The hardware fitted is an old-style Vision digitiser card (with only one bank of memory) and the Vision24 software to run it. The process is fairly slow (it takes around forty five seconds to digitise a single picture, in colour, on a RiscPC). We are held up firstly by the speed of access to the old hardware, and secondly because the hardware is merely a framestore. The actual conversion of the video signal to a usable picture is performed entirely in software.
That said, I simply connected the digitiser to a spare SCART socket on the back of my satellite decoder, and clicked the mouse for each image I liked. In realtime, as the programme was being broadcast.
The images were recorded full size, but due to only having one memory bank, every line was
duplicated to fill in the missing field.
Then, using ChangeFSI, the images were converted to half size. This took care of the doubled
lines, while still staying in 32 thousand colours.
The images you see for everything, except Touched by an Angel and Buffy episode 4.02, were created totally within the RISC OS environment, taken from a live broadcast!
You may notice some slight horizontal interference in the picture (like the picture is comprised
of lines which don't totally match). This is due to the picture having been 'scrambled' with
VideoCrypt. It's just something I've become used to.
The original (broadcasted) picture looks like...
If you're interested, the picture is the airplane landing in front of the house at the end of the movie "Forever Young". That's what was on, as I was writing this... :-)
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