What color TV was really like back then...
 

A few days back, some of you had mentioned dollar DVD's. Last night, I found a bunch of them at Walmart for 88 cents. I grabbed several... some of them being black and white and some in color.

One of the color DVD's was The Lucy Show. Only being 88 cents, it was clear that they didn't remake the color on this particular show. Although I enjoyed the show, the color was absolutely awful! It made me realize that this is probably what watching color TV in the 50's and 60's was really like. The audio was pretty bad as well. My mother had told me in the past that color TV wasn't really that great during the 60's... now I realize what she was talking about.

Another example of this is in my old original Star Trek episodes on VHF that I bought back in the 80's. On the tape, the episode itself is pretty good as far as color is concerned. Following the episode, they show what was coming on next week. That part of it was pretty crappy... you could tell the color wasn't retouched. Looked kinda faded and blurry compared to the episode.

Just goes to show that there must be a lot of work involved in re-coloring these old shows that we see on television today. Makes me wonder if any people were ever disappointed with what color tv was like when they would spend so much money on a set.

If you want to experience what color was probably like back then, buying these dollar DVD's would be the way to experience it!

On a side note, this episode of Lucy involves her winning a bunch of prizes from a local department store. One of the prizes is a new color tv. They wheeled it in and it was a rectangular set. Not sure what brand it was... the layout of the front controls didn't look anything like the typical RCA or Zeniths of the time.

Hi Charlie:

There are probably a lot of people on this forum that can speak for early color tv better than I but I do remember it back to 1966 when we got our first color set. At the time the color seemed fine but of course we could only compare it to the black and white set that we had before. I do remember that we enjoyed the Kraft food commercials as they showed salads and things that had lots of color. I also remember that during football games and such the grass was nice and green on one shot and when they switched to another camera shot it was blue. We did a lot of adjusting the tint control!

Steve

Well to be fair, the original video may have deteriorated with age. But I remember all too well if the incoming signal wasn't perfect, the color picture looked like hell. Many a time I'd relent and turn the color off. We later installed a 30' tower with a rotor and a pre-amplified Winegard antenna. Made a huge difference in both the TV and FM reception.

Seems like a lot of the times the colors really weren't all that hot."Dragnet" for example, almost everything was an ugly shade of blue-green. The live shows were better, looked more lifelike, but the canned shows could be all over the map. Then, too, the early color sets didn't have all the color correction gizmos they have now. Some movies color was just plain awful. Everything was WAY too saturated, looked like the colors were painted on.-Sandy G.

One thing to note, switching from channel to channel on color programs could be totally different as far as tint goes. Transmitters then didnt have as good of toloerance for keeping the color difference signals in the proper phase like they do now.
An example, the zenith space command 600 has the feature to adjust hue. At that time, the hue control was a very muched used knob on the TV. This justified the development of the space command 600 with its hue control capability. Today, one who sees a SC600 thinks why even have hue adjust on the controller? TV transmitters today have such better circuits for error correction making a hue adjustment a one time adjustment on the TV.
The space command 600 remote lasted from 1965-1972. in 1973 The Space command 600ZX was introduced as the replacement and it did not have the hue adjusting capability. TV transmitters improved to the point (around 1973) that the critical hue adjustment from channel to channel was no longer an issue like it once was.

Not buying it....
 

Sorry, but to take an 88 cent dvd copy of a 40 year faded Lucy show and use that as the benchmark for early color is ludicrous. Even in the 50's a well set up color set receiving a live color program or even a film show displayed beautiful pictures. I will admit some of the early video tape color broadcasts were terrible looking, and some adjusting of color and tint controls from station to station was necessary, since many of the automatic color corrections we take for granted today were not available on the early receivers. But watching a filmed Bonanza episode in 1959 or a live Perry Como show in 1956 on your new color set was pretty awesome and very natural in living color.

I suspect a lot those $1 DVD's are made from worn out 16mm prints that would have been used for syndicated reruns originally

Star Trek, and most other 50's-60's shows, were shot on 35mm originally and the studio DVD sets look terrific in B&W or Color.

