CBS color film about show of shows studio rehearsal.

[Popester]

CBS color film of early tv studio of ‘50’s era tv show toast of the town from studio 72 in NYC. Notice early shots of Ed Sullivan and others. Nice images of color studio cameras. From a YouTube post.

https://youtu.be/9CPx7JRgoqo

[old_tv_nut]

The unfortunate thing is that this film must have been very faded, and although they got the overall neutral tint OK in restoring it, they lost paractically all blues and yellows. The only strong colors seen are green and red. Even the camera viewfinders, which would have photographed bluish, look green.

The same people apparently did the restoration of a 1964-65 New York World's Fair film that recently popped up online, and has the same color palette, even though the shots are outdoors instead of in a studio.

[etype2]

Nice piece of history preserved on the film. The film introduction states the events were late Summer, 1954. Very short time between the abandonment of CBS’s field sequential system and their adoption of the RCA system.

[Telecolor 3007]

I took a fast look (without sound)
1st of all I wonder for what was that manual telephone exchange?
2nd, I wonder how fast they could make the transition between 2 cameras.
3rd, darn, I wonder how thouse cranes didn't crumbled with a camera and a operator on them. Because I read that "R.C.A." TK-41 cameras where really heavy.
Thanks anyway. I will post the link onto a Romanian forum too.

[Tom9589]

Telecolor 3007, you should have played it with the sound on. In the audio they explained that the "manual telephone exchange" was actually the patch panel for controlling the lights in the studio. Very advanced for its time.

[old_tv_nut]

The speed of switching between cameras was limited only by the reflexes of the technical director pushing a button.

[Telecolor 3007]

But it was noticed on the home screen?

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007

But it was noticed on the home screen?

Sorry, maybe I don't understand the question. What are you asking about, that was noticed or not noticed?

[Telecolor 3007]

If was noticed. Let's say they move from point A to point C, but between A and C, at point B you need to switch cameras. Did the audience from tv noticed there was a switch from camera 1 to camera 2 because of an short flip on the screen or they didn't noticed such thing?

[old_tv_nut]

By that time, switchers contained circuits that caused the switch to occur during vertical blanking. Also, all the signals from the cameras had the delays adjusted so they were equal at the input of the switcher. Therefore, there was no jumping of the picture when a cut was made from one camera to another.

The matched timing between cameras was also needed to allow special effects like split screen and wipes, because frame synchronizers had not been invented yet.

I believe at that time the switcher worked on R,G,B signals, like three monochrome switchers in parallel. That way, only one chroma signal encoder was used, so there was no worry about color phase changing from camera to camera.

[Popester]

What amazed me about the film was just how many people in those days it took to make an actual tv program. Camera operators, directors telling the camera operators what to do, people moving those big cables out of the way when a camera was dollied forward or back and the lighting crew. Wow those studios must of gotten very hot under those lights. Boy have we come a long way since then.

[Dave A]

I got in to the biz in the TK-42/43 days and I don't remember them being RGB at that point. We had the simplest RCA TS-40 (?) switcher and it was just passable. We used to do shows mixing color and BW cameras. That was a sync nightmare. And then the small tube cameras began to show up. RCA TK-76, Ikegami HL-77, etc. with their single NTSC signal. Those were a dark art to set subcarrier and sync phase all hidden behind side panels and under the lid of a 3/4" tape deck or a TBC. And do it daily.

[kvflyer]

I finally had enough time to watch the video. Quite interesting. I can only imagine the work needed to set that all up and those guys horsing the huge cameras around!

I imagine that since color was new, the various telephoto and zoom lenses were not a feature ergo, the quick movement of the cameras. At first, I thought it was an oscilloscope image of the signal in the camera. But then I though, hmm, they didn't have the little color CRT back then!

I wonder how many of those color monitors survived? Kinda cool, thanks.

[dtvmcdonald]

I have my doubts about whether the film was "restored". In that time frame
it had to have been either Eastman Color (same as Kodacolor) or Ektachrome E3 or E4. Kodachrome of that era would still be just fine today.

Given good care (air conditioning) Kodacolor prints lots better than that just straight and restrores perfectly. I have Kodacolor negatives from 1957 and they still print just fine (but they were stored carefully after 1960). Ektachrome fades badly to magenta and is hard to restore, and when its done, does not look like that.

It looks like it was printed B&W and then crudely "colorized". The giveaway is that some scenes have lots of brown and no green and, even more telling, when the bird flies off the guy's shoulder its green color does not appear on every wing flap!

[old_tv_nut]

The possibility of colorization never dawned on me.

The loss of color on the wings could be due to the undersides being pale, but colorization would explain it quite well too. It just boggles my mind that anyone would bother to colorize this, and then to lean on red and green like that. Colorization would not have been possible with this accuracy at the time, so if CBS wanted to send this out as publicity in color, it would have to be color originally.

At 08:15, the closeup of the control panel shows the red, green and blue knobs in differentiated colors, but the reds are dark and the blues are very dark and only slightly blue. At 11:31, Fredrick March's neckware appears orangish compared to his face. This kind of thing leads me to say restored, not colorized.

I wonder if prints like this one were duped on very contrasty film, then faded, and were restored like this?

The poster's channel has a number of historical films, all in monochrome except one in natural color and this one in odd color. I have left him a question and hope he replies.