Kyle's Photography

Relive Historical Events Online
By Kyle Purves

If you're interested in history there is now a great new digital archive on the Internet where you can download newsreels from the past. You can relive history and see historical events in the making for most of the 20th century (1902 to 1970). Witness events like the Titantic leaving port for the last time, the proclamation of King George IV, see lots of WW II footage, the funeral of Lawrence of Arabia, etc. There is also great footage available showing Canada and New Brunswick: See the Royal Tour of Canada in 1951, the Queen at Campobello in 1967, President Roosevelt at his summer “cottage” on Campobello, Sardine fishing at Black's Harbour in 1954, and a whole lot more.

The best part of all is that it's being offered for free by British Pathe (www.britishpathe.com) of London England. This company is one of the oldest film companies in the world, founded in Paris in 1890 by Charles Pathe. The company's claim to fame comes from their short, 1-5 minute long-twice weekly, Pathe Gazette newsreels. These were later called the Pathetone weekly newsreels that were usually shown in theaters just before the movie.

The only catch is that the downloadable clips are of a somewhat low resolution and watermarked “FOR PREVIEW ONLY”. But you can download them onto your computer and keep for your personal archive. You do have the option of buying your favorite ones on videotape and DVD although the format used is the European PAL/Region 2 one and not the North American format (NTSC and Region 1). But you have the option of downloading the higher resolution version of your favorite clip onto your computer. These news clips aren't cheap, ones as short as 20 or 30 seconds can still cost you 10 pounds ($25 CDN) each. There is a flat rate in place for all the news clips regardless of length.

British Pathe started offering the majority of their digital news archive online in July of last year. By May of this year they plan on having all 3,500 hours of 35mm film (90,000 individual items, 75 years worth) of archival footage in the form of downloadable video clips available. 12 million historical JPG photo stills will also be offered for sale at their website by the spring of this year.

To find a specific video clip on their website they have a simple to use keyword search engine. To view the video all you have to do is register and have the free Windows Media 8 player installed on your computer. A fast connection to the Internet is also recommended as some of the clips can be up to 6-8 MB in size. There is no limit on the number of clips you can download from the site although things do slow down at peak times due to the popularity of the website.

According to British Pathe, simply getting the digital library online was no easy task. All the film had to be cleaned and reassembled for telecine to DigiBeta videotape. They then had to encode to MPEG-2 to make the “masters” from which the low and high-resolution formats were made. In all it took over three years to complete the transfer of 3,500 hours worth of 35mm film, making it the world's first film archive offered for download over the internet. This was all made possible by the lottery funded New Opportunities Fund which funded the development of the website and the encoding the old film library. The Daily Mail and General Trust Group own British Pathe. According to the company, sales of video clips through the website have far exceeded their expectations.