I think Color may have actually taken a turn for the worse in the late 60's early 70's when they started taping shows. Those early videos look crappy now, even on DVD.

All In The Family is one example I can think of right off.

Those dollar dvds ( I have some) are made from old
transfers to 3/4" tape of worn and faded 16MM syndication prints. They are not what it would
have looked like back then when they would have
broadcast a new 35MM print from an RCA film chain.
The Star Trek is a good example, the old VHS tapes
were mastered from 16MM syndication prints, the
new DVD releases were mastered from the original
35MM interpositives. Most movies are also mastered
from the interpositive. Current network film shows
are mastered from the camera negative transferred and
color corrected to digital tape for editing and then
broadcast.
I am a Telecine Colorist and do this everyday.

---

Charlie If you want to know what color tv was like in the 60s check out tv land on cable. The color on the old tv shows loooks the same as it did back then. I watched alot of them on my grand parents rca when i was a kid. They did have a big antenna on the house with a rotor. That set had a great picture even in b-w.

You know, I definately remember a turn for the worse in audio and video quality of the shows from the early to mid 70's. As mentioned, video tape was probably the culprit. But I also feel that the producers and engineers no longer cared about good audio too.

Not only is 35mm a good idea, it should be fine-grain 35mm. When we were experimenting with HD captures of 35mm for the FCC ACATS (Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Services), we had a short piece of "Murder She Wrote", and the film grain was annoying in HD. These days, CBS is demanding all filmed productions be in high-quality 35mm.

Also, not to be mean, but Angela L. needed more makeup in HD.

And a third thing - we found we couldn't use the clip because it wasn't framed for 16x9 ratio. There was one scene where the bad guy and Angela are talking, and we couldn't understand the gist of the conversation until we looked at the complete 4x3 frame, and the baddie was holding a gun, just below the bottom of the 16x9 cropped picture! The framing would allow showing either the gun or their heads, but not both!

I appear in the opening title sequence of some episodes of Murder She Wrote as a cop struggling with a prisoner as me and another cop escort him up a long series of steps in front of a supposed police station.

Put *that* in your crack pipe and smoke it!

As for sound quality on 70's variety shows....they all seemed to share the exact same sweetening (laughter, audience sounds, etc) and were horrendously overdone. There were always some cat-call whistles thrown in for further annoyance. Who recalls that?

Anthony

My Dad purchased our first color set from Hudson's in the early summer of 1969, It was a 19" RCA CTC-27 with matching stand.
I remember the color was just fine on it and not having to mess with the tint at all. I also remember our whole family watching the Apollo takeoff on that set as well as laugh in, the Lucy show and many others with excelent picture quality.

Very interesting thread. I'm personally trying to find out what live colour TV shows were like back in the 50s and the closest I've come to seeing is excerpts of the Dinah Shore Chevy Show from late 50s and early 60s and 1960 Howdy Doody Show on DVD.

Anyhow commenting on those so called 88 cent DVDs, yeah they must of been 16mm worn prints of those shows as over here in Australia on Pay TV on the Fox Classics channel we have pretty much all the Lucy Shows from B&W of the 50s to colour in the 60s and 70s and they all are in top notch quality!!! The Lucy Shows of the early 60s look fantastic, rich with colour :thmbsp: !!! Anyhow this might not be so related to the 88 cent DVDs but about nearly 5 years back I bought a 60s rock video compilation and the quality of the clips was absolutely shithouse :dammit: !!! I can understand that kinescope films don't look that good opposed to video but these clips are bloody at least 5th generation copies which makes me wonder how they get away with selling stuff like this? There was also CCR's "Down On The Corner" Ed Sullivan clip which was in colour video but was at least 5th generation as the picture is very blurred, and yet I've taped that 1969 Ed Sullivan Show off Fox Classics in top notch quality!!! From memory I think the company of this video is Scopetone films or something.

