Info about 1970's broadcast "look"?

[Mr D]

Hi folks,

I'm just getting into this as a hobby!

Could you please take a look at the youtube video linked below.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1833581946745914
(note and edit some months later: Unfortunately the original video has been deleted, so i've changed the link to another version on Facebook).

Can anyone tell me what cameras are being used?

How is the "green screen" effect achieved? I don't see any green screen in the long range shots. Perhaps some other technique?

Any other comments or observations about the gear and techniques used to create this "look"?

BTW, i appreciate that when this film was shot, they probably weren't going for a "look", it was probably just the best quality they could achieve, it's only with hindsight that we can appreciate it as a "look"!

Thanks in advance!

[Dave A]

In the day (1972) this was a blue screen effect called Chromakey. Green came later. It is a "keyhole" process. The talent camera...all of them...sees the band against blue. The side shots show no blue. The video switcher removes the blue and inserts the background with adjustments to make the blue trigger the sensitivity of the switcher to the shade and lighting of the blue. The whole production was done in the effect as you never see the blue screen though you can see the edges of the filled in screen on a few shots. It was 60's/70's video trickery until better digital effects came along.

[ppppenguin]

Chromakey, also known as Colour Separation Overlay (CSO) was traditionally done using a blue screen. In theory it could be done with any colour and these days it's usually green.

You shoot the performers against a blue (or green) backdrop. The electronics work out which bits of the scene are bue (or green) and substitute another picture in those areas.

The idea is simple, and dates back to the days of cine film but making it work well is difficult. You can often get a blue cast on the performer, or blue edging round the cutout and shadows usually look wrong. All these were overcome with more sophisticated circuitry, even back in the days of analogue processing.

Chromakey was more difficult if you only had the composite (PAL or NTSC) signal available. That gave a whole load of extra trouble and was widely disliked. Much better to use the RGB signals direct from the cameras.

It's all easier with a digital vision mixer. You've got adequately wideband colour difference signals available at all times. AFAIK green screen is still quite widely used.

Chromakey was often built into vision mixers (production switchers in US langauge). A common arrangement was to have a composite PAL or NTSC system with an auxilary RGB switcher to feed the chromakey circuit.

[Nite_City]

Good evening from Germany,

Been reading this forum with great interest for quite a while.
Now that I actually can contribute some insight I'll gladly join the conversation

The segment you posted is from the legendary German music show "Beat Club", produced by Radio Bremen (the smallest member station of Germany's public ARD network).

Briefly visible at the start of the video and at about 11:50, the cameras used are Bosch Fernseh KC4 P40 which is quite an interesting thing: Bosch Fernseh was one of the largest camera manufacturers in Europe with a legacy dating back to the 1930's and with an excellent reputation for their b/w cameras.
Unfortunately when color TV did arrive in Germany in 1967 they were stuck in the development of a 3 image orthicon camera which was a "dead end street".
In an act of desperation Bosch Fese hastily issued a modified version of the American General Electric PE 350 in order to have anything to offer to their European customers whom they were losing mainly to Philips.
(Of course when finally introduced in 1969, the 3 plumbicon KCU40 went on to become one of, if not THE color camera workhorse in continental europe in the 70's.)

Here you have some pics of this camera model:
http://www.fernsehmuseum.info/fese-kc-4p.html
The camera shown first two images on the right actually was one of Radio Bremen's. With the model being quite rare and Radio Bremen being so small there's a good chance it actually is one of the cameras used in the production of the Beat Club video.

As already stated the chromakey uses blue instead of green. You actually can see the blue screens in the "fish eye" shots at the beginning of the video and around 12:00.
An interesting observation are the crawling edges of the key layer - look at the stand of the overhead mic at 17:48 - which I tend to interpret as a cross-luminance ("dot crawl") effect. I thus assume that the whole effect production was done using a composite vision mixer.

So - getting back to the original question - what you see is the look of plumbicon cameras, combined with chroma keying, a nice touch of director Michael "Mike" Leckebusch's psychedelic trickery, coming to us on a clean 2" quad color video tape.

Kind regards,
Michèl

P.S. What you see is the actual tape of the session which later was inserted into the final show. Funny that Beat Club and it's successor Musikladen not only have all episodes intact on the program master tapes but even have production elements tapes still existing. Compare that to BBC's Top of the Pops (to make a mean comparison)

[Mr D]

Wow, many thanks for the amazing info!

