Restoring Blake's 7 with Paul Vanezis

Garry: 00:00:17

Hello and welcome to Federation Strike A journey through Blake's 7. My name's Garry and welcome to our third bonus episode of our first season. Welcome back to the podcast, everybody.

I hope you're having a good cracking week and enjoying some sun here in the UK at least.

And you also managed to listen to our second bonus episode last week, which was our interview with Chris Thompson, who is the visual effects extraordinaire. He did all of the model work and the digital visual effects on the series one Blake seven box set. He also does a load of stuff for Doctor who.

He's done a bunch of visual effects supervising and all that good stuff over on the Blu Ray collection box sets and is also a huge, just an all round, really nice guy. I had a really good chat with him, so if you've not checked that out, go back and listen to that one.

But for this week, we're on to our third and final episode of our first season and it's a chat with Paul Vanezis, who is the guy who did all of the cleanup, visual cleanup stuff on the Blake's 7 Series 1 box set. And as we now know, the Series 2 box set has been up for pre order for a few weeks now and Paul is also working on that as well.

So both Chris and Paul, I hope to get them back off later in the year when we come back for our second season so that we can continue the chat around some of the stuff that they've worked on for series two, or series B as we call it.

So the chat with Chris is very cool, very technical, very geeky, if visual, sort of visual picture fidelity and the technology that goes behind all of that stuff is your bag, then you're going to love this episode. And both myself and Adam were on this one. Adam was able to join us. So we had a really good chat with Paul. It goes really in depth.

So like I said, if this is your thing, then we geeked out a little bit on this. So without further ado, here is our chat with Paul Vinises.

Continuing on with our bonus run of episodes after we've reviewed series one of Blake's 7, we're on to our next interview and a chat with a guy.

If you've, those of you that have watched through the Blu Ray, you'll, you'll be very appreciative of our chat with, with this, with this guest this week. It is Paul Vanezis. How are you, sir?

Paul: 00:03:03

I'm very well, thank you, Garry.

Garry: 00:03:05

Good, good, good. Thank you very much for agreeing to come on and have a chat with Us. I'm sure that many of our listeners will be super interested in your.

Your work on the. On the Blu ray, but also some of your work just around TV production, camera work, all the technical stuff.

I want to dive into that in the next few moments.

So for the benefit of our listeners though, who don't know your name, give us a quick intro into what your sort of bulk, your library of work is and what you specialize in. And because I had looked through your stuff and it's just incredible the amount of stuff that you've done and the variety of work.

So give our listeners a quick run through of who you are and what you do.

Paul: 00:03:54

Well, yeah, I mean, if you look on IMDb, there's actually quite a lot that's not on there as well. But yeah, I'm a producer director now. I'm a freelance producer director. I used to be a producer director at the BBC.

I was there for 22 years and before I was a director I was also an editor at the BBC at Pebble Mill in Birmingham.

And so I started as a trainee assistant film editor working on things like Howards Way, although I didn't do very much on Howards Bay, but I worked on Howards Way and Silent Revolution, went did some screen one, a little bit of assisting on a screen one. And then I became a dubbing editor.

So I was on film for my trainee period of the first year and then I became a dubbing editor, which is basically a sound editor and sound designer for drama.

And I worked on two series as a dubbing editor, series called Specials, which was, went out on Wednesday nights which starred Martin Cochran and Cindy O'Callaghan. And Terry Malloy was in it as well. Okay, Ron Donachey, great, great cast, great to work on.

And I worked with two legends of broadcasting, Brian Degas, who is this kind of crazy Argentinian who'd originally produced the Vendetta series in the 60s with Stelio Candeli and Harry Robertson. And Harry Robertson was a composer, he composed the music system to some Hammer films. He was also the original Lord Rockingham.

So those of you that have heard of Lord Rockingham's 11, Harry was Lord Rockingham. And so I worked with Harry and Brian as producers on specials and actually had a really good relationship with them. And then I also.

But the first thing I did as a dubbing editor was a 10 part series, a John Godber series called Chalk Face. And I did all the sound design for that series. That was the first thing I did. And.

And then I was a VT editor and worked across videotape and assisting on programs like Top Gear and Network east and Country File, that kind of thing and the Clothes show and the. My boss on the Clothes show, the editor, Roger Cassels. So he was a program editor, not a technical editor.

He produced that series and he gave me my first break as a director on the Clothes Show.

So that's where I started as a director and then more recently I've specialized in pretty much from my last few years at the BBC and then to the present day, I've mostly specialized in science programming, science documentaries.

And although the industry is very slow at the moment, the last thing I worked on broadcast was about 18 months ago, which was I was the edit producer of a documentary for Channel 4 about Richard Branson's attempt to launch a satellite from Cornwall on the back of a 747. So that's cool. Yeah, yeah, that was, that's the last show I made. But, but you know, kind of high. I kind of, I guess career highlights would be.

I was a producer on Stargazing Live and great show. Yeah, I did, I did a one off documentary with Stephen Hawking.

So I filmed with Stephen on, on and off for about three months making that show with him and Dara O'Brien. And yeah, that, that, that has to be a career highlight.

So great thing to work on and, and we produced a really, you know, you know, a piece of work that I'm proud of and it's on YouTube if people want to watch it.

Garry: 00:08:42

So yeah, it's very cool. Yeah. And it's very obvious that because as I mentioned, you've got a wide variety of work and, but it's obvious that you do lean into the science.

You can tell that's something of interest to you. The Stargazing stuff is, is amazing.

And Stargazing Live, that's really cool there a very cool thing that you worked on which was Destination Titan, I think that was for BBC4 if I'm correct.

Paul: 00:09:13

Yeah, Destination Titan was at the time I had just become the. I've been the series producer of the sky at Night for about seven months.

I did it for a year and a half with Patrick Moore and completely out of the blue a director contacted me and he'd, as a vanity project, he'd self funded the making of this program he was calling Destination Titan and he came to Pebble Mill, he wanted some rushes actually from the sky at Night coverage of the landing of a probe on Titan. It's one of the moons of Saturn. For people who aren't astronomers. It's a long way away anyway, very long.

It had taken seven years for this probe to reach, to reach Titan. And he, and the landing is, is, it's still man's most distant landing of any object on a foreign, on a planetary body.

It's, you know, billions of miles away. It's a long way away. So anyway, he wanted the rushes and.

Which I couldn't give him, you know, he was just, he was just this kid called Stephen Slater who had, he'd kind of made this thing on spec and funded it himself. And he showed me what he was doing and, and the sequences, as they were, were fabulous.

You know, they were, they were nicely constructed, they were well shot. But he hadn't really tied it together as a film.

And I said to him, I said, look, why don't you finish the film, Go away, finish the film and then send me the film and then we can talk about it. We might be able to find a way of helping you. And I genuinely didn't think I'd ever hear from him again.

. This would have been in, in: 2011

I mean, it wasn't perfect, it wasn't quite to the standard that we would want to broadcast editorially and structurally it wasn't quite there and it was about, it was just over 40 minutes long. But I thought, you know what, I, I wonder whether we could, we could buy the film from him.

So I showed it to my boss and my boss showed it to Kim Schillinglaw, who is the head of BBC Science, Science Commissioner. And she said, this is great, I'll have it, but it needs to be an hour long. That was it.

And so we got Stephen in and we bought his film from him, but we also engaged him to help turn it into a one hour show. And, and so we, we finished Destination Titan with a little bit of extra shooting and three weeks in the edit.

And I think we produced a really sharp film which BBC4 have shown 16 times since. So you can understand why we're all very happy with that film.

And Stephen is a very good, good friend of mine still today, and I, he helps me out with various things.

In fact, something I've done on one of the Doctors recently helped out with some of the archive and, and one of the films I've helped him with was the Todd Miller Apollo 11 feature film.

So Stephen was the archive producer on that and he contacted me because he wasn't, you Know, I was trained in film and he wasn't quite up on film formats and he needed help identifying some material for the Apollo 11 film, which at the time was going to be made for cnn. It was a CNN film. And he sent me this, this spreadsheet of. It wasn't really a spreadsheet.

adsheet, but it was, it was a: 1975

And down the left hand side were the titles which I recognized many of them being interested in in NASA's archive. And he said, I don't understand the third column, what it is, what should I be getting scanned for this film?

And the third column there was 16 mil 35. The third column was 65 mil. And I said to him, well, you obviously want the 65.

And he said he thought that was a mistake because he'd never heard of 65 mil and a lot of people haven't, but people have heard of 70 mil. And the thing about film is that it's very expensive. It was expensive. A roll of 35 millimeter film is expensive.

millimeter feature in the: 1960

And when you make a 70 mil feature, quite a lot of the real estate of that, of the physical 70 mil film is the soundtrack. But when you're shooting on location, the sound is recorded separately, so the film doesn't need to be as wide.

