Disc 2 Bealville - Tunnel 2 - Monolith - Caliente (April 1995)

THE IAN COCKCROFT COLLECTION
NORTH AMERICAN RAILROADS

Between the years 1992 & 1996, Ian Cockcroft made an annual visit to the US in order to record the railroads on video. The exception was 1993 when, in fact, he made two trips, one in May and another in November. After his fist visit in 1992, he decided to upgrade his recording equipment for any subsequent trips.

In 2009 Ian asked me if I may be able to transfer his video collection onto DVDs. If my memory serves me correctly, these were mostly, if not exclusively recorded on Hi8 video tapes. The 1992 tapes may be an exception. His collection amounted to approximately 100 hours of recordings.

These were what one might describe as 'raw' recordings, with no editing having taken place. Also, as the age of the tapes varied from between 17 to 13 years old, some degradation had already begun to take place in parts.

Moving forward to 2021, I had pondered for some time about the possibility of making an MP4 version of these recordings and subsequently began looking at my copy of the original DVDs. It was then that I found that virtually without exception, they would only play for a few minutes before freezing. As I understand that computer DVD players tend to be less forgiving than those more normally connected to a TV, I tried the discs on my main DVD player and found that although they would play, almost every one would freeze at one point, usually around 20-50 minutes into playing. Subsequently, they would then play through.

If I wanted to make MP4 versions I was going to need a reliable DVD copy. The only way I could achieve this was to make a copy of the original disc onto the hard-drive portion of my TV recorder. That would then be burnt onto a fresh disc which would then play on my computer. Using WinX software I could then create an MP4 version.

Having got to the stage of creating an MP4 file, I could now do some basic editing using Windows Movie Maker. This has enabled me to remove an awful lot of the degraded elements. Sometimes this has resulted in me having to insert a soft transition where, ideally, I wouldn't have wanted to. However, I think it preferable to leaving in a bad section. At times this has not proven possible and there are some sections, especially at the start, where there may be a couple of minutes of what I would best describe as 'rolling interference' at the bottom of the image. Similarly, if a section of interference coincides with a voice-over explanation from Ian, then I have left that section intact.

The original DVD size is 720 x 576, which creates some stretching of the image. I have had to save as 640 x 480 when converting to MP4, which isn't particularly large. Hopefully, this will not spoil your enjoyment.

Steve Williams. April 2021