Talk:People's Century

A fact from People's Century appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 4 May 2005. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the composer Zbigniew Preisner wrote the title music for the monumental BBC documentary People's Century, which spans 26 parts?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2005/May.

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Untitled

I think that it was shown on the BBC for the first time a few years before 1999 - possibly 1996. --Garethhamilton 06:36, 3 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Playback speed

I think it is pretty notable that People's Century is one of the few, maybe the only documentary or documentary series where the silent film footage is exclusively played back at the actual recording speed, which especially in the early years varied greatly for different formats, although by the 1910s was pretty much standardized as 16fps (the later 24fps standard for talkies had mainly to do with the fact that the faster the playback speed, the better the sound reproduction). And yes, I'm well aware that during the silent era, most projectors were still hand-cranked (which, beside some early aesthetic uses of slo-mo on the side of directors, is what Kevin Brownlow's widely-quoted 1980 article Silent film: What was the right speed? makes a great deal of, notably at a time, 1980, when it was much more difficult and fault-prone to try and reproduce such low framerates in telecines to interlaced video), but that's a wholly different issue from recording speed.

In most other documentaries that I see, the footage is usually sped up to 24 or 25fps (a standard when transferring silent footage to video that arose during the 1950s in order to prevent brightness flicker when pointing a TV camera not synchronized with the projector at the projection screen for crude-off-the-wall transfers), which makes for silly, jerky motions and so on, whereas the mode employed by People's Century (by having every film frame remain for several video frames before the next, thus preventing any brightness flicker at all) therefore makes for a much more realistic, lifelike appearance.

Would you guys consider it notable enough for the article, and could it go in there just like that, or do you think it'd require a source? --2.240.253.1 (talk) 08:32, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]