Anyhow with films being broadcasted, these days they'll be of pristine quality when broadcasted off Digital Beta opposed to the old days when broadcasted off a telecine because the films have been digitally restored and touched up and put to Digital Beta whereas back in the old days when the film prints were directly played off the telecine the scratches were all there as well as the grain and even the brightness/contrast looked bad in some of them. How I know this is I'm a vintage domestic videotape collector and have watched some films from Philips VCR format videocassettes from 1978/79 and the movies were very grainy, too much intensity or contrast and scratchy, one example being 1954 "War Of The Worlds" which I found on a 1978 recording. Compared to the films, the live television shows of that day were pristine, though with the smaller portable colour broadcast cameras used outdoors the quality varies which some shots the picture is a little blurry and the colour looks a bit out but the 70s were still the early days of colour portable cameras.

With the early years 50s and 60s, restored 35 mm prints of films colour/B&W will look pristine today, don't know how they looked off the telecine way back then but I assume a little more grainier, scratchier and maybe bad too much intensity/contrast but still good but not as good as today with the digital restoration on them.

Videotapes, quality varies on condition of the tape and maybe brand of tape that's used, I have the 1960 final Howdy Doody Show colour special on DVD and the quality looks fantastic in some areas but a bit blurry in others and maybe slightly grainy but looks fantastic for a colour tape that's survived nearly 45 years old :) !!! Anyhow looking at the few live colour excerpts and shows I have of the early era of colour, the quality of live shows can depend on the techo's camera adjustment, the Dinah Shore Chevy Show the colour looks a bit desaturated and chromium whilst that Howdy Doody Show the colours are really rich and same goes for the Andy Williams Show. A lot of the colour videotaped shows of the 60s I've seen are pretty much in pristine quality, the Ed Sullivan Shows I've taped off Fox Classics the pictures look fantastic on most of them.

Anyhow I use to think that in the 50s and 60s the quality of live television was of the quality of scratchy/grainy B&W kinescope films but learned a few years back that it wasn't the case.

Cheers
Troy

I was just reviewing the DVD of the Peter Pan special, comparing it on the restored '67 Magnavox I recently acquired on ebay and on the 64-inch rear projo. It now is apparent to me that they did some noise reduction in remastering, so the noise that remains seems to be more slowly changing than normal and lagging the camera moves as a kind of changing "dirty window". This tells me that the original was noisier than what I'm seeing. The motion threshold, however, is set such that moving objects do not smear. Other noticeable differences from current video: some 60-hz hum components in the video. Quad tape banding is remarkably NOT visible.

The main difference between the color rendition of the old Maggie and the new projo is the low percentage of DC restoration on the Maggie. - Makes dark scenes come up to gray, and bright scenes somewhat too saturated in the faces. The 100% DC restoration in the modern set makes the hum more visible in dark areas.

The only other vintage programs I've seen recently (Frank Sinatra and Nat "King" Cole, on PBS) had much more aggressive noise reduction resulting in pretty bad smearing of motion. How much noise comes from the image orthicon cameras and how much from the quad tape is hard to say, but if it's worse in the lowlights (as judged on a scope) it's from the camera, as the gamma correction blows up the lowlight noise.

So... haven't seen a source that could be said to fairly represent a live show of that era in all respects. Haven't seen the Howdy Doody special.

Get the HOWDY DOODY show. It's the best of all of them; makes that PETER PAN mastering look like black & white.

Oh, yeah. The dreaded *canned laughter*. Even shows like M*A*S*H had it! :thumbsdn:

Any idea where to buy the Howdy Doody program? - Amazon seems to list a bunch of old B&W ones, and some color that don't seem to match this description.

I can help you!

It's called "Clarabell Speaks" and is part of this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...v=glance&s=dvd

AKA "The Last Howdy Doody Episode".

So, go to Amazon and grab it! It even includes the "slate" and count down".

Oldtvnut,

Everything Steve Hoffman said. Plus a nice NBC Peacock opening at the top of the show. Being the last Howdy Doody show, have a box of Kleenex standing by. It gets emotional. The first 3 of the 4 episodes on the dvd are b&w copies of color broadcasts. The "Clarabell Speaks" is in knock your socks off videotaped color. There is some early chroma key shots that needed debugging.

