Making colour video stills from a B&W vidicon tube camera

[Aussie Bloke]

G'day all.

I've been lately playing around with my vidicon tube cameras and have been reviving an experiment I did 8 years ago which is making a colour video still from a B&W vidicon camera using 3 primary coloured pieces of cellophane, red, green and blue. The camera I used is a 1970 Sony AVC-3200CE.

I was inspired to do this experiment from seeing Richard Diehl's attempt at making a coloured video still using a QuickCam and 3 dyed primary colour filters http://www.labguysworld.com/ColrQkCm.htm , Richard illustrated my successful attempt at this experiment at the bottom of that page.

Anyways I've recently been doing a lot of colour video stills from my AVC-3200CE using that process with varying success dependent on lighting and have decided to illustrate it in a YouTube video which can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZBg6pmLVuk

I also added some 70s instrumentals as a soundtrack to the video to fit in with the era the camera was made.

Basically what I did was had my Sony AVC-3200CE hooked up to a DVD recorder (VCR for outdoor shots) and pointed the camera to a subject or scenery and placed the 3 coloured pieces of cellophane, red, green and blue in front of the camera lens one after the other to capture the shot with each primary colour filtered. I had to layer the cellophane colours to filter a decent amount of each primary colour so I used 2 layers for red, 3 layers for green as it was lighter and 2 layers for blue, and of course I had to adjust the aperture so a decent amount of light passes through the filters. Then I copy the footage to a rewritable DVD and copy the VOBs to my computer and open them up in a video editor (I used Womble MPEG Video Wizard) and select a video still from each colour filtered shot and exported the stills as an image file (I used bitmap bmp). Then I opened the 3 colour filtered B&W stills in a photo editing program (I used Corel Photopaint 7) and I converted the format of the stills to greyscale 8 bit which is required before they can be combined to make the colour image. Then I used the "Combine Channels" function and voila, a colour picture!!! The accuracy of colour reproduction as mentioned varied dependent on the lighting of the subject or scene. Anyhow I took a lot of outdoor shots and indoor shots with my camera pointed to pictures on my computer monitor, I did one of colour bar patter to test the accuracy of the colour reproduction and the accuracy was pretty good seeing I was using household cellophane as filters.

I can imagine the EMI type 204 3 tube colour vidicon camera like this one http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/coll...&images=&c=&s= would of produced pictures similar to this.

Anyways this is a fun experiment and it's something worth trying for those into old video cameras like myself. I would like to see someone try this experiment with a working image orthicon tube camera or possibly even an working iconoscope tube camera as I'm aware there's 2 currently working, a bomber camera from the mid 40s and in UK a custom made photicon camera which the old photicon iconoscope tube is driven by modern electronics. It would be thrilling to see this experiment applied to those early operational B&W cameras.

Anyways below are some of the colour stills I made from this experiment, for fun of it I even took some shots of the NBC Peacock, Eisenhower dedication WRC-TV footage and that 1954 CT-100 screenshot of Marie McNamara. The rest of the pics can be seen in the YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZBg6pmLVuk .