Garry: 00:16:17

Right.

Paul: 00:16:18

And so the rushes for a 70 mil feature are actually 65 millimeter.

Garry: 00:16:23

So that makes sense. Yeah.

Paul: 00:16:25

So suddenly I was telling him that he had IMAX quality archive content that he didn't know existed. And wow, I'll be honest, neither did I at that time. And so, so anyway, I helped him out with, with identifying that and working out what to scan and.

Yeah, and they made a, you know, an Oscar nominated film.

Garry: 00:16:51

So, yeah, yeah, it's very, very cool. Yeah, it's a bit of a. Bit of a space nerd and yeah, it was just very cool to, to watch that.

So, yeah, it's crazy that I'd not clocked your name, Paul, previously. Over the years, watching things like, you know, sky at Night and Stargazing and Destiny, I just hadn't clocked.

So it was really cool to see your name pop. Up when I did some research stuff, it was like, ah, Paul's done all this stuff.

Paul: 00:17:20

Yeah.

Garry: 00:17:20

On space.

Paul: 00:17:21

I have done for. Well, since: 1988

So, yeah, I've been doing it a while.

Garry: 00:17:33

What's your.

Doctor who convention back in: 2012

Paul: 00:17:59

Yes, that's right.

Garry: 00:18:01

What's the difference between having to do content for live events and conventions like that versus sort of traditional television?

Paul: 00:18:09

Well, producing. I think people are a bit confused sometimes about exactly what a producer is and in television back in the day.

So take somebody like Rudolph Cartier, who did the Quatermass serials, as the producer. He is basically, he's God, really. He's not just the producer, he's also the director. He casts everything. He decides the music, you do the hot.

You produce the whole production from start to finish, and you direct the cameras as the producer.

In the early days and back in the day, when productions became more complex or they became serials, then you would bring in a series producer, like Verity Lambert, for example, and directors to produce their individual stories. So somebody like Warrior Hussain on the first Doctor who was actually. He produced that series. Like Rudolph Cartier produced Quatermass.

Garry: 00:19:27

Yeah, yeah.

Paul: 00:19:28

So Verity Lambert is across the series, getting the directors in, making sure that they've got the right funding to fund everything and also creatively, the look of the whole series as a whole, how it all fits together, that Warrior Hussein and Christopher Barry and John Crockett and later Michael Ferguson and the others, they're producing their individual stories within that, underneath that umbrella. So producing generally is making sure that you're bringing all of those elements together.

e reason I got the gig on the: 2012

I was recommended by Russell Minton and he suggested me to single market events because I had a knowledge of Doctor who, but they.

But more to the point, because I'd done things like stargazing live, they needed somebody that had had live experience and it was just fortuitous that it was a Doctor who thing, you know. And so, yeah, so I produced the stage for that So I didn't produce the event, I produced the stage. Gotcha. And the key things for something like that.

And I remember that very clearly because there were lots of discussions about timing, because we. The thing about those kind of events is.

And also the following year, that was a kind of a test bed for the big Doctor who celebration at xl the following year, which I also did the stages for, that was a bit different because then I became a series producer of the stages. I didn't produce any of the stages myself. I got in producers and I then created the format for. For all the stages.

And then the producers turned up on the day and produced the stages to my plan, if you like. So. But on that.

On that first one, a lot of it was to do with when the audiences were coming in, because there was repetition of all of the stage events for different audiences, because you don't. You want some people in the. In the theatre, in the auditorium at one time, other people will be doing something else somewhere else.

That's how it worked with Excel, I think. Excel. We did four, three or four sessions a day of exactly the same content. So. And everybody. Everybody effectively sees the same content.

t. At the Dot who festival in: 2015

And so you've got Stephen Cranford presenting. So Stephen was one of my choices. You've got. Mark Gatiss was a contributor to that as well. And then all the.

All the visual effects people, and you had two artists on stage creating these creatures live. And we needed to be able to see their. The output of their screens as they were working, creating these creatures.

And there's a bit of audience interaction as well. And we were doing this for three days, three or four times a day, I think.

And so I remember Mark Gatis saying to me at one point, he said, it'd be great if we could vary it a bit now. And he said, there's only so much I can talk about. Can we vary it slightly?

So as we got on, got through the weekend, we changed a few things here and there just to make it a bit different.

Adam: 00:24:35

I think that's the one we were at, isn't it, mate? We went to the festival, we did, and where. I think Danny, the effects guy, blew up a Dalek on stage. I'm remembering rightly.

Paul: 00:24:43

Yeah, he did, Danny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he did. He blew up a dip. A Dalek. Yeah, yeah.

And I mean, that was interesting because they'd said to me, they asked me to do that, that Doctor who festival. And then they said, oh, what are you doing the following weekend? I said, well, what would you like me to do?

And they said, well, would you like to do another event the following weekend? And I said, well, yeah, I mean, I should be free that weekend. I'm editing during the week.

And they said, oh, you probably won't be able to edit during the week. I said, well, why? And I said, because it's in Sydney. So we basically.

I was actually editing in Plymouth during that period and I'd got time off from that gig because I'd got the DOT two festival first. I'd said to them, I can do all the dates you want except for these dates because I'm doing the Dotto festival. And they were happy with that.

And I had said to them, there's a possibility that I might be going to Sydney, which means I won't be able to work between the two events. And they said, okay, we can work around that. I said, as long as you're back on the Wednesday after the event in Sydney, that'll be fine.

And so I did the DOT who festival and had to do a lot of prep of content for that. And then we finished on the Sunday I had Monday free, and then Tuesday I flew to Sydney.

And because of the way the time works, I landed like 8 o'clock on Sunday morning. Not Sunday, Thursday morning in Sydney. Met up with my mate, Damian Damien Shanahan. People will know who he is if you're a Doctor who fan.

And then we did the rehearsals on Friday in Sydney, and then we did the event Saturday, Sunday. And then I flew back Monday, landed Tuesday morning because the time difference is different.

And I was in the office in the edit suite on Wednesday in Plymouth, editing. Editing. I can't even remember what it was. Some consumer show.

Garry: 00:27:22

Yeah, okay.

Paul: 00:27:23

Which again is.

Adam: 00:27:24

You must have been absolutely shattered.

Paul: 00:27:26

Well, you know, I mean, it was business class, so, you know, I didn't pay for the flight. It was business class, so, you know, you can. You can relax. So, yeah, so great, great fun to do that.

But you, you know, you become a bit of a globetrotter. I mean, it's not often that you ask. You get asked to go to Sydney for the weekend, you know, to Australia for the weekend.

But that's what I had to do.

And the only other time it's happened was I was doing a business series for CNBC about six years ago, which was all meant to be shot in the uk, but the sponsor, Schneider Electric, that company was the sponsor of the show, they said, oh, we'd really like a bit more of an international feel to it. And so a program I did about mining, actually this is, if anyone wants to watch it, it's on, it is on YouTube, on the CNBC channel.

It's called IoT Powering the Digital Economy.

And this was, I did the both two mining programs as well as several others and they said, yeah, the person we want you to interview is UK based, but she's not in the UK at the moment, she's in Singapore on this date.

So, so I, I flew to Singapore to, with my presenter to shoot that, which is, it's, it's a couple of hours filming, you know, it's half a day filming at the most.

And then they said, oh, when you're in that neck of the woods, perhaps you could just pop down to Perth and do another interview at BHP with one of the technical people at their mining operation because they basically they have their head office in Perth and in that head office they remotely control these giant mining trucks. So it was all about the Internet of things and how it all connects together. So it kind of ticked the box.

So I had to pop down to Perth, you know, you know, just nip down to Australia just to do an interview. So we did that.

Garry: 00:29:58

Wow.

Paul: 00:29:59

But I mean, again, that's another situation where my presenter, she is British Nigerian and because she had been to Nigeria in the last six months, Australia wouldn't let her in unless she could verify her tuberculosis jab status.

And so we didn't discover this being a real problem until we were already in Singapore and we were literally traveling the next day to go to Australia. Didn't affect me because of course I hadn't been to Nigeria, so, so I had to take her to.

This is a job of the producer in these things which people don't realize these, these are the things you have to do.

I had to take my presenter to Singapore airport to their health clinic so she could get a TB jab and then had to get, then get that documentation to the Australian embassy in London overnight for them to verify it because she was, you know, and then I had to fly to Perth without her while she waited for the okay from the visa. It's automatic. I say automatic, they will automatically get the update when the Australian embassy ticks the box and says, yes, you can travel.

And so she didn't fly out until later. And that's quite stressful when, you know, you think, well, if they won't let her come, how do we shoot this interview, which is presenter based?

Garry: 00:31:59

So of course, yeah. Stressful.

Adam: 00:32:01

Yeah, Just added pressure.

