It wants a slice of the speaker market, finally releasing its pot, toa market, finally releasing its pot, to a half yea rss after market, finally releasing its pot, to a half yearss after the amazon eco hit shelves. They have gone to the seems shape as the google home and is on eco, but it feels like a premium high end speaker. That is one of the key points. The amount of audio work that apple have done on this device means that its key selling point is as a speaker. It is impressive with a four inch upward facing wolf, each with its own amplifier, meaning it can push sounds in different directions. It sounds in different directions. It sounds exactly the same wherever you are in the room but what it doesnt do is give the opportunity to change the levels in any way. If i wanted to push the pace at right now there is no way of doing that. Even in a space this big sound really carries. What is interesting, is even at 100 volume when i cant hear myself inc, it will still recognise my voice. Pours. Just like that. Whereas apple seems to be going all end for sound quality, and is on this is to be focusing on different features. There are echoes spot is all about one thing, this screen. The latest from others and now has the ability to make video calls as well is doing the usual like play music, tell you the usual like play music, tell you the weather and boil your kettle if you have got a smart home setup. But really, it comes into its own as a very nice alarm clock. It is not function which makes these different, the price is another factor. While the echoes spot costs £119, the home pod will set you back £319. As is apple s way, it ties you into apple s walled garden, so instead of accessing streaming services via voice activation, it will only let you use apple music in this way. If you are what of the 70 million spot by subscribers, you have to get into your phone and use airplay as a workaround, turning this starts speaker Smart Speaker into a well, speaker. As people have been discovering, one that might leave a nasty mark on wooden top. Their response . Choose a Different Service or get a cloth and some elbow grease. 0ver service or get a cloth and some elbow grease. Over the next few weeks we are going to be talking to some of the gods of visual effects world. Last week we went behind the scenes of labour on 2049, this week is the turn of guardians of the galaxy volume two and we started by talking about its truly bonkers opening sequence. The beginning of the sequence features a title sequence the sequence features a title sequence where groot is dancing in the foreground, it doesnt cut. It is on the whole time he has got to hold the attention of viewers with his crazy little dance while what happens in the background never stops. So we have got Something Like 4000 frames of continuous action. We we re 4000 frames of continuous action. We were faced with the fact that the environment was completely spectacular and had to be created entirely digitally. Everything that we we re entirely digitally. Everything that we were inserting had to be reflected and that is multiple times the computation to compute the life of what is going on, also in the reflection and so everything ended up reflection and so everything ended up being done to mac or three times because of the surface of these worlds they were standing on the. We we re worlds they were standing on the. We were delighted to take on rocket return. Refer shade that we have got here, the muscle systems, all of these things had updated in three yea rs these things had updated in three years between the first guardians and this one. So we wanted to bring all of that into rocket, which meant rebuilding him from the ground up and yet, making sure that he is absolutely recognisable as the same character from the first movie. Every movie that we get involved with, we want to push the envelope, try something new with expectation that we are going to get there. 0ld old film stock is a treasure trove of Historical Information and in the case of old bbc programmes it can be a race against time to find any remaining copy and digitise it or risk losing it forever. But when Charles Lawson was given an old morecambe and wise episode, there was a problem. Archivists of the bbc and the British Film Institute had a look at the film and potentially judged it to be irrecoverable due to adva ntest decomposition and judged it to be irrecoverable due to advantest decomposition and they we re advantest decomposition and they were effectively, it was going to be thrown out. The pictures inside that film, they are still there are imprinted on the plastic, but they are all locked inside this permanently fused lock of immobile gunk, which sooner or later will just rot away. Sir charles brought the film to queen mary s universities dental department to use their x ray machine to see through the lump of decaying film the precious pictures within. Now they had another problem, the film was too big to be x rayed. They had another problem, the film was too big to be xrayed. The only thing you could do would cut the film into little pieces and scanned one piece at a time. I didnt expect them to say yes to cutting up the film, but given the alternative was watching this just rapidly disintegrate, he said ear, lets do it. We were using an infrared laser which generates a lot of heat, makes flames, at the best we had a little debt of damage at the edge of the frame, at worst we lost whole