|
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.
|