Paul: 00:32:03

And also you're having to deal with, with camera crews that you've never worked with before. You know, you booked them 4,000 miles away and exchanged emails and had a chat on the phone.

Maybe, but, you know, but I'd never, I'd never spoken to the camera people before I turned up with her to do the filming. So, you know.

Garry: 00:32:24

Wow. So essentially what you're saying, Paul, is being a producer is extremely stressful.

Paul: 00:32:29

It can be a lot of the time. If you're organized then, then it's, it's fine. I mean, everything is in, everything is in the planning.

You know, you, you, you plan so that you, you're not stressed. That's, that's how it works.

Garry: 00:32:44

Yeah. When you've got international flights and things not going quite right and that sort of thing, I imagine that in the moment that could feel a bit.

But you know, when it's all done and comes together, I guess it's.

Paul: 00:32:55

rizons was a series I made in: 2014

ur months at the beginning of: 2014

And in that period, myself and my assistant producer Keaton, we travelled 35,000 miles just flying all over the place, making these programs. You know, a week in South Korea, a week in India, two weeks in the States. Five, five cities. Four states a week or so in, across Europe, Switzerland.

We filmed in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and went to, did a whole piece in Amsterdam about floating homes. Those, you know, you're cramming all of this stuff and you need to film two items a day.

You know, in America we were filming, you know, two big stories.

One in the morning, one in the afternoon, sometimes some distance apart or, you know, driving through, through, through floods in Northern California to film in a geothermal power plant in the pouring rain. You know, having to film Peter the camera in literally torrential rain.

You know, you're thinking on your feet all the time as a producer and as a director.

Garry: 00:34:59

Yeah, yeah, of course, that makes sense. And wow. So I just can't believe the amount of stuff that, as I said before, that you've, you've been Involved in.

So taking all of that history of your of. Of work, then up to this point, mainly producing and, you know, directing as well and. Yeah, and that kind of thing.

This a nice segue into Blake's 7, actually. What, what, what made you want to do something like this on Blake's 7, where you're involved in the more technical aspects of it, because you were.

Paul: 00:35:33

You.

Garry: 00:35:33

You headed up the. The restoration side of things, Is that correct?

Paul: 00:35:36

Yeah. So I looked after all the restoration for Blake's 7.

So Blake's 7 had been talked about before the lockdown as a potential title, additional title, as a kind of on the back of the success of the Doctor who sets. I think we'd done only the first two sets when we were talking about doing Blake's 7 and.

Oh, wow, they couldn't, for some reason, I can't remember the detail of it, but it didn't happen at that time and I'm not quite sure what the reason was for that, but it didn't quite happen then. And then suddenly we did all the costings for it. We looked at. Looked at all the costings, we looked at the assets. I was.

A lot of work had been done on that before I even saw it. So BBC Studios had sent me quotes for restoration, some of which were quite old, actually. These quotes, they went back even further.

So they'd obviously been looking at the possibility of doing a grand restoration of Blake for a while and it was just a challenge for me because I'd, you know, I'd worked with the Doctor restoration team as part of the team, but there's not very much hands on restoration that you do. I kind of always did a lot of the physical stuff where.

So, for example, when Web of Fear and Enemy of the World, the Doctor who films came back from Nigeria, I did all the physical film prep for that and also for Morecambe and Wise show and some of the things and that. I love, I love doing all of that.

The technical restoration is much more challenging because you're having to do it all yourself, but we have great tools now to enable us to do that and it's a lot cheaper to do it so you can work from home rather than having to go to a studio or book expensive facilities. And so Russell said, you know, Peter's going to be too busy doing Doctor who. Who do we get to do it? And I said, well, I mean, I could have a go.

And he said, well, it's going to be a big job. You know, it's, you know, 50 minute episodes, not 25. It's like a full season of Doctor who. 26 episode season of Doctor who.

I said, well, I'll give it. I'll give it a go.

Adam: 00:38:58

So is that because you're a fan of Blake's 7, Paul, or did you just fancy the challenge of doing it?

Paul: 00:39:04

Well, it's a combination of the two. I mean, Blake seven, I watched from the beginning, you know, when it first, when it first appeared, and I loved, I loved it.

I loved the first two seasons when, when Blake and Jenna disappeared, that kind of. I kind of lost interest, to be honest with you.

Adam: 00:39:33

Really?

Paul: 00:39:33

Yeah.

Adam: 00:39:34

Okay.

Paul: 00:39:34

I lost interest. I kept watching them, but. But they didn't hold my. I didn't have a love of it as I did for the first two seasons.

Adam: 00:39:43

Avon didn't carry you through.

Paul: 00:39:46

He was. Avon is probably. Avon and Callie are probably the saving graces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Paul Darrow is such a fine actor.

Particularly shines in Blake's 7. I mean, he's done lots of other great things, but he particularly shines in Blake in Blake's 7.

But the, I'll be honest, I much preferred the more serious storylines and I wasn't a big fan of the campiness and I felt it got quite campy the further it got into it. And that's, I mean, looking at them now, I mean, it's all a bit campy, but that's part of its charm.

But, but in: 1978

Garry: 00:40:54

I mean, that's part of the charm.

Paul: 00:40:55

It is, it's all part of the charm. And embracing, embracing the cheese and ham is what we do.

Garry: 00:41:08

So the restoration side of things then. So you, you mentioned that you've been involved in the physical film stuff with previous projects and now the technical stuff.

When you say, you said you just have a go at it.

Paul: 00:41:22

Yeah.

Garry: 00:41:22

Which is a incredibly brave and very cool thing to do. Just to come out of your comfort zone, I guess, a little bit.

Paul: 00:41:28

Well, not very much because, I mean, you look at, go Back to season 14 box set of Doctor who and for that we needed. We had all the access to all the negatives of who's Doctor who.

We thought, well, we might as well just restore that so we can feature on the disk in true hd because there's very little true high definition content for that season. And so, so I worked on that did a full restoration of who's Doctor who and, and actually that, that kind of dictated quite a lot of.

Of my approach to Blake's 7. Okay. The, the key things are also, the other thing to bear in mind is that I used to be a technical operator in television as an assistant editor.

And so I was familiar with all the formats and particularly one of my tasks back in the day was working on tele addicts was transferring original tapes to modern formats and understanding those that, what, those, what the issues were with those formats, particularly 2 inch tapes. So I would play 2 inch tapes regularly to take clips from tele addicts.

transfers for that because in: 1993

Most of the episodes of Doctor who were single masters and there were no other copies. There were only the 2 inch tapes in the BBC archive and nothing else.

So, so you, you handled everything with care, of course, but you also discovered issues with, with some of the tapes and every now and then you might have a problem. I mean, I. Paul McGann's first appearance on, on TV in a play.

It was a play called Gaskin and it was all shot on film, but they decided to transmit it from tape.

So it's all on film in the archive, but the Videotape was a 2 inch videotape for transmission and that's what had also been kept and I needed to transfer that. I can't even remember what it was for.

Probably teleaddicts needed a clip for it and I ran the tape down to the point that they wanted a clip from and for some reason I couldn't play it immediately. I may have had a phone call from, from the editing office or wherever, but for whatever reason I wasn't able to play the tape immediately.

So for about three minutes it sat on the machine and then I hit play and the tape didn't move and I just heard a zinging sound. And the. What happened was the, the tape was sticky and because it had sat on the machine for a small amount of time, the tape had.

Was sticky enough to stick itself to the guides of the machine, the stainless steel guides. And then when I hit play, the tape had nowhere to go because it was stuck at both ends.

And the head drum is tipped the heads, there are four heads, which is why it's called a quad Machine quadruplex. And the drum spins at right angles to the path of the tape. It's a transverse scan format. And so. And the heads are made of cast iron.

They're tipped cast iron.

So what happened was the tape then tensioned across the head, came out of the vacuum guide that keeps it sucked away from enough away from the head so it doesn't cut the tape in two and it cut the tape in two. So, so again that you have to. Then you've got a big problem because you're halfway into a. Into a tape that's sticky.

So you know you've got a problem which wasn't evident at the beginning but is evident halfway through and you've got to try and rejoin it back together without damaging it any further and then rewind it back on the same machine. And that is, that's tricky to do. You know, it becomes a real piece of work to. A job of work to try and resolve that.

Garry: 00:47:15

Sure, yeah. So that's with the. The experience with old sort of television, tape vs film Etc. Was the. What was the condition of the.

The original material for Blake's 7 like? And was that on tape or film? What did you work with?

Paul: 00:47:32

Yeah, so. So Blake's 7 series 1, there are only 13 tapes. So there are no other. There's no, there's no 71 edits. Or in fact a lot of them are 71s.

They're the first generation edits, not like Doctor who, which went round and round and round in the 80s and most programs in the, in the 70s are effectively 71 edits. First edits. Right. And there are all sorts of reasons for that, mostly to do with the format. It's a 2 inch, is.

