Color Broadcast - Michigan State vs. Iowa (10/25/1969)
 

A little late in the game for "early color," but recently uploaded to YT is some extensive TK-41 footage from an ABC color broadcast recorded to quad at WLS in Chicago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS0G70l0idk

Repeating my comment on YouTube, FWIW:

This seems almost too good for TK-41s. No overscanned black/ multicolor areas in the corners; registration close to perfect. I see a little horizontal non-linearity on the left edge, and I think that gives it away as TK-41. I suspect the original was noisier, but the digital coding here is removing some or most of it (I note some coding artifacts on the grass).
EDIT: also wanted to mention the edge ringing on the quad tape.

It's also interesting to note the limited camera placement and the style of narration compared to today.

The color looks good. It was 1969. Production value not so good.

3:34 into this video, the earliest color recording I’ve seen. Mary Martin as Peter Pan. From NBC. Wonder if this is a kinescope recording. https://youtu.be/zUCnrpFQ-JI

Video tape, not color kinescope. There was a monochrome kinescope recording of the first production (1955). The live presentation was repeated in 1956, and I believe that is the source of this color tape.

Apparently the 1955 and 1956 color telecasts of Peter Pan were preserved with monochrome kinescope and it was the 1960 broadcast first preserved on color tape. The 1960 version was rebroadcast in 1963, 1966 and 1973. NBC is fooling us by captioning the broadcast as 1955. I have recollections of seeing Peter Pan on monochrome TV either 1955 or 1956.

Also interesting to see some dual slow-mo action at the 30:45 mark

Thanks. I got my dates for earliest color tape mixed up.

I remember a decade or so ago, they found the whole videotape of the 7th game of the 1960 World Series where Bill Mazeroski hit his famous home run to give the Pittsburgh Pirates the win over the New York Yankees. It was in black and white but I remember the announcer said that NBC was broadcasting the game in color. BTW, Maseroski was born in Rush Run, Ohio just a few miles away from me.

The Pirates game was a 5 reel BW kinescope paid for by Bing Crosby, a minority owner of the club. He was in Paris and had the game recorded. Found in his estate. I think MLB may have run it once. Check me on this.

Back to the thread with a view of the sideline TK-41 for all to dissect. There are some shots that look like a hand held camera but 1969 is early for hand helds of any kind of color quality. Probably the sideline TK looking around.

I think you're right, it was kinescope recording. I do have the 1960 Pirates program for the World Series packed away somewhere. A side note, I also have the 1970 program when Three Rivers Stadium opened in Pittsburgh, my father took some of those pictures, he was one of the commercial/industrial photographers for the firm that was contracted by the Pirates. Earlier in his career, he worked with George Romero before he made Night of the Living Dead. BTW, after that game, my parents and aunt and uncle had a pair of Vespa motor scooters and since traffic was bad, it was the only way to get through traffic to make it home.

I downloaded the entire broadcast and spent a few quality hours looking at it as a retired broadcast director with a great sense of this history and a few too many hours working in the environment. Please excuse the diversion from the pure TK discovery to my observations on how ABC covered this game in my broadcast world.

I had to first count the cameras ABC sent to this show in Iowa. I count eight (8).

They are;

Sideline left 35. Used as game coverage. The usual wide shot.
Mid 50. Game camera. Same wide shot.
Mid 50. Tight shot camera. Also hero camera
Sideline right 25. Game camera on the same wide shot.
End zone. Kicks, clock, generic shots.
Sideline approx Right 35. Low on a platform. Does not appear to move.
2 field handhelds. One on each sideline. Camera unknown but not TK. Much warmer color. Thinking Philips.
Far sideline is seldom used. Pic below for help in ID.
One looking ok, the other with registration problems.
Replay. Seems to be a pair of Ampex HS-100 30 sec. disc recorders. More on this
web page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW7jvmoLQ7o

A massive sideline microphone. Sometimes a spiral series of tuned tubes in to a funnel to the pickup. I forget
manufacturer.

