Fascinating.

"to the powers"

Intriguing....I did similar around then with the aid of a chum in film recording at Lime Grove (BBC) . Recorded a bit of Playschool with the chroma notch filter off and had it printed. When we played it back, there were rainbow patterns in highly coloured areas of the picture. Unfortunately there was no image processing software that could sort it out. Soon after I went to ITV and that was the end of that!

cgisarecrap Actually, we wiped a crapton of stuff in the US as well. Most of the early "Tonight Show" episodes (think "Parkinson") are gone because NBC wiped the tapes, for example. There are a couple of reasons we have more old programming still available: 1) We had more networks, and they ran much longer than the BBC did back in the day. As a result, we just had more programming available, and 2) because most shows aren't actually produced by the network that airs them, the original production company controlled the master tape. Some studios (like Desilu) kept basically anything that was popular when it first aired, so we've still got the masters for the original Star Trek, The Untouchables, and Mission Impossible.

And thank the lord you kept so much. Here in the UK tv companies like the BBC 'penny-pinched' and thought the cost of videotape was too expensive, so they were reused. At best they made cheap copies onto black and white film.

+almostfm Virtyally all American soap operas and game shows from the 1950s are gone, except for scattered episodes, and most of the ones from the 1960s as well. Dark Shadows is a rare exception, because virtually all of the show's run from 1966-1971 is available. The defunct Dumont Television Network, was a 4th American tv network that lasted from about 1946 to 1955, and reportedly ABC, which owned the archives of the Dumont Network, simply dumped all the telerecordings in the ocean in the early 1970s, to make more room in warehouse facilities. Only a few hundred Dumont shows are known to survive out of thousands over a run of about ten years! A lot of prime time tv shows were either recorded directly to film, or kinescoped, or telerecorded to use the UK term, which means filming off the tv screen) for archival purposes. American tv also faced a problem that is probably alien to tv in the UK: the need for time shifting. The US spans four time zones. In the early 1950s, if a show was broadcast live in New York at 7 pm, it would still be 4pm in Los Angeles, definitely not suitable for a prime time show. Video tape was the best solution for this, but before video tape, a show would be broadcast live in the Eastern Time Zone (New York), and transmitted live via cable and microwave relay to Los Angeles, where it would be telerecorded, the film developed, and then broadcast at 7 pm local west coast time. There was also the problem that the US is so big, (England is about the size of the state of Alabama), that not all local tv stations had access to the direct feed from the network via cable or microwave, so the networks sent telerecordings to local stations so they could still broadcast network shows even though they were not yet connected directly to the network. This was quite expensive for film and processing, but telerecordings of some old live shows survive in part, for this reason.

+John Satterfield PS, Not sure about the UK, but many telerecordings in the US are on 35mm film, which produces a much higher quality than 16mm.

cgisarecrap j

daro2096 the government who started BBC waited till the PAL system was sophisticated enough. As the USA reddifussion system wasn’t as good. But the USA had committed itself to ntsc.

PAL is 25 but interlaced, in fact it is 50. NTSC is 29,97 but interlaced, so it is 59,94. For cinema/kinéscope compatibility they don't use 24 but 23,978.

Yeah, that's just it. A US-standard kinescope doesn't capture a single video frame for each film frame; it's a cheat. The film 24fps camera captures one full 30fps frame; the shutter closes for 1/120 of a second, the camera captures half of the next video frame and half of the following so there is a full image, and so on. Really really fiddly and hard to do well; the reason so many US kinescopes look terrible and flickery.

I've noticed American Kinescopes look terrible in comparison, especially NBC ones like the Hullabaloo show, very soft.

It was expensive stuff mate, they wanted to re-use the tape.

I was thinking of the telerecordings (or what we Yanks call kinescopes). Those were film, not tape. The BBC simply threw away a ton of that stuff to free up storage space.

One of the archivists did ask to take them home, but when he got to the vaults everything was already gone without any notice!

I've heard that the first episode of Z-cars survived because the guy that was supposed to trash it, took it home, since it was his kid's favourite show.

They have used it on 13 episodes of Doctor Who, Three episodes of "Morecambe and Wise",the "Are you being served ?" Pilot. Half of one Steptoe episode. The four episodes of TOTP as you say, would be good candidates for restoration. I think it comes down to the cost of doing the restoration. There is an edition of "Disco 2" from 1970 where Elton John plays for Lou Christie which would interesting to restore, and two monochrome film copies of two editions of Colour me pop.

Craig Brown I have always wanted to see Steptoe! We had Sanford & Son starring the late great Redd Foxx of course.

ITV didn't export many programmes back in the day so there was little need to make film type copies from the video tape. For this reason there will be very few ITV programmes that could have this process carried out.