Is quite a bulky, clumsy format and you, you know, so you need, you don't want to be going around again. You're losing quality every time you make a copy. So there are 13 tapes and then there's some film. So we've got.

All the opening titles for all the series of Blake are all listed under the. Under the wayback, which is kind of the BBC's way of keeping track of where the opening titles are. They always put it.

If they've got opening title assets, they always put it against the program number of the first episode of the series. First series. So, so, so I think BBC worldwide were quite excited thinking there was a lot of amazing film for, for the way back when.

In fact, there wasn't any. It was just all these different opening titles on 35 millimeter.

So we knew we had all the titles for all the series, there was one roll of, of mute A and B negative from cygnus Alpha, episode 3, one scene, the fight scene, but nothing else from that. And then for the other episodes it's basically episode six onwards. We had everything apart from episode nine.

Okay, so Project Avalon, we didn't have any film for. We had no film for the way back.

We had no film for Spacefall, we had a small amount of film, one scene for Cygnus Alpha, nothing for Time Squad, nothing for the Web and nothing for Project Avalon. But we had everything else. I say we had everything else we didn't have for Breakdown.

Someone had been into the negative after the fact and cut bits out of it. Yeah. And so for example, the space station explosion had been removed and I was a bit disappointed because I thought it would look good in hd.

But then I found it on the end of Orak because it was intercut to. To make it look like it was the Liberator exploding. And in fact it was a space station from the end of Breakdown.

Garry: 00:50:31

Interesting. Is that? Okay, wow. So you've got, you've got everything there, but just a couple of bits additional for some episodes. Well, you mentioned.

Paul: 00:50:44

Yeah, on film sometimes you'd find. So for example, there's a scene in duel with Blake and Jenna up a tree at night getting attacked by bats.

And there was one scene looking through the, the footage, there was one scene where, where it's scratched completely throughout, unusably scratched. And I thought to myself, well, I'm going to have to go back to the standard definition transfer of that on the, on the program tape.

I'm not going to be able to make use of this. What a nice. That's disappointing.

But actually when I, when I, when I came to put everything in against the pictures, I realised that that film had been damaged probably on location or at the Ned cutter, and it had always been damaged. And so actually what they did, they must have noticed this before they did the studio. So they did the location filming first, which is normal.

Then they went into the studio, they knew there was an issue in the studio, so they wrote in an additional scene. And you only hear that conversation that's being being had on audio whilst Avon and the others are listening in.

Garry: 00:52:22

Oh yes, this is, this is making a lot of sense because Adam and I reviewed this very episode when we recorded yesterday. So what you're saying makes absolute sense.

Okay, so the film was damaged, couldn't use it, but they knew what, they were aware of it and so recorded the audio in studio and Then they just played it over the top of the guys watching back on the Liberator.

Paul: 00:52:46

Yeah. So at the point where the film is damaged, you hear part of the conversation, but we don't see it.

Garry: 00:52:53

You don't see it.

Paul: 00:52:54

Ah, clever way of.

Garry: 00:52:56

Clever.

Paul: 00:52:56

Yeah. Well, that's still the scam. Feel for you. He knows what he's doing.

Adam: 00:52:59

Yes. I'm intrigued, Paul, actually, because Blake's 7's been released on various formats over the years.

I think I've bought it on VHS twice and then DVD and now obviously Blu Ray and there is a, you know, a markable difference in the Blu Ray quality.

And I'm just wondering how much restoration had been done before because, you know, obviously techniques have obviously improved over the years, so there's more you can do now. But I. Perhaps you could tell me, had much restoration been done to the series before, or was it kind of a basic restoration and put it out like.

I don't know how much the BBC invested in it up until this Blu Ray release, where it seems like they've wanted it to be as best as it can be.

Paul: 00:53:41

Yeah. So the. I looked at the: 2004

Adam: 00:53:51

Did you work on those, by the way?

Paul: 00:53:52

No, no, I didn't. That was. That was looked after, that. The.

ne at BBC Studios and post in: 2004

They definitely did for Seek, Locate, Destroy. And I know that because you see one of the tenets of restoration, if you're going to do it, restoration, you always go back to source where possible.

There's no point in doing anything else because if you're. If you're taking it, if you've got a negative and a print and you want to restore something, why use a print when you've got a negative?

It doesn't really make any sense unless you don't have the budget. So it's why a lot of. A lot of Blu Ray releases of archive films don't look that. That good. Because they're made from prints. They're not.

They don't go back to restore from negatives. Whereas 4K releases, of course, you can resolve a whole lot more detail.

And so companies, because they're restoring their films, are thinking, well, we. We can make some money out of this. And they released their beautiful restorations on in 4K.

So for example, Alien, the Riddy Scott film from 79 is an absolutely astonishing restoration on 4K from the negatives. Early versions. Early versions. Previous versions are from film, from prints, so that's why it looks absolutely stunning. So.

red versions from. Yeah. From: 2004

haps they should have done in: 2004

On a Ealing Studios, wherever it was edited, between that and the VT edit, there's no problem. The film that you've edited is edited into the finished program and that's it.

But C Locate Destroy was an example where at the beginning, that sequence with the robot coming before Blake teleports down, they'd recut it on tape from the film. So they'd made changes to how it appeared in the film edit. But they obviously noticed this because of course it had been shortened.

But when they put it back together, they made a. They made a bit of a mistake. So I hadn't really noticed this other than that I tried to match.

I tried to match everything back as it should be to the pictures. I hadn't noticed this on the. On the re. On the remastered versions until Richard Molesworth. Richard Molesworth is basically managing the.

The project in terms of asset delivery and all of that kind of thing, as he does with Doctor who's. And Richard also compares the. Was comparing my remasters with the original versions to make sure that I hadn't made a mistake.

And so Richard contacted me and said, I've just been looking at Seek, Locate, Destroy your version, and I've compared it with the original and they're different. So I scratched my head and thought, I better go and have a look at this. I must have made a mistake, went and had a look.

It was fine, it was no problem. They were absolutely identical. And I said to him, where did you get the copy of Seat Locate Destroy that you're using to compare to?

id, I'm just using a DVD from: 2004

Adam: 00:59:14

And if there's one thing we don't want missing, it's that glorious Federation robot.

Paul: 00:59:20

Well, it's.

Adam: 00:59:20

We want that in hd.

Paul: 00:59:22

It's the most astonishing thing, isn't it? Yeah, it's unbelievable.

Garry: 00:59:27

Yeah. In relation to, you mentioned Alien, that. That's had a really cool remaster from the original film up to 4K.

There has been some horrendous remasters though, from some films where they've either just gone too heavy, heavy handed on the sort of edge enhancement or the noise reduction where it comes where when you sat down then you thought, okay, I'm going to get stuck into, into this Blake's 7 restoration. What was your, what was your feeling on. How far could you go with it before it starts to look a bit weird and unnatural?

And did you have to pull back a little bit?

Paul: 01:00:11

The huge problems with that kind of technology, noise reduction technology, artificial intelligence, upscaling, that kind of thing. If it takes away from your enjoyment of it, from how you remember it, then it's useless technology. It doesn't deliver what it needs.

It delivers technically what people want, what the people spending the money doing the restoration want, but it doesn't deliver for the consumer that is buying it because they remember it as a piece of work. So I'm looking at it from perspective of, okay, we're going to do an upscale. How could we make the upscale successful but still looking like it did?

the upscale look as it did in: 1978

If I did, I just thought it was my TV or there is poor reception and nothing to do with the original tape. I now know that is the original tapes because a lot of those problems that I've repaired, it's always been like that. It's always been there. So.

And I know that, I know that because of the work I've done playing those kind of tapes. So I'll take the Way back as an example. It's a good episode for its poor state that it was in and probably not because of its age.

In particular because these were transferred to digital. I'm working on digital copies that were made in the early 90s before the BBC donated the tapes to the BFI.

So all the tapes do still exist, by the way. They're at the National Film Archive.

Garry: 01:02:39

Oh, cool.

Paul: 01:02:40

So, but we didn't need to go back to those tapes because the BBC did a very good job of getting great replays to uncompressed digital tapes. And those tapes have been transform decoded, so the PAL has been unpicked and they're back to true component video, ideal for restoration.

But what has been captured is all of the damage that was done when the programs were edited. And some of that damage may have happened by successive replays of the tapes.

Quad scratching is a big problem for 2 inch tapes, and almost every episode had some scratching evident. And in the way back, they weren't particularly deep scratches.

And that's frustrating because actually the, the more obvious the scratch, the more obvious the damage, the easier it is for the software to hook onto it and get rid of it.

So if it's a very diffuse scratch, which it was on the way back, and in fact some shots were scratched twice in different places, then it's very, very difficult to get rid of it completely. And when I look at it, I look at it and I just see the damage, you know, so.