ABC had all the camera tools there to do coverage and was moving to the sophisticated coverage we know today. I was surprised to see the 35/50/25 yard line setup. I thought that came later. Single announcer that I cannot ID. A second color announcer is heard for a few seconds. Sounds like phone line audio. They mention three other regional games going on. I am wondering if the zoom lens optics were a bit tighter on the tubes to eliminate the usual corner problems.

Will correct if needed. And slave to two cats. Help find more of these ancient quads.

Thanks for spotting the handheld cams - that explains the out of register crowd closeups.

The hand-held camera looks like the early Ampex 2 tube unit (can't remember the model) with the big back pack. The reason the low 35 yard line camera doesn't move is that the sidelines are so tight, it's impossible to get behind the bench. The 35 yard line cameras were on a porch outside each end of the press box. The 50 yard line camera was in the announce booth. On the Eyes of a Generation page, Bobby talked about ABC buying a special run of TK41's. They were apparently placed in two 6 camera mobile units.

Good sleuthing work!

Better text below

alespn got it. ABC bought Ampex BC-100 cameras in 1967 for sports and we are seeing one. It is a two tube effort with a backpack. One backpack was for live video via cable. The other option was a microwave xmtr option with batteries. But the best part is the two tube operation. It was a L/G tube and a R/B tube which was pushed by a field-sequential spinning disc with R/B filters. It's 1952 again. The R/B signal went to a delay line then to be re-inserted with the L/G. First via an optical disc recorder then upgraded to a giant quartz crystal delay in a huge cabinet. The internet can explain this better than me. The Ampex brochure makes no mention of spinning discs. This may explain some of the RGB stutters in the above photo. Goldmark must have been laughing.

The Ampex sales sheet;
https://www.tvcameramuseum.org/pdfs/ampex/bc100broc.pdf

A group about half-way down;
https://groups.io/g/OldVTRS/topic/30...,0,0,0,3054694

Today's games really need to upgrade to 8k cameras - enough of this harsh picture quality with standard 2/3" native pixel-count camera sensors already!

That's immaterial. Today's quality is caused by intentionally degrading the picture with grossly, amazingly, too few bits. ATSC is 19 megabits/sec which is more or less adequate, but they are using fewer than 6 megabits/sec. Even static pictures look awful. Every channel , every subchannel, cable, streamed, or over the air.

Not true fo streaming.
Sony Bravia Core: claimed up to 80 mbs.
Apple TV: 25 to 40 mbs.
Netflix: 15 to 25 mbs.

Individual streaming quality is dependent on the speed of WiFi used and the steaming service chosen and the program watched.

Anyways, sourcing from a 2k pixel sensor is off to a really bad start for "HD"
Anyone see the RWC games from Japan on NBC, sourced with 8k cameras!
-very smooth, pleasant 'low-fatigue' HD images!
Sony is falling behind on UHD broadcast cameras; Ikegami & Hitachi are forging ahead.
The NHK RWC games used Ikegami & Hitachi 8k cameras.

No I did not see those.

But NO program I have seen on NBC recently has been better than "passable",
and even that applies only to things like locally produced talking heads.

Any sports rates as "horribly bad, execrable", 0 on a scale of 1-10.

They are currently showing a trial. OTA the non-camera-created lettering looks reasonably good, not full HD quality, but edges don't look horribly
"overshaprened". On Comcast, edges are seriously oversharpened.
The peacock looks pretty good, just a little soft, from far away, but up close, shows level steps.

The camera material is poor but not truly bad ... say 3 or 4 on a scale of 1-10. Edges show terrible overenhancement. The lawyer's gray coat shows not the slightest bit of detail whatsoever. Slightly out of focus detail in mottled areas shows signs of sitting still with zero noise for say 1/3 second then there will be a step of a pixel in location or a step of a few levels of intensity. This is the same OTA and Comcast. The lawyer's hair is like that except worse.

They have now gone to one of those "victim" shows. Its a black guy with a bald pate. The detail on his face outside sharp high contrast edges is nil. The edges are hyperoversharpened. Computer generated text looks like its not real 1080i which NBC is supposed to be.

And this is in the absence of any serious movement at all.

None of this is in the league of a really good Blu-Ray movie.

A locally generated ad with ONLY computer generated large type looked excellent except for slighly unsharp edges.

