s I did not have to much trouble finding someone who could do it for me (in the USA) for a fee. However, that was all on VHS, and, of course, in an era when VHS was very common. It would probably be much harder to find someone with the right equipment now.
Still, you apparently have a Tardis, so that should not be a problem for you.
(Alternatively, I can remember seeing William Hartnell transform into Patrick Troughton, so perhaps you have the technology to read it out from my brain.)
Also, come to think of it, all our TV was in black and white back then, so it was not even PAL in the first place. I don’t know what it would have been, but an '80s American TV probably would not show it.
In practice, it is (was) harder to cross-tune PAL and SECAM than theory suggests. I suppose if you were a Soviet pawn, being able to tune in wavery, soundless Western programming was a boon.
But yes, without digital processing and codecs helping, tuning a 25/50 fps signal on a 30/60 tuner or vice versa is not going to work. You might be able to pull the audio in, but the video would look like the old “satellite scramble” light show. (And wasn’t *that *frustrating when a frame would snap into almost-viewability on the softcore porn stuff… 
)
Worse than that. BBC1 still used the old 405-line system throughout the 1960s.
True. Did they repeat Doctor Who on BBC2 (625-line from its inception in 1964), I wonder? The BBC would then conveniently have done the conversion for you.
An aside, but one of my favorite technology-wars observations:
[ul]
[li] Original VHS: 250 lines of resolution[/li][li]Original Beta: 300 lines of resolution[/li][li]S-VHS: 400 lines[/li][li]Beta SP: 340 lines[/li][/ul]
Note that these are ideal/theoretical limits and could be reached only under lab conditions, and neared by recording using industrial-grade machines such as those used to turn out commercial movie tapes. Home recording was 50-75% of this resolution at best, and most machines lost another 5-10% in playback.
And bloody, bloody wars were fought over this, when *all *players came in at around half of broadcast resolution’s whopping 480 lines.
N/M
It’s a trick question. The BBC didn’t start broadcasting in color until 1967 so technically they weren’t using PAL in 1966.
Of course a 1980s NTSC VCR wouldn’t be able to handle 25 frames per second, so you wouldn’t be able to record the program(me) although you could probably adjust the V-sync on the TV to compensate so at least you could watch it. You’d still miss out on the audio because the separation between the video and audio subcarriers was different between the UK and the rest of the world (even PAL-using Europe).
But I would scan the original film in HD.
Trick answer. There never was any film except kinescope, and scanning that in HD would be equivalent to blowing a web logo up to billboard size. (Which is done, sigh.)
I am not sure if the earliest DW episodes were not recorded at all, or if the recordings were lost. I know that many live events were lost because the studio tapes were recycled and written over - which is what may have happened to the high-resolution recordings of the Apollo 11 landing, at NASA. I’d take those in a heartbeat over, well, the first Doctor. I’m sure others might feel differently…
Given the technical obstacles involved, your best bet may be to get a kinescope camera, record the program off the screen, process the film (not a problem in 1966, a challenge today), come back to the present, find a video producer who still has atelecine setup and convert it to video.
Easy Peasy.
Yeah, that sure sounds easier than finding a USB TV dongle that supports the UK variant of PAL.
As I pointed out in post #4.
Even in 1967, color was only introduced on BBC2, and Dr Who was on BBC1.
Format conversions in the 1960s were problematic even for the professionals. I can remember watching episodes of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In (presumably made in NTSC color) on British black and white TV (I forget which channel). The picture did not properly fill the screen.
Interestingly, I remember the BBC turning off the PAL color for black-and-white broadcasts well into the 1980s or even 1990s. Which was nice, because that way you avoided any chroma noise. And back in those days our cable company would pick BBC 1 and 2 out of the air across the north sea so the signal usually wasn’t super clean.
Interesting trivia: The BBC refused to pay to convert the original Monty Python series to NTSC so it could be shown in America (in fact they were going to just wipe & reuse the master tapes when the show ended, Terry Jones bought them and stored them in his attic). They got an American agent and her major contribution was to front the $900 (a lot of money back then) to get them converted and shown on PBS. And the rest is history…