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#1
05-07-2019, 04:08 PM
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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)
Last edited by Nite_City; 05-07-2019 at 04:22 PM. 
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#2
05-07-2019, 04:28 PM
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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?!
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#3
04-08-2021, 08:03 AM
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#4
10-03-2019, 07:06 PM
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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. Quote:
Has anyone outside Germany purchased these Fernseh-branded GE cameras? I have never seen them in footage/pictures from any other country. Quote:
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? Quote:
But here's another KC-4P classic  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN1GEiO1vmI Quote:
https://youtu.be/6T47NWZJAK8?t=149
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#5
10-03-2019, 08:40 PM
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--- 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. .jpg) 
Last edited by old_tv_nut; 10-03-2019 at 08:48 PM.
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#6
04-07-2021, 10:50 AM
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Obviously, CBS and ABC weren't too keen on funding NBC via RCA... Not surprisingly, the GE cameras seemed to be duds. GE was weird with product quality even back then..
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