What color TV was really like back then...

Speaking of Chicago area and baseball.....my mother was a baseball fan when she was younger and she and a friend would go to the ballpark (can't recall which one) and end up getting to hang out in the air conditioned TV trailer to watch the game.

That may seem a little bit of a let down, to be so close to the park but instead watch the game on TV, but at the time this was a gigantic high tech treat, PLUS the fact that the trailer was air conditioned made it a no brainer. Am amazed she never witnessed any short circuits due to the technicians drooling on the equipment while gawking her and her friend! Hubba Hubba!

Anthony

[NIPPERTHEDOG]

I bought some old TV shows such as milton berle and red skelton, the video on some showed age but carol channing singing Diamonds are a girls Best friend and others, what classics!! I'm grateful anyone produces new copies of old shows. I'm sure these are limited, maybe wont be made again. I'll go & check out Walmart!!

[Sandy G]

I STILL wish I could conjure up a copy of Marlene Dietrich singing "Lili Marlene"-it was in color, but was very "funky" looking-kinda like a badly done kinescope, but in color. They cut back & forth between her & the orchestra, lots of streaking where the klieg lights shined on the instruments.-Sandy G.

[oldtvman]

for the most part early color programming coming from NBC was breathtaking, sure there were some programs on film that didn't look that good, but most of them were in the sixties when CBS and ABC got in the game. Show such as Bonanza and any of the live color shows on NBC would blow you away in by today's standards

[Telecolor 3007]

A few time ago I found a V.H.S. casste with comecial from the '50's. But when I wanted to buy it I couldn't find it any longer in the shops. When I'll get me some money I'll buy it second-hand.

[Dave S]

Originally Posted by Eric H

I suspect a lot those $1 DVD's are made from worn out 16mm prints that would have been used for syndicated reruns originally

I had the dubious pleasure of seeing a VHS duplication facility many years ago that ran off a lot of the old shows for the cheapie market. I went there because they were selling off a lot of their "surplus" video equipment. One of the no-longer-needed items was a (then) top-of-the-line Merlinized 1" type C video recorder that they dubbed from. As the market soured, they fell on hard times and although they didn't go out of business, they switched to dubbing from 3/4" cassettes. Loss of resolution, huge increase in chroma noise, plus the added fun of a reel change or two in the middle of your movie! Fortunately a lot of their product was black and white.

[Dave S]

Originally Posted by Steve K

At the time the color seemed fine but of course we could only compare it to the black and white set that we had before.

I was a fairly undiscerning viewer as a kid, but I distinctly recall noticing the sometimes blatant banding from the 2" quad playback all the time on shows like Laugh-In and others of that era. I also recall noticing at an early age the wild highlight flares that occasionally appeared in the picture, well before I knew what an Image Orthicon was.

My kids may some day fondly recall today's outrageous lipsync issues with apparently asleep-at-the-wheel technicians having moved their lack of ability or concern into the digital domain.

[bgadow]

Lipsync? One of the local affiliates has gotten terrible about this. Most nights my wife will watch both Wheel of Fortune & Jeopardy & you cannot get through both shows without the sync getting way off. Until recently I had never seen it that far off, in fact. I have also noticed, recently on that same station, that every commercial "pauses" at the end. I assume this is a digital thing. (I've seen the same thing on the cheap old computer cd of tv commericials I have, at the end of the commercial it will return to the front then pause) I don't notice this on the other local station. What the other station used to have, though I don't notice it anymore, was a defect that showed up during network station breaks. When the switch was thrown the picture would always roll vertically once, real quick. I do recall a 40th anniversary documentary they had 10 years ago & the original engineers were discussing things. It was pointed out that one piece of switchgear was homemade way back when & was still in use. So I often wonder if that was the cause of the "roll".

[Dave S]

Bryan,

I am NOT an engineer (and I don't play one on TV) but I do know that most signal feeds are received through a device called a frame synchronizer, which allows the incoming signal to be in the proper karma with the local system. If the signal is lost, most frame syncs will simply repeat the last good frame of video until they detect a valid signal input again. Could be what you were seeing.

I also had an early digital video editing system (The infamous Video Toaster Flyer) which for reasons which still remain unknown to me and perhaps everyone else on the planet, liked to "stutter" every once in a while at scene transitions and toss a single frame of the *previous* shot up between the cut you actually were making. Even my current system, Apple's highly regarded Final Cut Pro occasionally decides to resurrect a frame from "elsehere" in the program and mysteriously put it back on the screen when you least expect it! Digital is great, no doubt about it, but it's brought its own brand of weirdness to the table.