And it's also hidden in this kind of coating of noise, which wouldn't have really been obvious at the time because the tapes go through the transmission chain and noise is added in there. So it. A CRT TV screen doesn't really.

Garry: 01:04:42

You don't really see it back in the day.

Paul: 01:04:45

on a CRT, on a CRTV screen in: 1978

Garry: 01:05:08

Right, yeah.

Paul: 01:05:09

And that's very hard to do. So. So there are two things you look at. Firstly, what software can we use to automate the process of getting rid of the noise and the damage?

And how much manual intervention do we need to do in advance of that? And in some ways the film is the easy bit because you clean the film. So all the film was ultrasonically cleaned.

s. It's like Instead of being: 1080

Garry: 01:06:02

Okay.

Paul: 01:06:03

square pixels. So it's still: 1920

It's: 1558

And then when we downscale it, any minor little imperfections get lost in the downscale.

Garry: 01:06:41

Right.

Paul: 01:06:42

So you're losing a lot of. Not actually you're losing a lot of noise when you downscale, downscale it back to hd. So that's. So the. I'm not saying the film looks after itself.

A lot of the film, like all the film in Breakdown had a lot of picking in it.

So a little bit as well in Orak, where the, where the film kind of probably at some point had stuck to get some glue, maybe hadn't set properly when it was neg cut and, and it had stuck to itself, got warped over time. So you're having to try to deal with all of that.

And then there was some damage to the negatives as well, which you had to clean up in advance or hide. But generally that was all very good. And then you grade, you grade it and how you, how you grade it, you need to have an approach to that.

And, and then there's some despeckling that you need to do. But all of those, the film kind of, you know, I mean, we could probably have an entire podcast on that, but let's not really get into it.

The videotape is the really difficult stuff because you're dealing with twice the number of pictures per second. 50 instead of 25, film is 25, video is 50. I. So 25 frames.

But each frame is two fields and they're, they're completely separate images interlaced together and quad scratching.

Normally if it happens because of the, there's some imperfection or there's some height irregularity or there's a bit of dirt or grit on the tip of one of the four heads of the video machine.

Garry: 01:08:27

Right, right.

Paul: 01:08:28

And that each of those heads lays down a field of information, one part of 1/50 of a second of time. So okay, so it doesn't affect the entire frame, it affects half a frame. One field of the what? Of the frame.

So you need software that allows you to edit at field level instead of frame level instead of frame.

Garry: 01:09:04

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

Paul: 01:09:06

And you need noise reduction. That can work at field level as well. And that's not obvious where you might be able to do that.

Yeah, so I am using just a standard non linear editing system. There are several. So a lot of people use Adobe Premiere to edit with and there are some tools, plugins that you can use for restoration.

And I, I do use premiere, but for Blake's 7 and for tape based productions. I'm using DaVinci Resolve. And yep, DaVinci Resolve actually is quite clunky for dealing with interlaced video.

It's really a progressive film based editing system and grading system. It's not really designed for interlaced video.

Garry: 01:10:25

Right.

Paul: 01:10:26

So you might think, well, why the hell are you using it for Blake's 7 then if it's not very good for interlaced video? What it does do brilliantly is because it's not really designed for interlaced video.

When you import an episode of Blake's 7 or Dot or anything that's interlaced into Resolve and you set your project settings to work with fields instead of frames. When you create an interlaced timeline, it flags it as interlaced, but it's actually a progressive timeline.

Okay, so a 50i timeline, when you go through it frame by frame, you're actually going through it field by field. It effectively deinterlaces from 50i to 50p. And that means that when you apply noise reduction to doesn't work at frame level.

I mean, it does because it thinks everything is a frame, but actually it's doing video noise reduction and dirt and scratch removal at field level without knowing it.

And so actually you can get extremely good results by using the lowest possible noise reduction settings literally in the automated dirt removal tool in DaVinci Resolve. The setting I'm using is 0.001.

Garry: 01:12:26

Okay. So very minimal.

Paul: 01:12:28

It's. It's like the lowest you can do, but that's all it needs. That doesn't, that doesn't take out the quad scratching. It takes out the noise.

Yeah, and, and it does it so much better than, than some of the other noise reduction tools that I have now. It's not perfect for, for every shot.

And you have to do it on a shot by shot basis because you can't just, you can't just apply it to the entire episode in one go. You need to.

If you do that, every single shot change will have artifacts on it at the shot change point because it thinks it's going from one type of scene to another and it thinks it's the same shot and therefore it has to clean it up. So you don't want it to do that. So you have to import the program. I use a system called Scene Detect in Resolve, which detects all the cuts.

You have to correct that manually and then it imports the entire episode as in shot form. So every time there's a shot change, vision mixer shot change, or a film edit shot change, it creates a Single clip. You then lay it all down.

Fortunately, it's consecutive, so it's numbered. So you lay it all down against version of the episode that is just one chunk.

And then you make sure it's correctly aligned and everything's in sync with the sound. And then you can start work on it. And yeah, so you have to do it shot by shot. The film you treat completely, completely differently.

You have to treat the film as progressive film because it is progressive. It might take up two fields, but when you. When you switch between field one and field two of film on tape, they're the same. Or, or are they?

ose films were transferred in: 1978

The telecine is having to produce 50i so interlaced video out of the machine.

And so actually, because the telecine is twin lens, each side of it might produce a slightly different image of the same frame for field two as opposed compared to field one. And that's why some film in the episodes looks unstable.

I'm not talking about jitter, but I'm just talking about generally the image has kind of got a shimmer to it. Right. And then other episodes, like Seek, Locate, Destroy, for example, was done on a particular telecine that was designed.

It's called a polygon telecine. It's got a polygon prison.

And that machine was used, even though it delivered poorer quality images, was used because it allowed them in the studio sessions to freeze the film frame so that they could draw the outline for the teleport.

Garry: 01:16:15

Okay.

Paul: 01:16:17

So the technical people that really understood that, or the directors that really understood that, only used the polygon telecine to transfer the teleport sequences. And everything else was transferred on a normal telecine. But some episodes, like Project Avalon, which is.

Looks absolutely dreadful, is all polygon all the way through.

Adam: 01:16:46

Okay, that's our next episode. I think we'll have to. We'll keep an eye out to see. Yeah, we're reviewing, I think. Yeah.

Paul: 01:16:52

ct Avalon, the Blu ray to the: 2004

Garry: 01:17:04

Yeah, that was going to be my next question, actually. Paul, just to come to a. To wrap up, just got one more question. It was going to be that one, actually.

Of all the Blake's 7 episodes that you've done thus far, is there any one particular story where you felt, actually, I'm really happy with it. I nailed it. Because the original stuff was in. In pretty bad shape and I've managed to bring it to a standard that. Is there any one highlight?

Paul: 01:17:37

Mission to Destiny, no question. Oh, okay, yeah.

Mission to Destiny has got all of that stuff, which arguably was pointlessly, pointlessly shot on film because it could have been, you know, normally, and if you're doing it, it would have been shot in the studio. But because they, they had, they had a budget which meant that they had to do so much film. They had to build film sets for. For the spaceship scenes.

Breakdown as well. Had a lot of stuff. Liberator shots on film for no very good reason. You know, I mean, the, the. Lots of the stuff with Gan having his operation.

I mean, they built that set in the studio, but they also. They also built it at Ealing Studios and shot it on film. So, you know, it kind of doesn't make sense.

I mean, what I would say is if you, if you looked, if you looked at Mission to Destiny on the.

It's hard to say compare it to the dvd because of course they did do some remastering work and they probably did grade it up to get it to look a little bit better.

But certainly comparing it to the episode as was broadcast, you'd be better comparing to the VHS releases maybe, which wouldn't have anything done to them. And they, you know, it. It just looked so drab compared to exactly the same color that you see in the studio. So.

So my lead for Mission to Destiny in terms of how to get the look of it right, was to just look at the. At the studio material. The studio material is. It's obviously softer. It's on video. And the colors.

There's not nearly as many colors in video as there is on the. What the film has captured a hell of a lot more, certainly. So.

But what you need to do is you need to get the costumes, which are quite colorful in Mission to Destiny looking as they did on. On film, as. As the studio looked. So because the studio, I'm. I'm changing very little on the studio.

Definitely in certain scenes I'm correcting when it cuts from one camera to another and the cameras aren't quite matched. I will correct those kind of discrepancies. There's a lot of that in the way back, particularly in the scenes where Blake is going, trying to get out.

He meets up with the rebels in the beginning of the episode. And they leave a lot of those scenes, those dark scenes. If you compare those to the dvd, I suspect you'll see some big differences there.

But The Mission to Destiny had all this lovely film and it just looked. I mean, it was dirty. It was a polygon transfer. The grading, the levels were all over the place. Gamma was up and down. So some shots look.

