Color differences-NBC NY vs NBC Burbank

[Steve Hoffman]

When I was in school in 1970 I wrote a big story for our newspaper about TV news broadcasting. Big deal but the crux of it was I got to hang out at the news Dept's of KTLA, KTTV, KNXT, KNBC and even KCOP, meeting the anchors, writers and basically hang around the cameras. At NBC I remember well that they still had all the old ROUNDIE monitors everywhere and the old cameras. I couldn't believe it, actually, having seen the Norelco PC-60 cameras at CBS. The NBC cameras looked totally giant. In the NBC, Burbank master control they had a "TO" and "FROM" set of CTC-16s. To the transmitter and from the transmitter. Even there you could clearly see the signal variations and loss from the in-house to the broadcast signal. We got to watch the Tonight Show feed coming in from NYC being taped on the ancient QUAD machine and the quality left a lot to be desired.. It was everything they could do to get those breakup "bars" off the screen. And of course the sound was 5k at best, totally low fi.

Looking back in my mind I find it amazing in the 1970's that they were still using those old 41's for everything, even the local news. They must have had crews aligning those things 24/7.