"But NO program I have seen on NBC recently has been better than "passable",
and even that applies only to things like locally produced talking heads."

Not in my case. Example Tampa Bays NBC WFLA looks excellent. Local live news, NBC nightly news, Saturday Night Live, Live sporting events, etc are razor sharp. Because, A: Sony TV's B: roof antenna. I've compared it with cable and cable looks real bad. If you ever saw OTA TV from a roof antenna you would not go back to cable...

Our local ABC affiliate, WSB, only transmits at 720i. All of the others transmit at 1080i. The difference is noticeable OTA. Guess they figured just about everyone is using cable or U-verse and can't tell the difference anyway. I'm a little bit surprised as WSB used to be the technology leader in Atlanta.

I can see a noticeable improvement in OTA picture quality from my roof antenna and looks very good. We now have 4K OTA from Phoenix stations. (Not yet available, but soon.) Abandoned cable 26 years ago because of picture quality. Been with Direct TV ever since. There have been issues with satellite such as compression, could see it when they did it and pixelization in the early 2000’s. That’s been fixed and I’m good with the picture quality. Streaming in 4K HDR from my platforms looks excellent. I’ve heard fiber, if configured all the way to home output is the best “wired” solution. I’ve not seen fiber. Physical BluRay 4K HDR is the best IMO.

take a peek, set y/tube res to highest, nice state of the art cameras!

Do you mean 720P? ABC decided a long time ago that 720P was better for high-motion sports than 1080i, although the resolution is noticeably reduced for non-action scenes. As a result, many of their affiliates went to 720p as their in-house format. Many early HDTVs did not handle format switches smoothly (don't know the situation now), plus there is difficulty in handling varying formats within a station. The result is that most or all stations convert incoming material to their base format and all switching/mixing and final emission is done in that format.

I have a Sony TV. I've also tried RGB from two old ATSC to RGB boxers,
one Motorola, one Accurian. They all look identical.

I have an outdoor antenna.
Looking at the signal on a spectrum analyzer shows that no station has any problem with multipath ... which the Motorola box does not like, while the
Sony and the Accurian can handle it. After all, it IS digital, which either works
perfectly or breaks up badly.

The problem is the quality of signal transmitted. Period. Too few bits. It does not matter the quality of the camera unless its a toy.

I should add that when digital OTA first came on, some programs, even sports, were truly excellent. That's before the providers decided that customers don't care about quality.

"Content is king" is an old adage. Remember when people were happy to bootleg 3rd-generation VHS copies of Star Wars?

I do remember although not bootlegged. Had a Sony U-Matic prior to VHS and Beta. Content for home viewing was scarce, but one could record programs and watch later. :-)

I had one of those HDTV tuner cards for my PC back in the early 2000's and early HD, before all of the subchannels came along, was awesome. Even 720p channels back then easily trounce the 1080i OTA channels today.

Old TV Nut, you are correct. I misspoke. Our ABC affiliate is broadcasting in 720p. I went back this morning and checked all of the major Atlanta TV stations:

ABC: 720p
CBS: 1080i
PBS: 1080i
NBC: 1080i
Fox: 720p

OTA shows the difference. Cable shows virtually no difference at all.

All this time I'm thinking PBS is 720, like my local PBS (which has sacrificed HD bandwidth by squeezing in do-gooder channels, in a certain foreign tongue, that this hoped for target audience apparently totally ignores.)

Back at the beginning of DTV, ABC and Fox chose 720p because it was thought better for
sports. And back then, it was. There were three reasons: interlace artefacts per se,
the Kell factor of blurring used to reduce them, and the fact that nobody actually
transmitted 1920 resolution, the absolute max was 1440. This was implemented by
restricting the coefficients in MPEG.

At least around here, they are equally horrible.

Anyone else notice their local OTA PBS has been kicked down to 720?

...besides, any 'advantage' of 720 is now moot because right at this moment, sports broadcasts are being originated with 1080i PsF cameras, resulting in zero interlace motional artifacts!

Big issues. The network affiliates and their equipment (not trivial, as in Millions). Problem B: Cable and Satellite down-rezzing it even more. Sorry, reality applies.

Does the FCC even enforce standards anymore?