Most of the original videotape recordings still exist and these have been digitally cleaned up in recent years. The film copies were made from the original videotapes so obviously couldn't be any better quality than the videotape copies. As with the original videotape recordings of other episodes, the film copy of the 'Room at the Bottom' video tape was digitally cleaned up, in this case as part of the same exercise as the colour restoration. The early b&w series of Dad's Army were only made as film copies from a completely b&w production so obviously no colour recovery is possible for these.

Me and my mates saw this possibility at BBC Enterprises in 1985ish... We also were the first to put the colour from US NTSC copies back on the FR recordings - but the tech wasn't up to the task back then. It took years before the Restoration Group could do it properly !

The technicians in the 'colour strike' made darn sure that no colour could be recovered. The cameras had 4 tubes, three for colour and one for grey, they ensured the camera was only using the grey (or monochrome) tube and everything else was switched off.

@@Witheredgoogie yep. Sounds about right. Pity...

I understand that in the USA here, it is a race against time as the glue and foam that is part of the tape reels is d composing, and sometimes ruining or making it more difficult to play the tapes. Then the heads get clogged or wear out, and need replacing. Ampex heads are scarce, along with air pumps, and many other circuit boards, etc. ele tronic capacitors on the circuit boards along woth transistors are also degrading.

Yes Quad machines are not as common as they once where, but there are dedicated people in the states and elsewhere that are preserving and restoring the machines, to put back into service dubbing tapes to newer formats. Electronic restoration of the older machines like the Ampex VR-2000 and VR-1200 is fairly simple, when compared with generation 3 machines like the Ampex AVR-1 which was microprocessor controlled. Capacitors and Resistors get replaced with modern ones of high quality that are better then the original, transistors can be found that have the same electrical specs as the originals. Some parts of mechanical restoration like the capstan and tape drive motors as well as the vacuum system is also fairly easy as parts for the motors and vacuums pumps are still made. The biggest problem is the Video Heads, they only last about 100 hours or so per set of 4 and only one company in the US still an refurbish a head assembly, to the tune of about $10,000. But there are collectors working on being able to machine their own heads.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, David.

If anyone wants the services of an ex BBC VT Engineer who used Quads for over a decade - give me a call !

But what happened to the original NTSC conversion tapes?

No that's not how it works. (Analogue) television signals do not contain RGB. It is a black&white picture superimposed with information for hue and colour saturation. This superimposed information is ignored by a black&white set, so it interprets the underlying black&white image only. This is why you could watch colour tv with a black&white set. But it so happens the superimposed colour information slightly interferes with the black&white image in a unobtrusive way, it leaves a fine dot pattern in the image. Black & white film prints also contain this residue of colour. They've used this residue in the b&w print to restore full colour, but it takes a computer to do it.

@@xaverlustig3581 Thank you, that's a nice description of the process in a nutshell.

Davan Mani Hell, how about all of them! Speaking of which...I just watched a documentary called "Dawson City Frozen Time" about a slew of old nitrate film prints unearthed from the permafrost in the Yukon. Among the prints were pristine footage of the 1917, '18...and yes, the infamous 1919 World Series. It looked remarkable. None of that old-timey, sped-up, Babe Ruth running the bases on his little legs junk. They actually look like ballplayers and not museum pieces in this footage.

Not the same thing. We're talking about telerecordings of colour television productions, not black and white release prints of Technicolor film negatives. They won't have the chroma dots inherent in these recordings.

Stuart Reid Correct~! "Swiss Miss" was slated to be shot in color, but never was....the production was the most expensive Laurel & Hardy had done up to that time & was going over-budget so it didn't happen. When I met Della Lind in 1992, she confirmed there were color tests done in pre-production but nothing turned up to prove otherwise. I wonder if they would do the same for Steptoe & Son, as some of the 1970 color episodes are missing.

Stuart Reid I'm a bit slow on the uptake: Chroma dots are synonymous to pixels then.

@@mykiemilford720 No - they are made of pixels, but look like a fine mesh over the entire picture, with a different pattern for each colour. The signal is very high frequency and actually reduces the Black and White resolution as the ultra fine image detail signal is filtered out of the TV signal and the dot colour coding information put in its place.

daro2096 In the states CBS was the first to switch over to color programming in 1965. However, there exists glorious color video of the Andy Williams show dating back to 1963.

@@mykiemilford720 NBC broadcast some shows (mostly musicals and sports) in the mid 50's, some examples are on youtube. Actually, CBS also had a color system (non-compatible with B&W) in the 50's, but the US FCC chose the NBC/RCA system. CBS petulantly refused to colorcast until 1965-66.

Sales to countries broadcasting in monochrome didnt need Colour copies. Australia was British TVs biggest market, and Australia went colour in 1975. NZ went colour in late 1973 and sales of Dads Army to NZ led to returns of sales copies (PAL tapes)from NZ in the 1980s amounting to about half of the series run I believe. About 30 Colour copies of Doctor Who from the early 1970s are NTSC tapes returned from Canada in the early 1980s. The BBCs First Colour drama series"Vanity Fayre"(1967) where again NTSC conversions returned from the US.

