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![]() Broadcast Engineering Museum | |
Abbreviation | BECG |
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Type | Charitable incorporated organisation |
Purpose | Conservation, education |
Headquarters | Broadcast Engineering Museum, 41 Capper Avenue, Hemswell Cliff, Lincolnshire DN21 5XS |
Coordinates | 53°23′51″N0°34′22″W / 53.39754°N 0.57268°W |
Website | becg.org.uk |
The Broadcast Engineering Conservation Group (BECG) conserves historic broadcasting equipment. It is based at Hemswell Cliff in Lincolnshire, England and is a Charitable incorporated organisation. [1] [2]
The group was founded by people with large private collections of broadcasting equipment, including several Outside Broadcast (OB) vehicles. [3] [4] [5] It is led by six trustees, many of them working or retired broadcast industry professionals.
In 2021 the group purchased its present building and is converting it into a permanent home for its collection known as the Broadcast Engineering Museum. To date, the museum only opens for visitors on special occasions or for groups by appointment.
A newsletter called Line-Up is published a few times each year and back issues are available on the BECG website, [6] as is a 3D virtual tour. [7]
Members of the group had been collecting and restoring broadcasting equipment and vehicles for many years before forming BECG in 2017. Some of these vehicles have been fully restored, while others are works in progress.
The group was formally incorporated as a charity by six founding trustees in May 2020.
In November 2021, the group bought the former RAF Sergeants' Mess at Hemswell Cliff. The building provides a permanent home for the collection and forms the Broadcast Engineering Museum. [8] As well as the main building, there are east and west wings of similar size and two large function rooms and workshops behind.
This building had been unused for 12 years and needed a lot of repairs. The local authority, West Lindsey District Council, provided BECG with funding towards the repair of broken windows. [9] [10]
Since acquiring the building, repairs and improvements have been made by both contractors and volunteers. In the first year vegetation was cut back, uneven ground levelled, leaking roofs repaired, drains unblocked and over 150 broken window panes replaced. A solar PV array was installed on the main south-facing roof and a CCTV system provided.
Two large rooms were converted into videotape and telecine display areas. The videotape area contains several 2" quadruplex and 1" C-format machines as well as more modern formats. The telecine area contains machines capable of scanning 8, 9.5, 16 and 35mm film.
In September 2022, BECG held its first public open days as part of the Heritage Open Days scheme and had about 200 visitors. About half were from the local area and half from further afield. [11]
Major items in the collection include: [7]
Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises a series of digital images displayed in rapid succession, usually at 24, 30, or 60 frames per second. Digital video has many advantages such as easy copying, multicasting, sharing and storage.
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) systems, which, in turn, were replaced by flat-panel displays of several types.
Videotape is magnetic tape used for storing video and usually sound in addition. Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal. Videotape is used in both video tape recorders (VTRs) and, more commonly, videocassette recorders (VCRs) and camcorders. Videotapes have also been used for storing scientific or medical data, such as the data produced by an electrocardiogram.
Kinescope, shortened to kine, also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940s for the preservation, re-broadcasting and sale of television programs before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes. Kinescopes were the only practical way to preserve live television broadcasts prior to videotape.
Telecine is the process of transferring film into video and is performed in a color suite. The term is also used to refer to the equipment used in this post-production process.
Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus (VERA) was an early analog recording videotape format developed from 1952 by the BBC under project manager Dr Peter Axon.
Ampex Data Systems Corporation is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence. Ampex operates as Ampex Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, and consists of two business units. The Silicon Valley unit, known internally as Ampex Data Systems (ADS), manufactures digital data storage systems capable of functioning in harsh environments. The Colorado Springs, Colorado, unit, referred to as Ampex Intelligent Systems (AIS), serves as a laboratory and hub for the company's line of industrial control systems, cyber security products and services and its artificial intelligence/machine learning technology.
Color grading is a post-production process common to filmmaking and video editing of altering the appearance of an image for presentation in different environments on different devices. Various attributes of an image such as contrast, color, saturation, detail, black level, and white balance may be enhanced whether for motion pictures, videos, or still images. Color grading and color correction are often used synonymously as terms for this process and can include the generation of artistic color effects through creative blending and compositing of different layer masks of the source image. Color grading is generally now performed in a digital process either in a controlled environment such as a color suite, and is usually done in a dim or dark environment.
