Before There Was Videotape...

This is what I was thinking of - it was tape:

October 17, 1958. Fred Astaire made his starring TV debut in the color broadcast of "An Evening With Fred Astaire," which was to win many awards including nine Emmys. (There were eventually ten Emmy awards: Thirty years later in 1988, Reitan, Kent, and Einstein also received a technical Emmy award recognizing "Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development" for their restoration of this earliest surviving Color Video Tape of an entertainment program).

You may enjoy this link to "RCA-NBC Firsts in Color Television":

http://www.novia.net/~ereitan/rca-nbc_firsts.html

 

Holy Maird,I didnt realise!!!!

I love this show a lot!!!!!!!


THANK YOU FOR POSTING THIS!!

 

The OP hasn't been online for 6 years, but I'm sure he would say "you're welcome".

 

Why?

 

I know Joel made this comment more than 12 years ago, but I agree with his overall opinion. It's actually pretty trivial today to get rid of 2:3 pulldown with kinescopes and recreate a progressive 30-frame "video look." Vidfire is what they use in the U.K., but there are similar systems available for NTSC videos:



The best workflow to restore kinescopes (my opinion) is to scan the kine on a high-quality film scanner, pin-register the image with software, then use field-removal processing like the Snell & Wilcox Alchemist, then have somebody remaster the image, adjust all the levels, and apply tasteful amounts of sharpening and noise reduction if necessary. Do all that, and you can get acceptable results from old kinescopes.

 

I love this kind of history. Color kines. Makes me salivate. I've seen some 1950s NFL games that were crude kinescopes (one from '54 was a Dumont). You could see the surrounding frame of the TV and the shutter calibration was off so there are white horizontal waves that detract from the pleasure.

 

Technically, CBS Color was on air for a brief time before the RCA Color system (what became NTSC) entered service. CBS Field Sequential color was done with color wheels and the broadcasts were incompatible with normal monochrome receivers. RCA's debut of Compatible Color Television in 1954 was a major move forwards. Dumont also broadcast using CBS color system but they were also short lived.