-Steve

This Amazon review pretty much says it all!

-----------------------
An astounding treasure, & an unheralded landmark DVD!, February 24, 2001
Reviewer: Kevin Segura (N.W. USA) - See all my reviews

Thought lost for years after a fire wiped out their eastern storage facility, NBC (in connection with the good folks at Rhino) have given all of us who care passionately about preserving our televsion heritage an amazing treat-- they have reunited the two existing halves of the color videotape of the final Howdy Doody show (controlled for years by two separate parties) and released it **intact** to the home video market, as part of their 4-volume "Howdy Doody" DVD series. Make no mistake-- the other shows on the disc (culled from B&W film kinescope masters owned by the network) are fine programs in their own right, but **absolutely nothing** you see before will prepare you for the breathtaking feeling of being transported back in time by seeing Doodyville once again in "living color"!! All of your favorite characters (Howdy, Clarabell, and the vastly underrated Chief Thunderthud) are here, and they truly do come to life in this, their swan song episode. The hour-long special is beautifully written: by turns heartfelt and truly sentimental, but never mawkish; and even though the occasion is regrettable, there's no shortage of fun to be had on this program. And, as a final bonus, all of the original commercial ads have been included, along with the original "first version" NBC peacock opening, network ID's and network movie promos. No fan of classic television will be disappointed by this disc... it's quite simply one of the few "must-have" milestone DVDs to have come down the pike. Kudos to NBC & Rhino for doing this one exactly right!!!

Thanks for the link - ordering it right now!

reply
 

On the subject of old show pic quality, seems like a lot of 70s and 80s shows look absolutely horrible they with the process they used to videotape them. The show "Soap" comes to mind. Lots of shows from then that were on ABC and videotaped in particular. Real blurry and fuzzy. Maybe they always looked like that, or it's just lousy copies that they showed in reruns I remember.
I'm sure those old Lucy shows looked great before the color film faded into just different shades of brown and yellow and dark red. For those cheap tapes they are not going to spend a ton of $ restoring the color.
All in the Family probably suffered a lot because of the constant old 70's living room set it was shot in, everything darn in that house was brown.
One modern show that is always good for showing off color is Everybody Loves Raymond - the mom is ALWAYS wearing some flowery, color-saturated outfit.
On the topic of putting the Star Trek 35mm films into DVD form - do they still HAVE the film and what condition is it in? Negatives too? Just wondering if maybe by now the only thing left is tons of different generations of the tape transfers....Frenchy

Soap
 

Frenchy,

Interesting you should choose the show "Soap". I was the stage manager on the first 6 or so episodes. I can only say that many hours were spent lighting and taping that ground breaking series. I recall the show, which was taped at the KTLA videotape facillities in Hollywood, was looking really good as a finished product when first aired by ABC. Because of limited studio space, which included a live audience seating area, the large sets were moved into place on huge wheeled platforms. The lights were double and triple hung to accomodate the changing scenery. After the first 6 episodes were shot, the network moved production to another studio with larger stages to avoid the moving around of sets. I remained at KTLA, my employer at the time. The rest of the series was produced with different cameras, sound and tape equipment and crews.

-Steve

In almost every case it's just the substandard copies we see today that look like crap, not the original show. I'm old enough to remember back to the early 70s, and primetime network shows always looked new, clear and flawless. By contrast, daytime reruns and old movies on local stations always looked tired and old because they were being seen on 16mm film, a format commonly distributed at the time. I really don't understand why in this day and age we still have to put up with video transfers that are markedly inferior to the original masters.

Yes the original 35mm films exist for Star Trek, i believe they used the master interpositive (the first positive made from the cut negative, is printed on a negative
type film base). Most of the films from film shows still exist, usually the negative
a & b rolls, the interpositive and the air print as well as the many lower grade and
16MM prints used for later syndication. Thankfully they try to use the negatives or
interpositives these days for DVD release instead of the air prints or 16MM syndications
prints that were so commonly used in the past.

