Info about 1970's broadcast "look"?

[ppppenguin]

When colour TV started in the US in the 1950s (ignoring the short-lived CBS sequential system) the options for cameras were severely limited. The only candidates were image orthicons and vidicons.

IO tubes were bulky but ultimately they worked well enough. The cameras were huge. Marconi made an experimental camera in the UK, nicknamed the "coffin camera" on account of its size.

Vidicons were compact but the inherent laggy response made televising moving objects impossible. You could never match the 3 tubes so you got very nasty effects. This could be minimised with lots of light, hence their use in telecine. Though in Europe with 25Hz systems we usually used flying spot and speeded up the film by 4%.

As Adlershof has said, Philips developed the Plumbicon in the 1960s. It was available in time for the first European colour services in the UK and Germany. The Plumbicon was a much imroved vidicon with lead oxide target. Hence the name. I think the first Plumbicon camera was the Philips PC60, a 3 tube design. In Europe this was rapidly followed by the Marconi Mk VII and then the EMI 2001. Both were 4 tube designs. They reckoned the extra complexity was worth the improvement in registration and grey scale. The Y channel was full bandwidth, the RGB channels could be reduced BW. I think this also improved sensitivity and reduced noise.

Later cameras basically took high frequency luminance from the green channel. That's a simplified description, but it gave the advantages of 4 tube cameras with the simplicity of 3 tube.

[julianburke]

The cameras in that video look like GE's.

[KentTeffeteller]

Which later became Harris/Gates

[nasadowsk]

Originally Posted by Adlershof

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

My understanding is that ABC (and CBS?) purchased plenty of the Norelco (Phillips in the US, to avoid trademark disputed with Philco) color cameras, and maybe NBC eventually did too. The EMI camera went to one affiliate in the midwest (it's a shame, they seemed to give nice pictures from what I've seen).

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..

[KentTeffeteller]

Yes, ABC loved the Norelco PC 70 cameras a lot. And bought many of them when ABC went color in 1965-1966. And CBS followed suit and bought some PC 70 cameras, to go with their RCA TK 41-C cameras and their old converted Field Sequential cameras which used the ChromaCoder. GE seemed to either be duds or too late to the color party going on. GE never was a major force in broadcast equipment, even in radio. RCA Broadcast was a much bigger company and you also had other major players in radio, like Western Electric, Collins Radio Company, Gates Radio Company to name some.

[KentTeffeteller]

Originally Posted by 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?!

No digital tape back then. Analog tape. In most cases, broadcast video was still 2" Quadruplex reel to reel tape, or 16mm film based. Those big broadcast cameras were never mass produced, TV studio equipment was also very, very expensive, as in several millions of $$$$ expensive, and the engineers who kept it operational, and the operators were very well paid people compared to most skilled professions.

[Opcom]

This is all very interesting as I have saved a chroma keyer and sync/burst generator pair. 1U high, the interesting part is that the color of the key can be varied over the whole spectrum to match the background. I sincerely hope the pot with the 3 taps at 120 degrees apart never goes bad!

[ppppenguin]

That special pot is probably a sine/cosine pot. Special and expensive. We certainly used them on chroma keyers etc at Michael Cox Electronics until the early 1980s. I may have a couple lurking in my spares box.