Sunday, September 12, 2010

Probably The Ugliest Test Card In The World

When I drew my recreation of the IBA electronic test-card ETP-1 in Macromedia Flash, I only captioned it with the large IBA caption.  As I only needed the card to recreate an HTV start-up sequence, I never bothered adding the two best known captions that appeared on the card - for Channel Four and S4C.

IBA ETP1 recreated in Macromedia Flash 8

This always annoyed me, so whilst I was listening to a podcast this morning I finally decided to finish it off. I used Inkscape to draw the lettering - I'll export it as an EPS file for import into Macromedia Flash at a later date.

Beautiful calligraphic script

If you enlarge the image below, you will see that letter is designed on a 10 x 10 pixel grid, with 2 pixel leading between each letter.

Snap to Grid and Clone Object are your friends

Now all I need to is some KPM tracks by Keith Mansfield and I'm back in the early 80s again.

2 comments:

wbhist said...

I was wondering if any ETP-1 recreations with the "NTL" were to be forthcoming . . .

On a sidebar . . . there is now a set of recreations being done for U.S. test patterns, even with the various slide fadings and film chain/slide scanner calibrations being accounted for . . . let's say with your UK testcard recreations, you've provided some inspiration . . .

Anonymous said...

Certainly right about the 'Ugliest TC' Kecske. But the music played on Ch4/S4C definately made up for it. Superb library stuff.

Would love to see the 'ETP1' branded with either CH4 or S4C on it.

Great blog, only just come across it. Cheers.