Oldest surviving color tape of entertainment show
 

It's the debut episode of Kraft Music Hall With Milton Berle from October 8, 1958. Berle's widow has kept the tape preserved, and David Crosthwait of DC Video has expertly restored it. It'll be screening at the Billy Wilder Theater near LA on the night of 2/24.

https://deadline.com/2024/02/oldest-...le-1235818725/

From an earlier thread on this site.

http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=276325

I hope they make it available outside of the screening through a streaming platform or disc release.
There's no way in hell I'll be in California anytime soon, if ever.

Personally I'd like to see the original unrestored on say an AVR-2 without the modern digital magic

About a month ago, it was being discussed on eyesofageneration Facebook group...

I wish I could find a Quadruplex machine....I ended up being given about 15 quad video tapes last fall and I'm curious what's on them/would like to have the first moving head VTR format to keep my other early VTRs company. (Slightly scared I'll end up having to move a fridge that weighs as much as a Volkswagen).

Hi to all,
Hi Electronic M,

contact this guy!

ETF Zoom monthly meeting, Jan 2024.
Broadcast Systems integrator John Turner (80), 50 years in Broadcast shows his collection of 1" VTRs, 15.000 sq/ft facility, all generations, all brands, from the 60s to HD.
The amount of "stuff" is staggering & most work, 3 Hours 34":

https://www.youtube.com/live/KaSBboz...ZptVvlhHKcnJ0A

Also has a bunch of 2" Quads, all brands.

His company: Turner Engineering inc. Mountain Lakes, NJ:
http://www.turnereng.com/

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

Yup mee too..... Digital is garbage no matter what people think......

I don't think they can project it as interlaced, so I hope they've digitized it through a TBC into a proper 60p with correct aspect ratio and plenty of bitrate.

I came across a digitization project lead by one of the nation's universities, and the clips they had online are in 30.00 fps progressive - not 29.97 fps interlaced or 59.94 fps progressive. I asked them whether these are just low-bitrate web files, and maybe they have properly converted files in their vault, possibly available for interested parties for a fee, and they responded that basically it is what it is. I was flabbergasted.

Another digitization project, MediaBurn, also has digitized early 1990s videos in 30p. So much for preservation.

Ignorance is bliss.

I still have a working Philips CDV-488 Laserdisc player and it beats my Sony BlueRay hands down even when viewed on a 64" Samsung plasma in composite mode with all the internal magic filters off. I also have a Sony BVH-2000 Type-C in my living room and a duplication master of Duran Duran Decade, nothing in our modern digital world comes close.

Our ears & eyes are analog.

There is something wrong with your setup or with your eyes.

Digital audio and video is only stored in digital form, it is delivered to our ears and eyes as sine waves. The needed math and engineering has been invented, designed and licked out by the early 1990s. There is no "digital sound", there are no square waves, because they would require infinite bandwidth. The only issue with digital is macroblocking caused by insufficient bitrate.

Average digital looks better than mediocre analog, premium analog looks better than average digital, and premium high resolution and bandwidth digital usually looks better than premium analog.... Trouble is most digital that most people consume is average at best... It's usually not given enough bandwidth to be free of artifacts.

DVtyro , Electronic M +1

I'll admit when digital TV first came out, I hated it. I was the low bitrate or crappy encoding at the time. Things came a long way. LCD TVs have a pretty decent picture now. I do still have a 27" tube TV in the bedroom though. Looks fine with my eyes closed! (I set a sleep timer!)

No offense taken here but I do have to ask if you've ever seen a real high bandwidth analog video and I'm not talking from a consumer format SVHS or ED-Beta, instead I'm referring to the likes of BetaSP, Type-C or Quad on a purely analog monitor like a Sony PVM2530.

I do have both Type-C and BetaSP and the best high-end monitor I can muster up is my Panasonic TAU series CT-34WX54 widescreen CRT so I'd like to invite you over for some popcorn to watch either some first generation BetaSP that I shot with a DXC-537 docked to a PVV-3 or a 2nd gen RF dup of either the first Bourne movie or a distro copy of the 1968 classic Bullitt on Type-C and you can bring your BluRay or DVD of the same and we can do the Pepsi Challenge in my living room. No sweetening or proc amps just raw composite from the analogs and HDMI from the BluRay in real time.

