The Video Rescue strategy involved playing each side of the two Domesday Discs straight through and recording what was happening on the DVD Recorder.

The DVD Recorder is capable of capturing 25 frames per second, exactly the same as the number of frames per second recorded on the Domesday Discs.

Tens of thousands of photographs are stored on the Domesday Discs as single frames so it was important that I could record all the frames. I found that the DVD Recorder could do this in real-time so it was a question of inserting the laserdisc and pressing record on the Recorder.

I used a separate DVD disc for each side of the Domesday discs, four in all, and I made two recordings onto each disc for each side of the discs.

The first recording was on the highest quality setting, straight through from start to finish.

The second recording was on a slighly lower quality setting (in order to fit both recordings on the same disc). In fact, the playback quality appears to be identical so I can't tell the different. The second recording was made with the LV-ROM player frame count running, as shown in the picture above.

The idea behind this was so that I could be able to extract any given frame from the recording by matching up the high quality recording with the copy showing the frame count.

Four DVDs and 16GB later and I have a full copy of all the frames on all four sides of the Domesday Discs.

I used the recording made of side B of the National Disc to extract 293 pictures from the "Images of the 1980s" film sequence, which you can see here.

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