frame. Gram took 5000 images of each chunk as it rotated 360 degrees to make a 3d as it rotated 360 degrees to make a 3 d model and at that point they started to seep what was on the film for the first time. When you first start seeing those pictures of Eric Morecambe and his stereotypical pose, you cant help but smile and think yes, this is, ear, this has to be done. Once the scans were finished they had loads of data but they also had a new problem. The next difficult part was finding a way of digitally flattening out this warped object and digitally prising apart or the individual film warped object and digitally prising apart or the individualfilm layers within. We initially had some manual softwa re within. We initially had some Manual Software where i would physically go through each individual block and spend five or ten minutes flattening out one layer after the other but that was over several thousand frames, quite labour intensive. That was over several thousand frames, quite labourintensive. At this point, charles took the problem toa this point, charles took the problem to a outer scientist. What a human would do is, we would try to see where the image was within a cross section. The problem here is a computer algorithm cannot quite do that. What the algorithm does is it follows, predominantly, the layers of plastic were not the images, but the plastic. And then once we have the plastic. And then once we have the layer of plastic, we can move to the layer of plastic, we can move to the edge of that layer and read off the edge of that layer and read off the image. That process was repeated on all of the film, making short work of a task that would take a human thousands of hours of work. Now charles is beginning the next phase, turning these scarred pictures back into video. Thats the next problem. But for now, hes managed to put together a taster of what is on that film. And beautifully as well not a word out of sync i am not mining now. You realise of course that the paper has stopped . Then start it again how does he do it . Thats an impressive sight, isnt it . That is the king s library, assembled by king george iii in the second half of the 18th century. Four floors below my feet here at the British Library like its vast basements, which you can imagine also contain a lot of books. But they also contain six and a half million sound recordings which are now being digitised. But did you know. These are stored on all sorts of physical formats from delicate wax cylinders to grass discs, two short lived formats are many discs, remember those . There is a big push to digitise them and make them available online. Each of the 40 different types of storage format have unique challenges, they all need their own playback devices and some need a little tlc to coax the best quality sound from them. Something reasonably robust like a vinyl disc, to shake its debris out of its hiding place. We also have a more traditional type of record clea n more traditional type of record clean machines, the brush and vacuum arrangements that can produce some quite startling results when you start to clean off otherwise invisible gunk. The team also have a workshop to keep their collection of machines in tiptop condition is that so machines in tiptop condition is that so staff can work on as many concurrent transfers as possible and chip away at the millions of recordings. If you are faced with a tape that is in a real state, you ta ke tape that is in a real state, you take it off the shelf and it may be mouldy, need treatment or some sort of repair, doing that process, the active process of caring for, conserving and repairing can be such that it can bleak replayed, is hugely rewarding. Certainly challenging. But with only 296 of their collection digitised and only 15 years until some recordings become unsalvageable, it is a race against time to save as many as possible. Anyway, that is it for the short click this week s topic the full version is up on my player right now, we are on facebook and twitter. Aches were watching and we will see you soon. Thanks for watching. Hello and welcome to news watch. Coming up, give bbc news make too much of the allegations against 0xfa m much of the allegations against 0xfam staff, damaging Public Confidence in the whole Charity Sector . And we know the bbc has graphics for is whether service, so why did viewers get is retro look last saturday . First, wednesday brought a sense of sickening familiarity with the news ofa sickening familiarity with the news of a mass shooting at a high school in foreigner. A couple of hours laterjohn sobel described the scene for the news at ten. Yet again those terrifying pictures of children running for their lives as an active zooter is on the school premises, and running as fast as they can to try to get to safety. We understand that the shooter himself is now in custody, he is believed to be an 18 year old former student of the school in broward county. He is now under arrest. It emerged that 17 people had been killed and bbc news provided plenty more detail and reaction, too much for some viewers. There had also been harrowing news leading the six oclock bulletin earlier that evening, after a man had been found guilty of murdering his niece last summer. And the attempted murder of a second woman. Denise thought some of the description provided was inappropriate for an early evening broadcast
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