Look sat up, other shots look crushed. And there was no need for that, really, so.

And also we've got modern grading techniques, so I think Mission to Destiny, of the ones that have the biggest difference between the episode that was broadcast and the. And the restored version, in terms of biggest improvements, has to be Mission to Destiny. Orac. Orac is a close second, just because. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam: 01:21:47

I've just got one more question before we let Paul go, because I'm just intrigued. He was talking about, you know, keeping everything in order and making sure it floats. And I'm just wondering if now on the Blu Ray, they've.

We get new effects as an option on an episode so you can watch them with new model shots.

Paul: 01:22:03

Yeah.

Adam: 01:22:04

Does that affect. Do you do. So once you've remastered the episode, do they then come to you and say, right, we've put in all this new stuff. Can you sync this up?

Do you have any sort of input into that? Or does that affect your work at all? Or is that done separately?

Paul: 01:22:16

Yeah, so. So I. I did look after the. Comping all the. The new effects into the. Into the episodes. I mean that.

The short answer is that it should be pretty straightforward if the technical guys have done everything right.

But the problem is that the way that we were doing it, I restored the episodes and then moved on to the next one, but they weren't the final, final versions. And so there were certain things like. Like cropping of edges. So some of those early.

The versions that we're working to, which were restored, but I then, for various reasons, had to go back and revisit. So, for example, the way back, I restored that episode twice. I wanted to do an episode.

restored the way back in July: 2023

So I didn't start the restoration until September, but in July I did the way back just to see how long it would take. And I didn't restore the episode in full.

I just wanted to get an understanding of the workflow and how long it was taking me and what techniques I should use. And I restored it and I thought I was happy with it. And then when I came to do it for Real.

In September, I watched it back and I thought, I can't do it like this. It just doesn't work. It just looks dreadful, really. I'm just seeing all the mistakes.

There's still problems that I haven't resolved and I need to find a better way of doing it. Like getting rid of the quad scratching. That was finding it.

It's, it's a challenge with tapes that are damaged and lots of people have, have problems getting rid of it seamlessly. But again, I came up with a solution for that. So, so yeah, I, that's, that's kind of, that's kind of the approach that I, that I took.

And you know, it's. And also what I would say is that I don't think it's a perfect restoration because I've, you know, I saw.

I don't know whether you went to the bfi, but we screened two episodes of the BFI and all I can see is, are the faults, you know, the problems.

You know, for example, in, in Seek, Locate, Destroy at the beginning where the, that beautiful robot that everybody loves fires a, a jet of fuel at some cable that's dangling down. And there's a close up.

Adam: 01:25:48

Yeah.

Paul: 01:25:48

And the cable swinging. And on the left hand side, if you look closely, there is a scratch in the negative.

Adam: 01:26:00

And I'll be looking for that scratch next time.

Paul: 01:26:02

Yeah, it's there.

Adam: 01:26:03

I'll be pausing.

Paul: 01:26:04

It is there. The scratch is there. And I, I went over and over that using all the tools, dust busting tools and some of the automated tools.

And I couldn't remove it seamlessly.

Garry: 01:26:27

Right.

Paul: 01:26:28

Because if it had been. It's a, it's a fairly static shot. If there hadn't been much motion in the shot, it would have been fine.

The trouble is you've got all these flames all around it. So it's right through the flames.

And I took the view, as it was only there for a frame or so, that I was going to leave it because if I then tried to unpick it, I would be. You'd be able to see the repair.

Garry: 01:27:05

Oh, right. That makes sense. Yeah.

Paul: 01:27:07

And so all you're doing is trading one fault with. With another.

Garry: 01:27:13

Yeah, yeah.

Adam: 01:27:14

I was gonna say where do you. I guess where do you sort of stop? You know, like you said, you've got to have a cut off. I guess.

I mean, I'm thinking of like in an episode, like Time Squad.

Paul: 01:27:22

Yes.

Adam: 01:27:23

There's a scene where Jenna, I think she's just been hit by a flying bottle.

Paul: 01:27:28

Yeah.

Adam: 01:27:28

And she runs away from the capsule.

Paul: 01:27:30

Yeah.

Adam: 01:27:31

And there's like a very faint white line.

Paul: 01:27:33

Yeah.

Adam: 01:27:34

And it's only in it for, like, probably a couple of seconds.

Paul: 01:27:36

Yeah.

Adam: 01:27:36

You sort of think, oh, so is that the sort of thing that was on the original negative? And you think, I'm leaving that because that's the original. That's how it went out, or.

Paul: 01:27:43

Well, yeah, so that was on tape. And so various. Various things were flagged up. So when I finish the episodes, they go for QC at the Pixel Logic, who do the authoring of the.

Of the discs. And that was one of the things that they flagged up as a fault that needed sorting. And I sent that back to them and said, it's not a fault.

arded as a. As a fault in. In: 1978

With a bit of work, but. But it's kind of. Where do you draw the line? Because.

Adam: 01:28:42

Yeah, that's what I said.

Paul: 01:28:43

Because if you look at all the teleport sequences, none of them are keyed properly. Yeah, yeah, all of them. All of them have got overhanging artifacts throughout the shot. White line on the edges, left, top, right here and there.

Sometimes the circle, the wipe is not centered on the person, so you see, the circle then is left behind to the left or the right of them. All of these are not consistent and they're incorrect.

But I take the view that if we're doing a restoration, we shouldn't be correcting those kind of mistakes, because if. When you watch it at home, you want to see all of those mistakes in the best possible quality. That's my job.

Adam: 01:29:39

Yeah.

Paul: 01:29:39

You don't want to see those faults repaired.

Getting rid of the dirt on the film allows you to see the film sequences as they were originally intended to be in the studio when they're adding all the electronic effects. If you were to review Blake's 7 as a piece.

As a piece of work from: 1978

Garry: 01:30:21

That's a good point.

Paul: 01:30:22

Yeah, so. So those kind of things I will leave in. If. In. In the way back in the. You won't. You won't have noticed this if you were watching either the original.

Original or the new effects. But in Glyn's office, when they've got the screen behind them and they've got Blake on the screen.

In the original version and in the restoration, the edges of the screen, which it's all kind of CSO'd in, are quite jittery. Yeah, it's not jittery on the new effects.

So you have to remember if you're watching the new effect sequences, it isn't just the models and stuff that have been tweaked and fiddled with. There's lots of other things under the hood that you won't notice. So.

Adam: 01:31:16

So were you tempted to take that line out then with the new effects? Did you think, oh, I'll do a version or no, that stays kinda.

Paul: 01:31:24

I mean, I didn't decide what needed tweaking.

What I did do in the new effects for Dual is Chris Thompson had changed the backgrounds of Travis and the mutoid in the forest and created a new forest background rather than the still frame. What's interesting from the, from the film for that is that Douglas Canfield had shots and backgrounds for that, but they didn't really work.

And so in the end they just used those stills that they created.

So Chris created new backgrounds and then delivered them, but of course they were still interlaced live video against his progressive backgrounds as it was Chris. So I thought, well, that's a bit.

That's a bit silly really, because if we're going to do this as a new effect, as an alternative, we should try and make it blend in more seamlessly to the rest of the film. So I filmized those sequences and added some 16 millimeter film grain to them to see if we could make them fit in.

I did a bit of regrading on it as well to match either side, just to see if it would work a bit better. And I think it does work better. I mean, it's not.

It's not perfect because the cameras were not the same type of cameras, but it definitely looks better than it did.

Garry: 01:33:10

It's close enough. Yeah.

Paul: 01:33:12

Yeah. I mean, closer.

And I think if we, if we're going to do any more box sets, then we'll probably look more closely at the new effects and maybe give them a slightly more film filmic look.

Garry: 01:33:28

Okay.

Paul: 01:33:31

Because a lot of people have felt, and I felt on some of the shots that some of the model sequences, even though they were. Even though they were models, have got a bit of a. A CGI look about them.

And part of that is that actually some of Those models were 3D printed from not particularly high resolution files. And so they've got a kind of a less detailed look about them, even though they look sharper. I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, so.

Adam: 01:34:14

Yeah, I know what you're saying. Yeah.

Paul: 01:34:16

So if we, if we just graded them slightly differently and had more of a film emulation to them, I think it might sell it better into the. Into the episodes. But we'll see. You know, we're a long way. It's a.

Adam: 01:34:29

It's a learning process, isn't it?

Paul: 01:34:30

I guess it is, yeah. And, you know, some when, when these things arrive, you know, you see them for the first time, you think, oh, that looks great, that's brilliant.

When you slot them into the episodes, if they look a little bit incongruous, then it probably isn't quite working and. And you just need to go and have a revisit and give it a tweak.