This is a great jumping off point for further reading.

A few more questions:

What was this recording onto back in the day? Analog or some sort of early digital tape?

To what extent is that recording format responsible for the look of this film?

What are the chances of recreating this look today? I'm not interested in some modern emulation, i mean the actual same process as in 1972......

For example, those big broadcast cameras seem to be completely unobtainium these days, none for sale anywhere on the interwebs. Presumably they're only museum pieces nowadays. And i guess you'd need a room full of other ancillary equipment as well?!

[kf4rca]

At a station I worked at in the 70's we would chroma key ABC network behind the anchor as we were leaving the local news at 11:30 PM. To do this we had to genlock the entire plant to ABC.
When the ABC Wide World of Entertainment open came up, the camera operator would zoom the camera in over the anchor's shoulder and then ABC would be switched in direct. And then we exited genlock.
It really looked pretty cool as the WWE open was a field of shimmering stars.
Would probably be called "cheesy" today.

[Chip Chester]

Depending on your budget, of course...

A high-res LED wall can be chroma-key green for one shot, and instantly (via switcher GPI) go black or video image the next.

The green/black transition could be handled mechanically as well. Think large vertical blinds. Not as quick, though.

[Mr D]

Ok, so it would have been recorded on 2" quad video tape.

That ain't gonna happen:

2" Ampex Quad VTR for sale, $28,000

So i'm curious, to what extent does that recording format dictate the look?

Does that tape saturate like an analog audio tape, giving compression and distortion artifacts? Is that why the colours are so trippy and strong? Or is there only minimal colouration (like recording to analog audio tape with a low, conservative level)?

Sorry for all the questions, just keen to learn!

[Sandy G]

I thought the initial video in this thread-W/Curtis Mayfield from '72 looked really, really good... The colors weren't over saturated,didn't look like the "Gain" was turned up too high, it to me looked like whoever was the engineer on both ends really knew his stuff. I've often heard in the earlier days of color broadcasting getting Black people right was difficult, because there weren't that many initially, & you could have the infamous "Blue Banana" problem if you weren't careful. But by '72, that looked to be in the past. I DO remember that we went to the 1964-65 NYC World's Fair, & of course, I HAD to see my family on COLOR TV in the RCA exhibit, I was upset when my Dad's face was a nice shade of lime green sherbet, & me & my mom's faces were sort of yucky looking oatmeal.... But God only knew how long those TK-40s & CTC-16s had been running w/o breaks, too...

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Mr D

Ok, so it would have been recorded on 2" quad video tape.

That ain't gonna happen:

2" Ampex Quad VTR for sale, $28,000

So i'm curious, to what extent does that recording format dictate the look?

Does that tape saturate like an analog audio tape, giving compression and distortion artifacts? Is that why the colours are so trippy and strong? Or is there only minimal colouration (like recording to analog audio tape with a low, conservative level)?

Sorry for all the questions, just keen to learn!

The colors and frequency response are almost all from the cameras. 2" tape could add some noise, banding or moire, but that was greatly reduced over the years. A particularly large improvement was made early on by going from "low band" to "high band" recording. Some early tapes suffer from noticeable luminance edge ringing, especially if they are second generation or beyond.

Edit: I want to add that some U-Tube posts suffer from conversion from interlace to progressive formats or too-low bit rates, down-rezzing, etc., but none of that is obvious here.

Also questions: do we have any idea of the sequence of generations here?
Started on quad(?), as PAL (I believe so, I see cross color and cross luma effects)?
Was it transferred to another format at some time? What format (digital component)? With what gear?
What was the final format and hardware/software before it was transferred to MPEG or whatever is posted on U-Tube?

Despite all these possibilities, it seems like the look is a transparent reproduction of the cameras of the time (although the conversion to digital with high-quality gear may be giving a better picture than a regular PAL receiver would have done).

[Nite_City]

You're correct about the auxilliary equipment.
The camera is only part of the complete camera chain. You also need the Camera Control Unit (CCU) for these vintage cameras. Otherwise the camera head is more or less a pretty decoration...

By the way: Far more interesting IMHO are the earlier b/w episodes of Beat Club. Not only due to the lineup, but also due to the fact that the electronic video effects already were used in the b/w era - with black used as the key layer!
Random examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILm5mLqjNQw or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui0yziHnO4o or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhHPv9P4JxY

Kind regards,
Michèl

[Adlershof]

Originally Posted by Nite_City

the cameras used are Bosch Fernseh KC4 P40

Which did not stay for long. It seems that by the mid-seventies they were all gone, replaced by KCK which then stayed well into the nineties.

