What color TV was really like back then...

[old_tv_nut]

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.

[Steve Hoffman]

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

[Celt]

Originally Posted by heathkit tv

...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

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

[old_tv_nut]

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.

[Steve Hoffman]

Originally Posted by old_tv_nut

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".

[Steve D.]

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

[Steve Hoffman]

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!!!

[old_tv_nut]

Thanks for the link - ordering it right now!

[frenchy]

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

[Steve D.]

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

[David Roper]

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.

[orthophonic]

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.

[Sandy G]

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.

[old_tv_nut]

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.