Garry: 01:35:01

Yeah, for sure. It sounds. It sounds like a fascinating process and something that's incredible. I'm in agreement with Adam or she'll agree with me.

We could chat to you for hours, Paul, about all of this stuff.

It's so fascinating and I know our listeners will have loved because I've seen plenty of comments on social media just after the launch of the Blu Ray set where people were discussing how good the restoration is. And I think part of the reason why people enjoy it so much is because it's very fitting to the original broadcast stuff. Yeah.

I think people actually appreciate that you've had that sympathetic view towards it rather than, you know, I'm just going to use all the things and make it look like a modern TV show. You've not gone down that road.

So I think, yeah, it's such a great an insight to hear your thoughts on it and the balance between the technical stuff and a little bit of creative license and your view on what it should like. And it's also very cool. So, yeah, I'd love to chat to many more hours with you, but we will have to wrap it here. So before we go though, Paul.

Yeah, what's next for. For Paul then? What's any, any cool new projects you've got coming up? Anything you want to. To talk about?

Paul: 01:36:24

Good. That's a good question.

Garry: 01:36:27

Without revealing anything that you're not supposed to reveal, of course.

Adam: 01:36:31

Oh, Brian Blessed. Tell us about.

Garry: 01:36:33

Oh, Brian Blessed. Yeah.

Paul: 01:36:35

Oh, Brian Blessed.

Adam: 01:36:36

Okay, well, Brian Blessed story.

Paul: 01:36:39

Yeah, well, I don't know. Yeah.

was held in Stoke on Trent in: 1998

s and early: 2000

Did the AV for them. And because the AV was so successful, Diane Gies asked us to do Deliverance 98. So we did, and we made nice recordings of those. And.

And those recordings have been used on the set. And for one of the panels, I had to mic up Gareth Thomas. And Gareth Thomas famously didn't wear personal microphones at conventions.

His view was, I don't need a microphone. And Diane said to me, good luck with getting a microphone on Gareth. But I thought, well, we're doing this for posterity.

You know, someone's going to want to make use of this footage in the future. I didn't realize it would be me. And so everybody went on stage. Gareth goes on stage without a microphone, but holding a pint of beer.

And so I went up to him and I said to him, I've got a microphone on it. And he said to me, he said, why do I need a microphone? I'm a proper actor.

And if you watch that panel, you can see me going up to him, trying to get the microphone on him. And I actually said to him, that's all well and good, but we're all professionals here, aren't we? And they can't hear you at the back. And he agreed.

He put a microphone on and he didn't argue about putting a microphone on for the rest of the weekend, which was great. So he was a little bit difficult about it, but actually when he sat down with his pint and had a conversation, he didn't have to project.

And it was much better because if he had, it would have made it sound look and sound dreadful. So it was much, much better. Anyway, a couple of weeks later, we were doing the Panopticon Convention, Dr.

Convention in Coventry, and Brian Blessed appeared and he came up to be mic'd up before he went on. And he looked a bit nervous, which is very unusual for Brian Blessed.

And I said to him, brian, we're going to put two microphones on you because it means that you can project but you don't need to shout. And we're going to put one on one side and one on the other so that we can keep, because we know you're going to project a bit.

So it means we can keep the level of each microphone slightly lower. And when you turn your head, you're not going to go off mic, and we don't have to ride the faders. He said, oh, that sounds like a good idea.

So anyway, I was micing up and I said to him, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I had to mic up Gareth Thomas. And I told him the story that, you know, Gareth didn't want the. Want to wear a microphone. He said, you know, what do I need a microphone for?

I'm a proper actor. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And Brian said, oh, yeah, you know, some of these actors can be a little bit. They can be a bit precious, can't they, Paul?

Can't they? Yes, clearly they can, Brian. So anyway, he went on stage, you know, he went on. He said, gordon's alive. And everyone cheered and.

And then he shouted up, can you. Can you hear me? Paul shouted down, yes. And. And then he said, you're not gonna. He said to the audience, oh, you're not gonna believe it.

They've asked me to put on two microphones in case I turn my head, you know, and they all laughed and. And they said, what do I need a microphone for? I'm a proper actor. And you.

And you realize in that moment, and I've been doing it a long time, I work with actors all the time that, you know, he was nervous because he didn't know how he was going to start his. His. His gig or whatever the show. And. And the inspiration how he was going to kick it off came from that conversation of attaching a microphone.

And the person to thank for that is Gareth Thomas.

Garry: 01:42:10

Gareth Thomas.

Adam: 01:42:11

That's brilliant.

Paul: 01:42:12

There you go.

Garry: 01:42:13

What a great story. Fantastic. I imagine you've got hundreds of those stories, Paul, over a pint, you could probably.

Paul: 01:42:19

Almost certainly.

Garry: 01:42:20

Yeah.

Paul: 01:42:21

Well, we'll have to track you down.

Adam: 01:42:23

To the next BFI pool if you'll have to grab you at the bar and get you a drink.

Paul: 01:42:27

Yeah, Old Chin Wag well can do that. And also talking about the BFI for the screening that we.

The Blake's 7 screen that we did, one of the big bugbears that we've had is that we do these remastered versions, but when they're, you know, for the Doctor who's. When they're screened, their projector can't cope with interlaced video.

Garry: 01:42:50

Oh, I knew it. I knew. I knew something was. Was up with that.

Adam: 01:42:55

Yeah.

Paul: 01:42:56

So they can't cope with interlaced video. And so we did season 25 presentation, and afterwards I said to Justin at the bf, I said, look, we can't.

When we do Blake's 7, we can't screen if you can't do interactivity. We can't screen a Remastered version 250 minute episodes like we have today with, with this.

With the Happiness Patrol effectively filmized of our restoration. Doesn't make any sense. So I said, I'm going to Deliver, instead of 50i files, I'm going to deliver 50p files of Blake.

Garry: 01:43:36

Oh, nice.

Paul: 01:43:37

And I'll do you. I'll send you a test to make sure it works. And so that's what we did. So rather than deliver the 50 I, it's very simple to do.

It does make the file sizes double the size, but we screen 50p files so that the studio material looked like proper studio and that they can screen. And so they looked absolutely cracking on the screen at the bfi. Finally.

Garry: 01:44:08

Yeah, I can imagine. I've said that before at a couple of Doctor who.

Adam: 01:44:11

You have, actually. Well, I didn't know what you were talking about.

Garry: 01:44:13

Yeah, well, I've said you can, you can obviously tell that it's had some work done to it. You can tell that. But something's not quite right with the picture. It just doesn't. Something's off with it. Glad you said that, Paul.

Adam: 01:44:28

Yeah, Garry and I were at the screening where they, where we. We of the Happiness Patrol, where they sent the wrong file and we didn't get to see the special edition.

Paul: 01:44:36

Yeah, I was there as well. It was a bit embarrassing that. Yeah. But the, but the, the most recent one, which was the Season seven spearhead. Season seven spearhead.

All the content is progressive, so we didn't need to deliver 50p files for that. Except I did because the trailer has got interlaced clips in.

Garry: 01:45:06

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Paul: 01:45:09

So the trailer was delivered 50p and actually, if you look at it on YouTube, actually, that is a 50p file. So you will see this, the video stuff.

So the, the vidfired Silurians and all of that kind of stuff are not interlaced, but they are, they are at the right frame rate.

Garry: 01:45:32

Oh, wow.

Paul: 01:45:33

You know, interlacing is kind of a bit redundant. I mean, it's part of the Blu Ray spec, so we have to deliver interlace. But in an ideal world, we deliver everything at 50p now. Yeah.

Rather than 50i because we don't, you know, I mean, with, with Blake's 7, all the restorations that we. I actually restore, not in hd, I do the basic restoration in standard definition.

Because the last thing you want to do is to upscale all the noise and all the dirt and all the crap before you and then get rid of it. You don't want to do it that way. You want to get rid of it before you do the upscales.

So you clean it up to make the SD look really, really good and then you upscale that and that works brilliantly. But because DaVinci resolve is so poor at exporting, in fact it's impossible to export an uncompressed interlaced file in SD from DaVinci Resolve.

So I export it as 50p, having deinterlaced it. And then I work on then that that is what is get gets played out and upscaled to 10, 80, 50i. So it's.

But that seems to work really well and thinking of it in those, in that way, understanding how this, how the scaler works so that because we're using a hardware scaler, we're not using software scaling that also stops artifacts creeping in. Because software scaling, you know, how good is the software? There's only one decent software scaler in my view.

It's made by Grass Valley and it's what we used to make all the 60i versions of Doctor who for America. It's what we used on Monty Python's Flying Circus when I looked after that.

Because originally, for example, Monty Python Network wanted to keep the costs down and they wanted one universal. Yeah, they wanted one universal format. So they were going to do everything 60i so it would be compatible.