Exactly. Just for kicks I recorded some digital video to VHS and then digitized it back, you can see the comparison in my YouTube video. Twenty years ago we had MPEG-2 HD@ 15-18 Mbit/s, now our OTA HD dropped to as low as 5 Mbit/s and even 3.5 Mbit/s, it is garbage. There are tons of SD subchannels @ 2 Mbit/s, they look horrible too. Still, when you compare VHS copy with digital you can see how the edges are much better defined in digital, color does not bleed over edges, and static scenes look almost perfect. The quality of digital depends on bitrate, and the more detail and motion you have the more bitrate you need. Analog is different here, you get more or less the same results no matter fast or slow scene, but it is a known fact that the Japanese MUSE had chroma interlacing, so fast scenes looked less pretty. This is why most MUSE demos use slow to medium pans and tilts, very careful, with stabilized camera.

BetaSP is SD. The fact that you mention first generation reminds everyone that analog loses quality with each generation. Yes, BetaSP holds much better than Umatic or VHS, but it loses quality nevertheless. Digital does not lose quality when it is copied without editing, this is what everyone likes it for. This is why torrents are so great :)

34 inches? You got to be kidding. My computer monitor is 27 inches, it is not a gaming monitor, and I sit one foot away. On the other hand, my VHS captures look great on my smartphone :)

CRT is great for motion. Plasma is comparable. My main TV is a 50-inch Panasonic plasma, I wish I bought the Kuro when I had a chance. Early LCD TVs were crap for motion because of the ON/OFF character of the elements and low refresh rate, this is why I bought plasma back in 2006. But LCD TVs went a long way, and their 480 Hz or even 600 Hz refresh rate is good enough to portray smooth motion.

Digital also loses quality with each generation of compression and jitter, not as substantial as the consumer analog formats but there is a loss that's why its called "lossy compression". There are time when a SD looks far better than the HD and again this comes down to the overall detail, just because it has 1080 progressive lines doesn't mean each line is unique in the sense it wasn't sourced from a lower format and upconverted. Then we can get into things like 4:1:1 sub-sampling, bit error rates and the all important dithering from the low sampling be it 8-bit or the more common 10-bit. How about the compression artifacts like mosquito noise and dynamic pixelations? The modern displays are really good at hiding these things with their 3D filters and other DSP functions but when they're disabled the truth comes out, you can only make a pile of pixels look so good.

Yes 34 inches of 16:9 CRT that covers native unprocessed analog plus HDMI to 1080i due to the CRT itself. It will show you every flaw in that pretty digital image without shame, I have a screen cap from the first StarWars from the original Laserdisc (where Hon shoots first) but the videokarma server won't accept it due to the size. What it does show it the real quality of the image without the dithering or other digital compromises needed to keep the costs low for the consumer world. The image is very bright and dynamic, no highlight crushing or dithering and without the blockiness of the pixelation during the fast action scenes. Once again analog wins this round.

I specifically mentioned that I am talking about copying without editing or recompression - you can make a zillion of exact digital copies, whereas every analog copy is a new generation.

Visually lossless intermediate codecs have been used for the last two decades with great success for everything from home videos to big-screen movies. FX scenes in the original Blade Runner have seven exposures on the same strip of film, you can search for BTS comments about the loss of detail. Digital allows dozens of recompressions without visual loss. With modern storage solutions one can use lossless codecs to prevent data loss in the areas of the image that have not been changed.

In short, analog has nothing to show for it.

Why would I watch upconverted HD? I watch native HD.

60 Hz DV used 4:1:1 subsampling, it is a thirty-year old CONSUMER format, yet it is comparable to PROFESSIONAL analog Betacam SP. Notice, that the evaluation was done using the FIRST generation off a Rec. 601 source. Every new analog copy - even without editing - will make it worse. Broadcast HD has been using 4:2:2 @ 50 Mbit/s interframe from day one as the lowest acceptable format. Of course, nowadays the numbers went up in every metrics: resolution, bit depth, bit rate, full color, alpha channel, etc. Again, analog has nothing, it has been left behind in the dust.

Yes, these artifacts are caused by insufficient bitrate. Blame OTA TV, which has ruined television for everyone. It still looks better than analog NTSC. Analog HD needed 30 MHz to look good. The Japanese tried to squeeze it into 15, 12, 9 and even 6 MHz, but predictably it would look worse and worse. Analog HD in 6 MHz was not watchable, whereas H.266 is roughly 8 times more efficient than H.262, meaning you can have 8 great looking HD channels instead of one analog NTSC.

The only use of an interlaced CRT TV set is watching interlaced programs. Sadly, the Japanese dumped their 1125-line equipment onto the U.S. thirty years ago, but only because the U.S. had stopped manufacturing televison broadcast equipment by that point.

