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/collection/database/?irn=249192&search=emi+204&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 .

I'll certainly give such an effort a thumbs - up . . . :thmbsp:

Fun!

I've been doing some further development with this colour experiment and have added a new dimension to the colour channel combination. I was thinking about those RCA TK-42 cameras and how they used 3 colour channels and a luminance channel and thought of applying this principle to my colour experiment. So I decided to add an unfiltered B&W still of the subject being shot to the channel mix to raise the luminance of the picture. I first combined the colour filtered 3 channels in Corel Photopaint to create the dark colour picture. Then I used Adobe Photoshop and opened the luminance channel and superimposed the combined colour channel over it using the layer tools and selecting "exclusion" in the layer blending options which gave me a colour picture of reasonable brightness. Unfortunately this desaturated the colours to a certain extent so I then merged the layers and ramped up the saturation which brought the colour back to a good richness though because the picture is grainy I got the confetti effect though still a good looking picture. To reduce the confetti I blurred the picture a little bit. On the overall adding the luminance did gave a much improved colour picture. I have attached some pictures of some colourful bottles in the kitchen in the various stages of this added development to the colour process and a digital snapshot to compare with.

In a way, it reminds me of the way some vidicon-based color film chains reproduced color slides (if anyone looked at some clips of optical test patterns on YouTube - especially from U.S. stations). Some look desaturated as on the third example, while, others had the saturation looking as on the fourth and fifth examples.

I, however, happen to like this effect, and my thumbs-up stands. :thmbsp: