VCR alert
 

This weekend the recently new Decades sub-channel on lots of your cable and off-air systems will be running episodes of Dark Shadows from the 60's. They ran them in BW last weekend from Saturday at 1pm to Monday morning at 7am in a marathon. This weekend they move to the color versions. Same time frame. Check your local listing for times.

These weekends only barely touched the 1250 or so episodes of the soap. What great fun to have them back. Many episodes were directed by one of the first female directors in television. One Lela Swift under the tutelage of Worthington Minor, the producer of all of the great CBS live shows of the 50's. Lela passed just a month ago at the age of 96. As a longtime television director, I have the greatest respect for female directors. They see things differently than male directors and they should be celebrated and studied for their vision.

The show was recorded at ABC 16 on W53rd St in NYC. The show recorded ahead for two weeks while ABC refitted the studio for color. Not sure of the color compliment at that studio. It was recently the home of the Wendy Williams syndicated talker.

I never knew, they made that many episodes!
Back in the day, I was never that much of a TV watcher, even though I was repairing TV's, part time.
I watch Decades a lot for the historical content. :thmbsp:

Figures... closest outlet is 100 miles from me. :gigglemad

I hope it's coming across the airwaves better than here (KTVT Ch 11.2).
When I watched a little last night the audio was about a second out of sync to the video. Pretty annoying.

I'm really looking forward to the Johnny Carson ~ Tonight Show starting in January
on Antenna tv ! That will be a VCR Alert for me !

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I'm pretty sure Dark Shadows was originally entirely shot in color. The reason there are black and white episodes is due to the original tapes being erased and reused leaving only black and white kinescope copies remaining. The earliest episodes are all kinescope then as the show progresses and color videotape copies are found color episodes start intermittently showing up. There is one episode that is missing out of the entire series because the videotape went missing immediately after it was broadcast. I believe there is an audio recording of it combined with still images that was created to fill in this missing episode. I've seen the whole series all the way through at least 3 times.

Yep looking forward to Johnny too! Seems I read it won't be "The Tonight Show" though because NBC owns the name, just be "Johnny Carson".

http://antennatv.tv/wp-content/uploa...rson-Slide.png

When they developed the ATSC digital TV standard, one thing they forgot to attend to was getting the video and sound lip-synched. :thumbsdn:

I had a 2008 Vizio LCD set with an adjustment for sync'ing the sound. Only local subchannels (Me, Grit, etc) via cable seemed to need it. Regular cable and local non-sub channel network TV had perfect sync.

I've noticed that poor lip sync is not uncommon in DTV reception, and had noticed it on digital cable and Internet video streaming as well, but I've never seen it anywhere near as bad as a second off -at least not since the 1977 NYC blackout, when networks tried to patch things to work which way they could. That night saw delays of several seconds and some audio with multiple echoes.

As for Dark Shadows - I guess I was totally mistaken. I thought it came from Associated Rediffusion and got its own unique "look" from the necessary 405/25/+ to 525/30/- standards conversion.

Neither my wife or I had ever seen Dark Shadows, and the recent marathon has just had her shaking her head! She can't believe that such a low-budget show existed. What I saw of it looked pretty neat.

Apparently GetTV is trying to keep up with Antenna TV and is adding the Merv Griffin show to their schedule.

According to Wikipedia...

"Originally, it was aired in black-and-white, but the show went into color starting with the August 14, 1967 installment transmission."

I've also read that at first ABC only had one color VTR and Dark Shadows had to share it with ABC News, but I can't confirm any of that. It was posted on YouTube under some of the Dark Shadows bloopers. They said the reason so many mistakes made it into the show was because they only had the equipment for a limited time and couldn't do many retakes. If you haven't seen those bloopers, they're worth watching. The one where David Selby rips a sword from the wall and the other sword comes crashing down on a glass lamp is priceless.

My nearest Decades station is several hundred miles away in New Bern, so no dice for me. I saw it off and on when it was on SciFi many years ago. I watched the show when it was originally aired after I came home from school, but only from 1969 on, after we got a new color TV with an outside rotating antenna and we could finally pick up UHF. The local ABC station didn't air Dark Shadows, so it was like watching something forbidden! My sister and I were hooked and I especially remember the shows with Kate Jackson as Daphne.

When me & the Wife go from the living room to the bed room, and often finish some
tv show. Often I turn on the bedroom set before turning off the living room set.
I have noticed that there is a very noticeable echo. And if you switch channels
and them go back to the original channel, you can change the echo, it changes delay, or
one set may lead, than after a retune the other set may lead. Both sets are using the
zenith/Insignia OTA tuners, separate tuner for each set.

I can't tell if there is much of a video delay, I assume it's processing time, and when
the unit sync's with the incoming signal, decodes and sends it to the tv, the signal
must be buffered locally to a small degree....

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Hey they can call it the "Fig Newton Hour" for all I care.... It's "Johnny Carson ! "

Did you see the American Masters PBS did on him.... 2 hours pretty good !
I always liked staying up to see him.... I kinda hope Antenna TV puts him
in at the 10 ~ 11 PM Time slot..... Hell I bet he can even beat out Kimmel...
I know he can easily smoke the ones currently on CBS & NBC....

I assume the Carson family owns all the material, and I'm happy they are
letting it up from the salt mines and giving it some air time....

So Thank You
Carson Family !
We all Miss Johnny !

:)


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Yes dark shadows started in monochrome because of budget and lack of colour cameras. After it went to Colour all true outside scenes shot on film vanished and everything was in studio and everything on tape .........the black and white videotapes do look nice and the colour nice too.