Same thing for old video taped shows, what was used in the past (and unfortunately
sometimes still today) were copies or dubs that were several generations down
from the master tape. The master tapes generally look stunning, for tape anyway.

Filmed shows in the 80's were many times transferred from the camera negative to one inch
broadcast video tape and edited on tape, the negative was never cut (or printed) So what they
are doing now is retransferring the negative to digital tape, often in hi-def, and
re-editing to match the original edit. A very slow, time consuming process, because
many edits have to be visually matched to the original. Cheers is an example of
a show that was recently re-done this way.

All filmed shows today are transferred directly from the camera negative to digital
and hi-def tape and edited on tape.

I have transferred hundreds of episodes of shows from the 50's thru the 90's and
and believe me, the difference between using the air print (or god forbid, the
syndication print) and the negative or interpositive is night and day. As for tape,
I have looked at two inch color master tapes from the 60's that are breathtaking
(except of course for some of the crude keys and effects) and then looked at the
same show on a 5th or 6th generation one inch or 3/4 inch syndication dub and
all that is left is a blurry mess.

I worked at a TV station in the mid-late 60s between semesters while in university.I remember the control room becoming crowded every time a Kraft Foods commercial was to be aired. Those early Kraft colour commercials when viewed on the highest quality monitors available then ( Conrac ) were visually superior to anything else we aired.

I remember about the WORST one had to be "Dark Shadows"-it was videotape, B/W the 1st couple seasons, when they did go to color, it was washed out & noisy, lots of drop outs, "burning" when they showed a candle or other intense light source, the whole production looked quite amatuerish & produced on sub-standard equipment. I liked it, but watched it about as much to see the production flubs as I did to see the story.-Sandy G.

I think the Kraft commercials benefited from the KISS principle - just trying to get the equipment adjusted for most accurate color, and lighted somewhat flatly to show the product clearly.

Similarly, some of the most consistently good color in Chicago has been the WGN baseball game coverage over the years - same principle - just try to show what's there with setup "by the book".

This is not to disparage good dramatic lighting, but the early cameras (not to mention receivers) had trouble with large dynamic range, making it tough to pull off.

By the way, I now have the recommended "Clarabell Speaks" Howdy doody DVD, and it's interesting to compare to current product. It does have well-saturated colors as mentioned in this forum - but it also shows most of the shortcomings of the image orthicon cameras and some video tape problems as well.

As for the cameras, well, they're as noisy as I remember. One of them has registration problems. There are a couple of shots that have a 30-Hz flicker in one upper corner or another of the picture (would not be visible on a roundie monitor or receiver). However, there is no black haloing around white objects, (or cyan haloing around bright red objects, which I have seen on image orthicon cameras in the past).

The show used a blue screen shot near the beginning that kept falling apart - hard to make a good chroma-key discrimination on a noisy signal, but this seemed to suffer more than it should have - I recall very good chroma-key effects used on many programs using image orthicon cameras.

As for video tape effects, all the saturated red objects have a strong FM carrier moire' pattern. However, there is no quad tape banding visible.

When I watch this on the '67 Magnavox, it puts its own deficiencies in the mix (mainly less than 100% DC restoration, plus the room light reflectance of the light-colored screen).

This is a good exercise to make you appreciate the quality of even cheap contemporary equipment - a mini-DV home camcorder and an ordinary comtemporaryTV surpass the quality in many ways.

Speaking of Chicago area and baseball.....my mother was a baseball fan when she was younger and she and a friend would go to the ballpark (can't recall which one) and end up getting to hang out in the air conditioned TV trailer to watch the game.

That may seem a little bit of a let down, to be so close to the park but instead watch the game on TV, but at the time this was a gigantic high tech treat, PLUS the fact that the trailer was air conditioned made it a no brainer. Am amazed she never witnessed any short circuits due to the technicians drooling on the equipment while gawking her and her friend! Hubba Hubba!

