Digitising images from the first tests of HDTV in Europe: The 1992 Summer Olympic Games

This paper discusses the digitisation project launched by the International Olympic Committee’s Audiovisual Heritage team, with technical support from the French Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), to digitally preserve a rare-format collection of tapes produced during the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games. What makes this collection unique is the fact that the D1 tapes are recorded in 1250/50 HDTV standard, the first analogue high-definition television standard developed in Europe, but one that was never formally adopted at European level. This rendered the task of digitising the collection almost impossible, given the lack of video tape recorders for such a format and, in particular, the lack of technicians with the required know-how. Before exploring the technical details of the digitisation process, the paper briefly presents the origin of the recordings, outlines the chronology of the 1250/50 HDTV standard’s development and explains how the Olympic Games were chosen as one of the testing grounds for this new technology. The paper then provides a technical description of the design, implementation and effectiveness of the workflow developed by the INA to digitise these legacy carriers, using obsolete recorders in conjunction with modern tools to reconstruct the experimental high-definition system.