Star Wars is 24 fps. When shown on an interlaced TV set it is telecined. You don't see full vertical resolution, you see interline twitter, and you see shimmer from insufficient 50 Hz refresh rate. Have you tried to use a consumer-grade TV set as a computer monitor? The difference is striking, which is why computer monitors have used progscan since at least 1980s. There is LESS detail in the interlaced scan.

To see full movie resolution you need to remove the pulldown, converting it back into 24p, and display it as progressive. This is what modern TV sets do. This is what good TV sets did since the late 1980s, with built-in deinterlacer, with 100 Hz or 120 Hz refresh rate, with 16:9 screen. Such TV sets became popular in Europe, much less so in the U.S., because NTSC has stuck with 4:3 interlace. Since your TV set is 1080i only, you cannot enjoy the full resolution of BD movies. OTOH, it can do 480p, so provided that it can do IVTC correctly, you can enjoy DVDs as intended.

There is book smart then the reality of experience. Sadly I'm seeing a lot of "digital is always better" rhetoric here based on opinion than fact. Academics are no match for the reality of experience and these I have of 40 years of experience with. The reality is what you see on your fancy high-priced screen are little more than DSP enhanced figments. The movies like StarWars when released in 1977 (I was there at the theater for this) they were ALL shot at 24 FPS until the later episodes were done in CineAlta at a 24 FPS rate, this factually documented by Geoege Lucas himself. So to say that because my TV set is 1080i only I can't enjoy the full resolution of a BD doesn't hold any water, it is the number of scan lines NOT the interlacing that defines. The movies were transferred using a flying spot scanner BTW.
S-VGA was both interlaced and progressive depending on the scan rate and this was due to the horizontal sweep limitations and limitations of the RAMDAC of the day. There is just as much detail in interlace as there is in a full sweep being this is a function of bandwidth itself.
"The only use of an interlaced CRT TV set is watching interlaced programs." Once again false opinion. You just contradicted yourself with the later statement regarding the computer monitor. I can't speak for the remainder of the statement regarding the 1125 line format as Japan was doing their own thing and it ultimately failed.

"because NTSC has stuck with 4:3 interlace" what the??? 4:3 is the aspect ratio of the screen itself, divide the screen into 4 sections vertically and only 3 of them will fit one on top of the other, interlace is an odd/even field of 2:1 of equal number of scan lines one over the other. Because my CRT monitor is 1080i it CAN display the SAME bandwith and detail of your whiz-bang LCD or plasma with its DSP running in the background and look just as good and I CAN prove this without a doubt. The problem here is once again we are splitting hairs of opinion with the belief that one is "better" than the other. Digital has it's own set of issues and compromises just like analog has, the one difference here is digital has the technological advances to hide these flaws effectively making ice creme out of horse manure. In the real world we never see the real picture, everything is a compromise be it compression for transmission or storage space, raw costs and the buying public that for the most part judges by the cost on the bottom line.

Can't believe I'm seeing the interlace/progressive, analog/digital, original film vs. what's on your screen religious wars being rehashed. Both of you have correct and incorrect points.

The original digital TV tests showed plainly (but note, with tube pickup cameras and CRT displays) that 1080I had more visual resolution for still scenes (with the vertical resolution toned down to reduce twitter), while 720P was better for sports with high motion. You cannot say definitively one is always better than the other. The comparison is further affected by the introduction of solid state camera sensors (no smear) and different display technologies. But it never comes down to strictly "old good, new bad" or vice versa. It's a question of the whole system from glass to glass.

@Arc Tech 109, DV Tyro obviously meant 2:1 interlace, come off it!

Not withstanding all the above, yes, it is always interesting to see what is recovered nearest to the source, without any (possibly) noise reduction, introduction of artifacts, or whatever.

As a movie fan and consumer of A/V entertainment, one has to invest in the best possible delivery system and you don’t have to be wealthy to do so. Currently OLED soon to be surpassed by Micro LED and self emissive nano OLED is the best visual median.

Bit rate is key. BD and Apple TV currently have the highest bit rates. Sony has a proprietary system with high bit rate. OTA is slightly better than satellite for live video transmission.

720p vs 1080i is a wash, although 720p does not have interline twitter. I was talking about 1080p24 BD movie, which loses vertical resolution when watched on a 1080i monitor. Here, this is about DVDs, but the same is true regarding HD.

Of course it does, and of course you can't.

No, I don't. After the designers of computer consoles realized that interlacing sucks, they promptly switched to progscan. If you've tried using a computer with interlaced and progscan CRT monitor, you know the difference.