[old_tv_nut]

Lipsync ain't necessarily someone asleep at the controls these days - Broadcasters are burning the midnight oil to find all the places it can go wrong these days and fix them. We have designed digital systems that are (almost) so complicated that no-one can understand them, at least not grasping all the details at once. It's gonna get better, but not instantaneously.

[Dave S]

Geeze, Wayne, could it really be that hard? I'm not a broadcaster and certainly not an engineer, but poking a button to delay the audio a frame at a time until the picture caught up with it seems like something any intern should be able to do. Do we still need to invent that button? I slip tracks all the time to fix lipsync errors when editing video and just "earballing" it to get within a frame or so is quick and easy and usually good enough (and better than a lot of what I see broadcast.) I do suspect that for broadcast this wouldn't be quite as simple as I make it sound since the delay likely would vary from source to source (but hopefully not slip within a particular segment.) I certainly didn't mean to be too harsh on EVERYone involved in getting the signal out on the airwaves, but shouldn't there be a live human being watching at some point doing some simple Q.C. on the lipsync in addition to watching the waveform monitor?

[Bill R]

If it's a musical performance a lot depends on how well the artist can lip sync his own stuff since a lot of live television performances are just lip sync in the first place. Not much an engineer can do about that. Possibly if the music is ahead of the singer it could be improved, but only until the singer got out of sync again.

[old_tv_nut]

Well, I think you can imagine that no-one is interested in just a symptomatic fix, but would really like to fix the problem wherever it arises. Someone at the end of the chain is going to go crazy as the delay changes, maybe from program-to-commercial-to nth commercial and back, and maybe even during the program as audio and video feeds are switched separately between different backup delivery means, or from source location to location. It's messy, and people are working to clean up the mess at every stage.

[Dave A]

I get to deal with this mess everyday in my career in broadcasting. What you are seeing is the variables of MPEG transmission as broadcasting rushes headlong in to digital.

So many broadcast plants, remote truck transmissions, news uplinks, et al are digital in one form of MPEG or another. With a few frame syncs thrown in along the line to get it back to analog. And that is just transmission. Origination at the station is from a server for the most part. Wheel of Fortune is just a server file. Edited on a computer. MPEG again.

With MPEG, everything is motion. The the more motion, the more the processing, the bigger the file/frame, the more the bandwidth, the more the pic slows down in relation to the audio. Eventually it catches up.

And then there are the converter boxes that are being used to get separate digital SDI (Serial Data Interface...which is the standard digital signal used in normal 4x3 transmissions or 16x9 lo def) video and analog audio combined to one data stream. Hi Def is another monster using 270 meg transmission.

I had a problem tonight with a black box from a long-haul transmission service that came to me with the audio wired out of phase.

You could have a news report from a landslide in Cali that goes;

Analog 4x3 camera to digital satellite uplink
Digital downlink to long-haul digital fiber transmission to studio
Digital switching in studio
Digital or analog uplink to satellite for distribution
Digital or analog downlink at cable headend or local station
Local digital conversion and TX for over-the-air 8VSB transmission or
Digital conversion to QAM 256 for digital cable box at home
Digital processing in your home plasma set

Add a few layers for transmission from overseas.

Just watch a NFL game and watch the processing try to keep up with a fast-moving deep pass on the wide shot, game coverage. StutterVision. Some networks are better than others. You can see it on any old beast that we all love. And that signal is a down-converted version that we call a "center cut" (4x3 analog from the Hi Def 16x9, 270 meg, digital original) version of the highly touted Hi Def original from the stadium. Another conversion which can be done at the origin or at the end transmission.

And different Hi Def plasma set mfrs have different processing in their sets. It pays to shop and compare. Watch out for sale sets. Older processors just like a cheap computer.

There will be a test later,

Dave A

[Jonathan]

Color back then probably didn't look as good as it did now because of the limitations of early NTSC. NTSC signals generated by a video game system, DVD player, and satellite receiver are much better than what was used to capture and generate video back then, since it was out of phase.

Though from what I hear, the 15GP22 and 21AXP22 triniscopes produce a beautiful color picture. This is why I want a set with one of these CRTs, for the rich color picture, despite the limitations of early NTSC.