A video tape recorder (VTR) is a tape recorder designed to record and playback video and audio material from magnetic tape. The early VTRs were open-reel devices that record on individual reels of 2-inch-wide (5.08 cm) tape. They were used in television studios, serving as a replacement for motion picture film stock and making recording for television applications cheaper and quicker. Beginning in 1963, videotape machines made instant replay during televised sporting events possible. Improved formats, in which the tape was contained inside a videocassette, were introduced around 1969; the machines which play them are called videocassette recorders.
1–inch Type C is a professional reel-to-reel analog recording helical scan videotape format co-developed and introduced by Ampex and Sony in 1976. It became the replacement in the professional video and broadcast television industries for the then-incumbent 2–inch quadruplex videotape open-reel format. Additionally, it replaced the unsuccessful type A format, also invented by Ampex, and, primarily in mainland Europe, it supplemented the type B format, invented by the Fernseh division of Bosch.
1-inch type A is a reel-to-reel helical scan analog recording videotape format developed by Ampex in 1965, that was one of the first standardized reel-to-reel magnetic tape formats in the 1–inch (25 mm) width; most others of that size at that time were proprietary. It was capable of 350 lines.
2-inch quadruplex videotape was the first practical and commercially successful analog recording video tape format. It was developed and released for the broadcast television industry in 1956 by Ampex, an American company based in Redwood City, California. The first videotape recorder using this format was built the same year. This format revolutionized broadcast television operations and television production, since the only recording medium available to the TV industry until then was Motion picture film.
Hemswell Cliff is a village and civil parish in the West Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England. It is situated on the A631 road between Caenby Corner and Gainsborough and on the Lincoln Cliff escarpment. According to the 2001 Census it had a population of 683.
Cintel was a British digital cinema company founded in 1927 by John Logie Baird and based in Ware, Hertfordshire. The early company was called Cinema Television Ltd. Cinema Television was sold to J Arthur Rank Organization renamed Rank Cintel in 1958. It specialized in the design and manufacture of professional post-production equipment, for transcribing film into video or data formats. It was formerly part of the Rank Organisation. Along with a line of telecines, Rank Cintel made 3 tube RGB color video projectors in the 1960s.
The Fernseh AG television company was registered in Berlin on July 3, 1929, by John Logie Baird, Robert Bosch, Zeiss Ikon and D.S. Loewe as partners. John Baird owned Baird Television Ltd. in London, Zeiss Ikon was a camera company in Dresden, D.S. Loewe owned a company in Berlin and Robert Bosch owned a company, Robert Bosch GmbH, in Stuttgart. with an initial capital of 100,000 Reichsmark. Fernseh AG did research and manufacturing of television equipment.
A film chain or film island is a television – professional video camera with one or more projectors aligned into the photographic lens of the camera. With two or more projectors a system of front-surface mirrors that can pop-up are used in a multiplexer. These mirrors switch different projectors into the camera lens. The camera could be fed live to air for broadcasting through a vision mixer or recorded to a VTR for post-production or later broadcast. In most TV use this has been replaced by a telecine.
The 57th Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards was held on 29 September 2005. The National Television Academy announced the winners at Bristol-Myers Squibb in Princeton, New Jersey.
A television production truck or OB van is a small mobile production control room to allow filming of events and video production at locations outside a regular television studio. They are used for remote broadcasts, outside broadcasting (OB), and electronic field production (EFP). Some require a crew of as many as 30 people, with additional trucks for additional equipment as well as a satellite truck, which transmits video back to the studio by sending it up through a communications satellite using a satellite dish, which then transmits it back down to the studio. Alternatively, some production trucks include a satellite transmitter and satellite dish for this purpose in a single truck body to save space, time and cost.
From 1963 to 1970, Ampex manufactured several models of VTR 2-inch helical VTRs, capable of recording and playing back analog black and white video. Recording employed non-segmented helical scanning, with one wrap of the tape around the video head drum being a little more than 180 degrees, using two video heads. One video drum rotation time was two fields of video. The units had two audio tracks recorded on the top edge of the tape, with a control track recorded on the tape's bottom edge. The 2-inch-wide video tape used was one mil thick. The VTRs were mostly used by industrial companies, educational institutions, and a few for in-flight entertainment.
Link Electronics Ltd. was a major UK industrial and broadcast television equipment manufacturer and systems integrator in the 1970s and 1980s. The company was founded by John Tanner and David Mann, who began manufacturing television cameras in 1966.