The U.S. stuck with NTSC until HDTV came along, at least for OTA. Europe tried other formats, in particular PALPlus, which supported 25p and 16:9. As early as the late 1980s brands like Nokia, Siemens and other started offering TV sets with 16:9, progscan, 100 Hz refresh rate, and built-in deinterlacer. Compared to the-old school PAL, this felt almost like HD. Fun fact, in the early 2000s Australia adopted 625p50 as HD format.

Digital IS better than analog. First generation analog can look great, given enough bandwidth, like the original MUSE HD, which needed 30 MHz. Even if you could afford a TV set or a VTR, with this bandwidth there were no hopes for broadcast.

Digital has better quality, requires less bandwidth to transmit (or bitrate to store, which is just the other side of the same coin), the devices are smaller, cheaper, and all around more democratic, and copies do not lose quality.

Digital vs analog is sort of like video vs film - until the 1970s film cameras were smaller, more dependable, portable, provided better image quality, etc. But as video developed, it moved farther and farther from film, which just could not miniaturize further, because the size of film roll was a given. Betacam spelt the end of Auricons and Eclairs. Similarly, DV spelt the end of analog Betacam, and there is no returning back as digital keeps on moving forward. The latest 4K and 8K CMOS sensors with global shutter fix the most glaring defect of modern digital cinematography, so film is finally dead.

I'm going to stick with my legacy formats which do include DigiBeta DVCPro HD and HDCam along with Type-C and BetaSP. If you want to push your agenda go for it, I'm done arguing with the inexperienced and/or misinformed.

"so film is finally dead."

Funny, I just shot 6 rolls of 120 Velvia last week.

I give Phil two thumbs up

I still shoot a Hasselblad and an Arri S16.

Speaking of which, any of you going to this event? I’m on the fence right now :/

Shooting film is fun, but few outliers do not reverse the global trend. I shoot VHS and DV myself, fully realizing that I am a freak.

I'm believe in general, the original format being showing in the original (high) quality hardware, is superior than ANY conversion to another format, be digital or analog. Case especially in point with games: some older games are made taking into account defects and virtues of CRT, for example.

For sure, bad conversions to new digital format are made everywhere, including some documentaries show in famous streaming platforms (some are good, some are so-so).

But showing a old analog tape converted to a different animal (eg. to a 4k OLED TV), will never be equal to same content displaying into a old CRT TV with all it's very different caracteristics: gamma/linearity differs, motion perceptions differs due to impulsive operation mode of CRT vs the sample-and-hold operation from a OLED, and perceptual object brightness derived from both caracteristics plus video response aberrations or not. And the CRT natively reproduces the interlaced content, without any "strange" conversion for the natively fixed progressive panels. And, the old content *maybe* can produced in equipment taking into account all difficulties from old CRT reproducers, this being different in newer display techs.

Maybe the keyword here will be "natively". In the end, the image ALWAYS will differs.

And, we will need to take into account the various conversions needed to display into a eg. 4k panel: de-interlace, upscale etc. The 4k panel will show all these errors (plus the low original resolution) without any mercy if magic filters are off.

And in the end it's the eyes of the beholder

Thanks for the measured response, Alex. Hence my original question, how they are going to show it? On a largest CRT they could find? On a bunch of small CRTs, mimicking a 1960s living room? Via a projector? There were interlaced projection TVs back then, but I wonder were there ones that could fill a large movie theater screen?

I guess, using a bunch of 17-20 inch TVs would be the best option to replicate how it looked like back then.

There were HD-CRT projectors that could work with screens of varying size...ISTR hearing about UHD models.

I watch all my HD content on a Sony native 1080i HDMI equipped HD-CRT set... there's NO difference in picture quality watching 1080 content between it and a 1080 LCD except that the LCD looks worse most of the time and approximately equal the rest.

Anything bigger than 40" is pointless unless you have several dozen people and a stupidly large room. Most people watch stuff alone or in groups under 6. If you're sitting so close you have to pan your eyes to see things in other parts of the screen your sitting WAY to close.

HDTV was designed to be viewed at about 3.5 times picture height, confirmed by viewing tests with untrained subjects. Farther away you lose some benefit of the resolution, closer there is no more detail to be gained.

I have a Sony KD-34XBR960 which displays nice HD images. It is no match to my 2018 LG OLED with 4K, HDR, DOLBY VISION/ATMOS capability.

A small apartment has a 12 foot wide wall, plenty of room to add a projector screen or large flat screen OLED panel less than an inch thick. I would argue that a CRT television takes up more room, especially a KD-34XBR960.

You want eye panning in your home to get the immersive feel you get when watching a movie in a commercial theater. That what a home theater is all about.

Not true at all! It is called an "immersive experience", ideally with more activity on the screen than you can take in at one physical position.