Anthony

Any old vintage video is Great
 

I bought some old TV shows such as milton berle and red skelton, the video on some showed age but carol channing singing Diamonds are a girls Best friend and others, what classics!! I'm grateful anyone produces new copies of old shows. I'm sure these are limited, maybe wont be made again. I'll go & check out Walmart!!

:yes: :yes: :banana: :banana: :lmao: :smoke:

I STILL wish I could conjure up a copy of Marlene Dietrich singing "Lili Marlene"-it was in color, but was very "funky" looking-kinda like a badly done kinescope, but in color. They cut back & forth between her & the orchestra, lots of streaking where the klieg lights shined on the instruments.-Sandy G.

for the most part early color programming coming from NBC was breathtaking, sure there were some programs on film that didn't look that good, but most of them were in the sixties when CBS and ABC got in the game. Show such as Bonanza and any of the live color shows on NBC would blow you away in by today's standards

A few time ago I found a V.H.S. casste with comecial from the '50's. But when I wanted to buy it I couldn't find it any longer in the shops. When I'll get me some money I'll buy it second-hand.

I had the dubious pleasure of seeing a VHS duplication facility many years ago that ran off a lot of the old shows for the cheapie market. I went there because they were selling off a lot of their "surplus" video equipment. One of the no-longer-needed items was a (then) top-of-the-line Merlinized 1" type C video recorder that they dubbed from. As the market soured, they fell on hard times and although they didn't go out of business, they switched to dubbing from 3/4" cassettes. Loss of resolution, huge increase in chroma noise, plus the added fun of a reel change or two in the middle of your movie! Fortunately a lot of their product was black and white.

I was a fairly undiscerning viewer as a kid, but I distinctly recall noticing the sometimes blatant banding from the 2" quad playback all the time on shows like Laugh-In and others of that era. I also recall noticing at an early age the wild highlight flares that occasionally appeared in the picture, well before I knew what an Image Orthicon was.

My kids may some day fondly recall today's outrageous lipsync issues with apparently asleep-at-the-wheel technicians having moved their lack of ability or concern into the digital domain.

Lipsync? One of the local affiliates has gotten terrible about this. Most nights my wife will watch both Wheel of Fortune & Jeopardy & you cannot get through both shows without the sync getting way off. Until recently I had never seen it that far off, in fact. I have also noticed, recently on that same station, that every commercial "pauses" at the end. I assume this is a digital thing. (I've seen the same thing on the cheap old computer cd of tv commericials I have, at the end of the commercial it will return to the front then pause) I don't notice this on the other local station. What the other station used to have, though I don't notice it anymore, was a defect that showed up during network station breaks. When the switch was thrown the picture would always roll vertically once, real quick. I do recall a 40th anniversary documentary they had 10 years ago & the original engineers were discussing things. It was pointed out that one piece of switchgear was homemade way back when & was still in use. So I often wonder if that was the cause of the "roll".

Bryan,

I am NOT an engineer (and I don't play one on TV) but I do know that most signal feeds are received through a device called a frame synchronizer, which allows the incoming signal to be in the proper karma with the local system. If the signal is lost, most frame syncs will simply repeat the last good frame of video until they detect a valid signal input again. Could be what you were seeing.

I also had an early digital video editing system (The infamous Video Toaster Flyer) which for reasons which still remain unknown to me and perhaps everyone else on the planet, liked to "stutter" every once in a while at scene transitions and toss a single frame of the *previous* shot up between the cut you actually were making. Even my current system, Apple's highly regarded Final Cut Pro occasionally decides to resurrect a frame from "elsehere" in the program and mysteriously put it back on the screen when you least expect it! Digital is great, no doubt about it, but it's brought its own brand of weirdness to the table.

Lipsync ain't necessarily someone asleep at the controls these days - Broadcasters are burning the midnight oil to find all the places it can go wrong these days and fix them. We have designed digital systems that are (almost) so complicated that no-one can understand them, at least not grasping all the details at once. It's gonna get better, but not instantaneously.