@@mykiemilford720 According to what I've read, NTSC colour was introduced in 1954 in the US, but originally there were only few shows shot in colour. Only in the mid-60s did networks go for colour large scale. But there were colour programmes before. Not so in Europe, where the first official colour broadcasts began in 1967.

In the USA in the 1950s a handful of programs (notably the last 3 or so years of The Adventures of Superman) were filmed in color in anticipation of repeat color broadcasts in subsequent years. Lucille Ball's 1960s CBS sitcoms were filmed in color also, as was The Flintstones, even though they were broadcast in BW for their first few years. NBC was the network that programmed the most hours on their schedule in color in the late 1950s-early 60s. NBC did telerecord a tiny handful of 1950s color broadcasts on film, and some of them (Perry Como, Ernie Kovacs) are on KZfaq. CBS had a tiny handful of color broadcasts, but doubled down on black-and-white pretty much out of resentment and bitter rivalry as they originally came up around 1950 with a mechanical color system that the federal government (NTSC were actually the initials of the government committee) rejected by 1953-54 in favor of the all-electronic RCA/NBC standard (only after the Philips/Norelco plumbicon cameras were developed and available after 1964 did CBS start getting into color on a wide scale; they grudgingly, kicking and screaming, bought some RCA cameras for a handful of color broadcasts before that point. CBS was eventually all-color by 1967 or so but using the Philips cameras to do it, not RCA). Fall 1965 was when color began in earnest on the prime time evening schedules for ABC, NBC and CBS, it took longer for the daytime programs to change over. Also keep in mind that many if not most of these programs were filmed by the Hollywood motion picture studios such as Columbia and Warner Bros. as original color productions on 35mm film. Before 1965-66 the studios would shoot many of them in BW as a cost-saving measure. So some filmed sitcoms that premiered say in 1964 would have their first one or two seasons (or series) filmed exclusively in BW and the remainder of the run in color. ABC was pretty much a shoestring operation and was the last to become truly all-color by 1968. What is now PBS was NET in the 1960s and that loose confederation of stations (run by nonprofit groups, local school boards and universities) had even less money than ABC did (government funding came later with the 1967 establishment of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) so as late as 1968-69 some of the shows on "public television" were still in BW.

Unlike today, film was cheaper than tape. When it was first introduced in 1956-57, a one hour videotape cost $300. A one-hour 16mm kinescope cost $100. And that one hour videotape was expected to give 100 passes per tape.

t0nito hi, did you know that there is recently a algorithm invented? It's called algorithmia wich is able to colorize original old B&W foto's and (unintendedly) video's, the way it works is by analising objects in the image and apply colors to it, so if it recognizes a face, it should know that it should be pink,light brown or dark brown,depending on the shade of gray,for instance an light gray apple is supposed to be green while a dark gray apple is supposed to be red, etc,, It's still a demo software but results can varying from good to bad,so it's not perfect yet and never will because, it can never know what colors cushions are supposed to be, it can only gamble on that but for the rest it's incredible to see such deep learning system . It's called the fotoshop of the future. What do you think???

johneygd Now that I've learned all this about chroma dots and chroma keys I'm almost wondering what's taken so long. Couldn't software take the additional step, once given the color or hue parameters, of formulating its own approximation based upon the given saturation and brilliance values within the B&W image?

You misunderstand the process. It's not guessing the colour from the grey value, rather it interprets cross luminance dots unintentionally preserved on the film prints. This is a deterministic process, it manages to recreate the actual colour present during recoring. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_crawl en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_dots en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_recovery

@@xaverlustig3581 this was a response to someone that said itbwas doing this based on the grey scale, if you read closely you will see that I mention that that's not possible because different colours can give the same grey scale, on the other hand chroma dot patterns are unique for each colour and that's was makes this possible. I understood exactly how this process works.

No

Or was is like VHS tape?

Tape is the same as VHS tape yes, to some level. If it is needed to be reused you can tape over it. The BBC didn't want to buy more reels of it and they assumed the existing shows would not be needed again, so they taped over it

BBC shot a lot of series directly onto tape with early video cameras.

This is about programmes shot electronically and recorded on tape in colour. Then they made black&white film prints for export, an later wiped the colour tapes for reuse. So only the b&w films survive, of course they can't be recorded over.

The first part of Invasion of the Dinosaurs has since been colourised using this process. It is a myth that the episode was originally wiped in the belief it was part of The Invasion. The Troughton serial was completely wiped in 1971 and Invasion of the Dinosaurs part one in August 1974. The Dinosaurs story was due to be completely erased and parts two to six were actually mistakenly saved. With Tom Baker taking over the role in late 1974, it was felt the Pertwee episodes would no longer be required as potential repeats. It is known Barry Letts was dissatisfied with the story and it is possible he ordered its wiping, though personally I would be surprised if this actually was the case.

Sorry, no - see above for the reason - basically - it won't have the dots.

No this only works for television.