Originally Posted by Nite_City

Unfortunately when color TV did arrive in Germany in 1967 they were stuck in the development of a 3 image orthicon camera which was a "dead end street".

However, some sources really exaggerate things when stating that it was a completely foolish idea to develop a colour camera with Orthicon tubes at all. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF_9wRVnazQ (The poor results on the 1964-1965 exhibit mentioned above came from a Vidicon camera.)

It was almost 30 years ago when I saw an old American programme and was very much surprised: Uh, it's in colour and has Orthicon halos?! Of course this was on TV and there was no chance to ever have heard of the RCA TK-41...

It became a dead end when Philips had developed the Plumbicon tube. Other camera manufacturers realized very quickly that it made any further attempts with Orthicons and classic antimonium trisulfate Vidicons obsolete. Perhaps this took Fernseh GmbH a bit longer.

Originally Posted by Nite_City

In an act of desperation Bosch Fese hastily issued a modified version of the American General Electric PE 350 in order to have anything to offer to their European customers whom they were losing mainly to Philips.

The desperation was related to the launch of West German colour TV in 1967: Their IO prototypes had been rejected (probably unmanageable registration was the main reason), and so LDK-3 captured the famous pressing of the fake button https://youtu.be/qWQuYRtNTpI?t=103 (see the film footage at 5:50 herein).

Has anyone outside Germany purchased these Fernseh-branded GE cameras? I have never seen them in footage/pictures from any other country.

Originally Posted by Nite_City

(Of course when finally introduced in 1969, the 3 plumbicon KCU40 went on to become one of, if not THE color camera workhorse in continental europe in the 70's.)

This may be a bit exaggerated when looking beyond Germany (in this case both parts of it). Some KCU 40 have been purchased by at least one Dutch broadcasting organization, some also went to the USSR (after they at Darmstadt were pretty surprised to receive an invitation for tender from Moscow); are other users in continental Europe known? And here only referring to the KCU 40, not the later KCK.

One small operation in the UK had them, too, and you will find a bad dissing of these cameras from there. For such things like an overcast November sky blowing out and even producing comet tails when panning...

I think it had been mentioned here before that also a 525 lines version had some success in the USA?

Originally Posted by Nite_City

P.S. What you see

Not anymore, the uploader has hidden his video from the public in the meantime...

But here's another KC-4P classic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN1GEiO1vmI

Originally Posted by Nite_City

Compare that to BBC's Top of the Pops (to make a mean comparison)

Such a comparison with Beat Club is indeed a mean one.
https://youtu.be/6T47NWZJAK8?t=149

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Adlershof

...
However, some sources really exaggerate things when stating that it was a completely foolish idea to develop a colour camera with Orthicon tubes at all. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF_9wRVnazQ (The poor results on the 1964-1965 exhibit mentioned above came from a Vidicon camera.)
[/url]

That clip shows the TK-41 quality, but unfortunately also shows the edge ringing you could get with quad tape (look at the right edge of the black trousers, for example).

---

I do not know of anyone besides Sandy who has reported bad color at the RCA exhibit in New York. The little bit of surviving tape looks excellent.
The cameras were all TK41 image orthicon, and, although I don't know for a fact, may have been the later version with prism blocks instead thin dichroic mirrors, plus less noisy solid state video preamps.

Even the "see yourself" camera at the RCA exhibit was a TK-41.

http://nywf64.com/rca09.shtml

They definitely were not vidicon cameras. The only vidicon live cameras RCA ever made apparently went only to a few military operations and universities (hospital surgery rooms, microsope cameras, and copy-stand uses for displaying maps and such), and the color TV exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. They were so light hungry and had such strong motion smear that no one would consider them for studio use.

[old_tv_nut]

Just to emphasize the sensitivity problems with the vidicon camera:
The minimum studio light level suggested was 2000 foot candles (over 21,000 lux); while the recommended level for the earliest TK-41s was 400 foot candles (over 4300 lux).

Approximate values for comparison:
Direct sunlight 100,000 lux
Open shade 10,000 lux
Overcast 1000 lux
Recommended for desk work, kitchens 300-500 lux

[Mr D]

Unfortunately the original video has been deleted, so i changed the link in the first post to link to another version on Facebook.