Because 60i is compatible in the UK on Blu Ray players and you can have a region 260 iDisk and it's obviously compatible for the US and US was a big market, but you can't, you can't do a ground at restoration at 50i and not let people see it. So. So anyway, the scalar that we're using is what we, is what we, we used for.

It's what we use on Doctor who, It's what we use on Monty Python's Flying Circus. We've used it on Blake now and I've also used it on. I did all the Doctor who series one to four. The new Blu Ray set.

Oh yes, I did all the scaling for that, the new HD graphics, all of that. And we're using the same scaler for that as well. There's one other thing as well.

getting the look as it was in: 1978

Have A look at the end credits of the way back.

Garry: 01:49:37

The end credits?

Paul: 01:49:38

Yeah, yeah. Because the end credits are telejector slides shot, change live to the music in a gallery session.

That's how it was done, and that's how all the episodes were done. They didn't edit each graphic in later. It's all done live in a gallery session.

And the background shot that the captions are against, it's actually a live camera move. So Michael Bryant has directed the cameraman to move the camera across a piece of artwork in the studio that they've got.

And the music is played, and they change the slides against the music all the way down, and then cut to the end caption. And all of that is done in one chunk. And it had to be done that way because you need to cut down the. The editing time. You know, you want to.

You know, it's only the end credits, so you want it, what, that one chunk of video to be plunked in.

And if you look, watch carefully on the original version, the cameraman, as he gets towards the end, because he's doing his move as directed by Michael, he's clearly realized he's going to run out of space shot. So he's got a little wobble at the end and then a kind of a slight speed up and a kind of a. Some uncertainty in his camera work.

And I didn't do the end credits. Steve Broster had the difficult task of recreating all of the credits exactly as they were done at the time.

He did Monty Python's Flying Circus for me, and he also did the new Doctor who stuff. And he's done another project for me which I can't talk about, not Doctor who or Blake's 7. And I said to him, okay, here's the Poison chalice.

Those camera moves, you need to have the new HD graphics on those same camera moves. So we had to export all of the frames to create a clean background. One clean background.

And then reproduce the move to match the cameraman's dodgy moves.

Adam: 01:52:25

So fascinating. So.

Paul: 01:52:27

And he's had. But also, the thing is, they're all different. All the episodes are different. So he had to do it for all 13 episodes.

Adam: 01:52:36

Oh, wow.

Paul: 01:52:37

Had to create that new clean background.

Garry: 01:52:39

Yeah.

Paul: 01:52:40

Which had to look exactly the same using the same. And also the dodgy moves, which you did brilliantly.

Adam: 01:52:47

I had no idea they were made like that.

Paul: 01:52:49

Same.

Garry: 01:52:50

No clue. Yeah.

Adam: 01:52:51

No.

Paul: 01:52:52

Yeah.

Garry: 01:52:53

Crikey.

Paul: 01:52:53

Noses.

Garry: 01:52:54

That's. That's a chunk of work, isn't it? Yeah.

Paul: 01:52:57

Yeah. So. So that's that's the. That's the level of detail that we went into to make it. To make. To reproduce those strange anomalies of the time.

Garry: 01:53:13

Well, thank God that these sort of projects has people on board like yourself, Paul, who have obviously got buckets of experience with just.

Just being in the industry for so many years, I think, and having an appreciation for the artistic side of things along with the technical side of things, where you can take on a project like this and just have complete. Although it's a bit of a new venture in some respects, you know, a complete understanding of.

Of how these things should look and how they should work and. And a love for the source material. So.

Paul: 01:53:48

Yeah, but, yeah, but I think, I think. I think it helps. I'm a director as well, because I'm looking at. Looking at it from the director's perspective. So.

And you know, and also speaking to directors like Graham Harper, when we did Caves of Andrazani for Doctor who, I said to him, the opening sequence of this, we've got the film and we can. We can sort out now that horrible judder between the film and the. And the Locked off. And he said, oh, God, would you please.

And of course the purists are saying, oh, we want it to be as it was, but the director is saying for something like that, oh, come on, please sort it out. You know, if only we could have done that at the time. And, and so I'm looking at it from those terms.

You don't want to, you know, something like that. You would. You would put right. Michael Bryant might say, oh, come on, Paul, don't. You don't need to go to that level of detail for the end credits.

My view is that that tell. That tells you about a lot about how it was made. I mean, it's obvious there in the. If you look at it, examine it, it's obvious how it was done.

You know, if people want to kind of look at this in the future, you need to give them some help. You know, the new effects are for the. What a lot of people are going to watch because it's brought it up to date and it looks.

All looks lovely, but the episodes as broadcast, we should try and clean it up and make it look as good as possible, but for that moment, not for this moment.

Garry: 01:55:30

Yeah.

And that's applicable to myself, who, when we started this project, Adam insisted that I watch the episodes as they were broadcast without the new effects to begin with.

Paul: 01:55:43

Yeah.

Garry: 01:55:45

To experience, you know, to get back to the originality of the show as much as possible. But. So I have gone back afterwards after I've watched these episodes. I've gone back and checked out some scenes with the new effects and so on.

But yeah, so that kind of thing is very much applicable to myself and other fans who want to watch it in that original but cleaned up state. Yeah, yeah.

Adam: 01:56:09

And I just want to add as a.

Somebody loves this show with a passion, it warms my heart to see Blake's 7 getting this amount of attention and care and I think that is the thing you, you care about the restoration you're doing. So it really. Yeah, it's very important to me as someone who loves this show to see Blake's 7 getting this treatment.

Garry: 01:56:29

Yeah, yeah, agreed.

Paul: 01:56:31

No, it's. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's good. It's. I'm really pleased with it and you know, and if the, if there are no complaints from the fans, then it's a.

That's a big plus, isn't it? You know, of course, yes.

Adam: 01:56:44

Well, we've not seen, especially in this day and age.

Garry: 01:56:46

Yeah, we've not seen any complaints, Paul, or, or anything. So a success project, I would say, and a big thumbs up.

Adam: 01:56:53

So bring on series two.

Garry: 01:56:56

Hopefully we'll get some more, some more Blake's 7 stuff. Right, Paul? It's been such a fascinating chat and we've dived into so much.

I'm 100% sure that our listeners are going to get in contact and say, guys, you need to do more of these, these deep dives into this stuff. And it's, it's been very, very cool.

So, Paul Venice, thank you so much for your time and, and your insight into this stuff and we will hopefully have you back on in the future to talk about more, more great stuff like this. So thank you very much, Paul.

Paul: 01:57:28

Lovely. Enjoyed it.

Garry: 01:57:35

There you go. That was our interview with Paul Vanezis and what a cool guy. Paul is a.

You can tell that he loves his work, loves all of that technology side of things. And he's obviously a very talented all round TV guy, does a lot of producing.

If you go onto his website or his IMDb page, there'll be links in the show notes to his stuff. You can, you can. He's just done so much work out in the field in studio stuff.

He's done all the things but this particular thread to his bow, which is the picture restoration and visual cleanup and all that stuff. You can tell he loves that. And we had some fun geeking out on the technology side of things and all that.

So as I said at the beginning, hope to Get Paul back on later in the year and we can chat about if his process changed for series two, what the source material was like, etc. So we'll get the lowdown on all that. That was our final episode.

Now for our first season, it's been amazing to kick off our new podcast and get through series one with your listening. Thank you so much for all of your comments over on the socials. It's been awesome to chat with you over there.

We've met so many cool people, chatted to so many of you. It's very, very cool. So thank you so much for A listening to the podcast in the first place and B for connecting with us.

And also those of you that have left very kind words with your reviews on things like Apple podcasts and Spotify, podchaser.com, those sorts of things. Thank you so much. It means a lot for your ratings as well. And yeah, that was our kickoff, our journey into Blake's 7.

We will be back later on this year after series B or Series 2 has landed with the the new Blu Ray collection.

We will pick that up, we will start watching it and we'll come back and give you our thoughts and reviews on all the episodes and hopefully some really cool bonus material as well. So as always, make sure you are following or subscribing to Federation Strike in your fave podcast app.

That way you won't miss announcements and notifications for new content as it lands.

You can also connect with us as I said over on the socials, there are links in the show notes to our Blue sky and our X accounts or just do a search for at Blake7 podcast and come and chat with us about all things Blake7. We won't completely disappear between now and our next season. We'll still be online chatting all things Blake's 7.

So come and connect over there and as I said, if you want to give us a rating and review, if you like the podcast, you can do that in Apple podcasts or Spotify podchaser.com all those sorts of things that would be very much appreciated. So until next time, thank you again so much for sticking with us throughout series one and we've absolutely loved it. We can't wait to get back.

Honestly, we are itching to pick up Series two, get that watched and start chatting about that. So we'll be back. So until then, take care of yourselves, stay safe and we will see you next time on Federation Strike, a journey through Blake's 7.