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Old 06-16-2015, 05:16 PM
RJMiranda RJMiranda is offline
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Join Date: May 2015
Location: Havana, Cuba
Posts: 60
NTSC color in Cuba

Cuban TV history has funny episodes. In the early 50s, the Mestre brothers, who had a large capital, started a big building in Havana, to be the 1st Cuban TV station (B/W of course). Today, it still houses Cuban TV and its main studios. But at the same time, a guy called Gaspar Pumarejo was trying to beat the Mestres, and he succeded. He bought used TV gear from US broadcasters, specially "portable" cameras, that is, the ones you could transport in three pieces, with only a mid-sized truck. And while the Mestres were building their brand-new studios and installing demonstration TV sets on every the store window around Havana, Pumarejo rebuilt his two-storied home (seven blocks from the Mestre´s Radiocentro) and beat them for some days by being the first on air. I suppose that when he started erecting his antenna tower it was like showing his hand, but maybe he did it last thing and the Mestres weren´t ready yet.
Talking about second-hand equipment, until mid-60s or 70s all the news footage here was shot on 16mm film, of course, and it was developed using a portable laboratory of the WWII, built to be installed into an aircraft so the film could be processed while the plane returned to its base. The laboratory was last used in a building across Radiocentro. I don´t know who bought it, if it was Pumarejo or either the Mestre brothers had decided to economise at last.
Well, in the late fifties Pumarejo again was the first to transmit color TV in Cuba. The attached photos show the López Serrano building (five blocks from Radiocentro, but in another direction) with the Channel 12´s antenna (others say it was Ch13, but I was not around at the time) and the control room in one of the highest floors of the building.
This channel did broadcast only color movies in NTSC. So I suppose its equipment was only a telecine and maybe a camera for the presenter.
Back to the first Pumarejo´s channel, at first he had only 2 cameras. So, when a baseball game was about to be broadcast, the technicians dismantled one of them and rushed it to the stadium while the other camera was kept in the studio. As soon as the game started, they covered it with only one camera until the second had time to join it. And near the end of the game, one camera had to be sent back to the studio to be ready with the next program. Think of watching a baseball game with just one camera!
Attached Images
File Type: jpg López Serrano TV1a.jpg (123.5 KB, 17 views)
File Type: jpg López Serrano TV2a.jpg (125.9 KB, 13 views)
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