I sit about 84 inches from a 77-inch-diagonal display, and I used to have a 92-inch screen and projector viewed at the same distance. The 77 is a reasonable compromise between practicality and ideal viewing size/angle in my home.

FYI: DigiBeta presentation.

Somehow I had missed your post on my previous visit. This makes perfect sense. I expect that they were referring to full 1920x1080 HDTV rather than the mid-level 720p (1280x720) used by Fox, ABC, and some others.

Based on that, of course, then UHD/4K, with twice the resolution in both directions relative to 1920x1080 HDTV, will be ideal at 1.75 times the picture height, assuming that everything works in a linear way. I am probably sitting about two times the picture height away from my 77-inch-diagonal screen, so that is pretty close to ideal I think. And, yes, I can easily see the difference among 4K, 1080i/p, and 720p at this position.

Ah man!!

Interesting again (abotu the resolution x distance)... yes, makers can propose "immersive experience", and not all people can love it (maybe most will).
"Me" included for people not liking it very much: not a fan of panning too much the eyes for video content (cinema is not my cup of tea). Also, not a fan of seeing a 200" zoomed face in a screen...
For gamming, I use monitors.
When watching new content (eg. 4k series) with my wife, I use a 55" OLED TV at distance higher that the recommended, but not so high that negates all difference of 1080p to 4k.

Is a example of preference; not so common I admit.

I bet that at least for one characteritic the CRT TV will surpass the OLED one: is easy to perceive if one use CRT for certain things even today, like me for gaming.
I notice a strong lack of resolution when an object moves in the screen, eg. a actress face, when the image pans/scroll, like in a action movie (the blurring motion effect). If one watch this in a PC CRT progressive monitor, one can fix the sigh in her face, and continue to perceive all details, wihtout smearing or loss of resolution. When watchin even in a "120Hz" OLED, is almost uncomfortable the loss of resolution sensation with the scroll scene (the blurring effect).

But why this? Is not a "Hi-End" mumbo-jumbo, is easily explained:

As I mentioned some time before, this is dependent of the persistence of our human/organic vision versus the manner that the display makes the refresh rate. Cinema people learned this hard way, making the light shuttering (if I mentioned the correct word). With lack of shuttering, a 24p frame is very lacking in motion resolution.
Enter the CRT. People already studied cinema and played with green slow phosphours, then rapidly decided to make a system taht reproduce motion as smooth as a 30+30 frames (60Hz; or 50Hz for a lot of countries) can possibly reproduce. In the end, is ended with a 2ms phosphour persistence for not blurring the motion. Most important, the pixels DARKENS ater 2ms. This is equivalent to 500Hz! Of course, feed with 50/60Hz video...
Then, enters the plasma panel. This blinks, due to line manner that is refreshed. But same CRT principles applies.
LCD time! Especially for early ones, for not resulting in a dim image and/or very backlight leaking, is needed that the image are displayed for ALL time before a new image enters. This is called a sample-and-hold display. Static for static images. Excellent for photos or Excel. But, for our own eye's "refresh rate", is not so good. This provokes a strong blur sensation for motion content.
Then, a backlight shuttering is possible to apply, for emulating the cinema proposition. Yes, this works... but the blink sensation is higher, since the entire screen blinks. In contrast, the CRT blinks following the video scan, making less obtrusive. Hi-End LCD based panels (using LED lighting) can make this locally, reducing the blinking sensation.
Nowadays we have OLED. Problem is, TV's like the LG CX's only have full screen dimming. If you adjust for a 60Hz content, the blinking is annoying, and bright reduces a lot. Of course, yes, the motion issue is fully cured; you can follow objects in the screen, like the CRT. For intermediate adjustments, the image not results like even a CRT running at mere 60Hz for motion sensation.
Gamers having low budget can use a CRT monitor for not needing using a outrageous high refresh rate needed for modern monitors for blinking issue.

OLED can refresh very fast, so is far better than LCD ones for applying tecniques for mitigating blurring issues.

Some of it on: https://blurbusters.com/blur-busters...mple-and-hold/ (But what a processing power or Internet bandwidth for that...

Some people are very sensitive to that (me...)

Also, for people having CRT monitors, I invite to explore the various tests disponible at: https://www.testufo.com/ and prepare to be amazed with the displays differences!

LAST NOTE: this test perhaps are interesting to make with a TV having a early 15GP22 CRT; the red is knowed for having too much persistence. But is problematic to find a PC having a native 480i output (the test is ruined with video conversions, due to pixels resizing etc).

All of this, for a little amusing about this subject.

Thank you for all that..... This stuff is quite interesting!!