David Attenborough's Animals of the British Country Side (1990)

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11 Oct

Written by SkinnyV

Continuing my quest to collect and preserve everything David Attenborough, I present you Animals of the British Countryside - Land Mammals, which is not only my first (but not last) PAL tape transfer, but my first transfer made with the aid of VHS-Decode.

For those of you who might be unaware what is VHS-Decode, it is a new technique where you capture the RF flux signal directly from the VCR's head as opposed to a regular video capture of the video signal, and then you decode that capture using what can only be described as a software based VCR with TBC, bypassing most of your hardware VHS player. There was a single copy of this on the Internet Archive, but the image quality was very bad, so I tracked down a copy of my own and decided to use it as a test subject for this new and exciting VHS transfer technique. I did the my usual de-interlacing, colour tweaking and light digital noise reduction afterward, and I must say that I am quite pleased with how it turned out considering the source material! The sometime shaky image is part of the original footage, as it seem it was shot on 16mm and then edited and transferred to VHS tape back in the 90's.

As for the video, this is a little known documentary with Sir David Attenborough's narration that focuses on Britain's land mammals, specially compiled from the BBC Natural History Unit's superb wildlife film library in 1990. It is quite interesting and well made for those of you who enjoy that kind of thing and can be seen as a low budget, proto Wild Isles, with all the charm of old school wildlife documentaries.

    You can download the full high-resolution video of the tape by right-clicking on the link bellow and selecting "Save As"!