No, I got nothin'. I worked on some later Paramount shows like the shortlived Platypus Man (with the late, great Richard Jeni), but far more for Fox and Sony Pictures.
it was bad real bad...analog TV reception was never great...but at lest the picture didn't turn into a mosaic picture as digital does when we get a bad signal... no we had snow! LOL!
TBS had a much higher budget, and the clout to get better. Big difference between TBS and a small market, low budget, cheapie budget on air station. At one time, TBS's predecessor, WTCG Channel 17 was no better than the cheapie, low budget, UHF station, because in the Atlanta, GA market, they were the low end, low budget, independent TV station themselves. Cable TV and satellite delivery changed that.
yes, Ted Turner slammed the market with great shows and I enjoyed every one of them...TBS was fabulous back when it hit the scene...
Another question for vidiot: Since you told me earlier that Viacom didn't start making syndication prints on 1" videotape until 1983-ish regarding many of the old CBS shows of the 1960s and early 1970s, please let me say that All in the Family (1971-79) was the first show Viacom syndicated, in 1979, using exclusively 1" tape (Viacom's rights to the show expired in 1991). I know this based upon posts I saw as a former member of the Closing Logo Group, and the experts there who saw this series in syndication back in the day recalled that they saw not only the videotaped V of Doom that you see here at the end of this episode of Unicorn Tales the above link takes you to, but also the warp-speed version. Were you involved in making the first-generation syndicated prints of All in the Family? The same V of Doom seen on Unicorn Tales was also seen on those 1980s prints of numerous old CBS shows I'd brought up here previously, the latest being The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) and Hawaii Five-O (1968-80). As I said here before, the V of Doom existed both filmed (early) and videotaped (later), and I know Viacom continued making 16mm syndicated prints as late as 1985, which is the case here regarding this 1963 episode of Perry Mason, which was printed in 1983: Perry Mason Closing (1963)/ Viacom "V of Doom" *Low Toned* (1976)/ SMPTE Foot (1983) ~Ben
What puzzled me was that when Python's US agent came close to getting individual public stations to buy PYTHON, the dilemma was that there were no NTSC versions, and conversion was prohibitively expensive. They got royalties from Dean Martin's company to do the conversions, but....hadn't PYTHON been on in Canada? Wouldn't there have been NTSC tapes for CBC? I guess either they'd been erased, or CBC was showing film tele-recordings. As I said above, the 1980 PYTHON conversions looked very good by analog TV standards(they looked great compared to the '74 ones)and I think they were digital as opposed to optical. I remember an ad for digital conversions in Variety in 1976.
Naaaa, not in the 1980s. I think it was -- at most -- $1000 an hour, which is not crazy/ridiculous. There's less than 25 hours of Monty Python's Flying Circus, so that'd be $25K for the whole package. Not crazy money, even for the 1980s. I think it'd be about half that today but look a lot better. Maybe more if they went in and did subtle noise reduction and image enhancement and a little color-correction, dropout removal, and all that stuff. I watched Python throughout college in the 1970s, and it was airing on PBS stations throughout North America during that decade. Somebody definitely had NTSC copies, but I bet it was ****ty optical conversion. We were so ecstatic to see a show this great, we didn't give a crap if it looked soft and ugly. It's still funny.
Those old conversions of Python did look like hell, though. I remember watching it on our local PBS station circa '82-'83 and being amazed at how crap it looked - Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who looked dramatically better, and they were of roughly the same vintage.
No, it was the 197os when Python agent Nancy Lewis needed NTSC copies of Python, not the 80s! I'm talking about a time when Python hadn't yet been on in the US. The episodes you watched in the 70s were indeed the first US transfers of whole episodes, made possible by revenue from the DEAN MARTIN'S COMEDY WORLD use of Python clips. The versions shown in the early 80s were pristine compared to the 70s transfers, and they were probably digital, but it wasn't as good then as it is now.
That would've been prior to 1973, because they were definitely on PBS stations in 1972. Yes, and they were really ugly, soft, and smeary. I was told by Image Transform around 1983 that they did those transfers in the 1970s, but I subsequently heard Audio+Video in NY did them. It's always possible there were different standards conversions done at different times. The key is to play the original 2" master tapes back really well, capture that to digital, and then don't screw it up when you convert it to NTSC or HD.
And yet...there are cases of certain skits edited from the later versions (for TV and home video) that were present in the pre-1980 U.S. tapes. To what extent I don't know, but the word on the street is those bits are now lost. IIRC one was included as an extra on a UK DVD set a few years back, and it was sourced from a You Tube video of a home recording of a U.S. PBS showing during a pledge drive with phone numbers superimposed over it.
I think it was the 70s. As I said, I remember an ad for digital PAL to NTSC transferring in VARIETY in the mid-70s. I also noticed that NTSC from PAL British programs started looking a lot better around 1976.
They had digital technology then. I read about the first CGI(originally intended as a guide to construction)in '73 or '74 in POPULAR MECHANICS, and saw a CGI TV-station promo(for WCVB-5 in Boston)with their logo rotating in "3-D". Digital re-masterings of Caruso's recordings came out in the 70s, to mixed reviews. They had it then, and I wish I could dig up the ad. I do remember that the second batch of NTSC versions of PYTHON that appeared in 1980 looked very fresh and clear compared to the ones that had debuted in 1974, even if they wouldn't look as good by today's standards.
That was REALLY disappointing that the BBC cut that bit out! "What on earth did anybody find so offensive about that" I asked myself. Well, the repeat aired during an election year, so..... And then "Dad's Pooves" disappeared from the same episode years later, I'm guessing out of respect for deceased Princess Di, since footage of Prince Charles' coronation was included in the sketch. Did the BBC have to be so lazy about putting these things back(actually, a quiz program sketch was missing from the BBCs version for a while because the host who Cleese was imitating died, but it was ALWAYS in the US version. And "Wacky Queen" was re-instated in Britain YEARS before it reappeared here. It's confusing)?
I think that's pretty much when the analog -> digital transition started happening for post production. We started the decade in "mostly analog" and ended it in 100% digital standard definition. And then HD hit about 1999-2000... and we had to throw everything out and start over. And then 4K became commonplace in 2010. I think the definition is kind of ephemeral and nebulous. All graphics computers at the time were combinations of digital and analog technology and were not 100% digital. A guy has made a terrific documentary about the Dolphin Productions/Computer Image Corporation "digital" motion graphics of the 1970s and 1980s, and one of the secrets was that 90% of what the artists did was using analog: moving TV cameras on motorized platforms, layering multiple chromakeys on top of each other, but using digital recorders that had no generation loss. Many of the images simply digitized a plain graphic and then they used a camera shooting off a tube monitor to capture it. Some of the complicated "computer" graphics had as many as 30 or 35 layers all happening at one time... but it was really analog. Here's one I posted some time back... The guy who did the documentary said the most important thing about Dolphin Productions (and their LA counterpart, Image West) was that they carefully guarded the secrets of how everything was done and pretended it was all done with rooms-full of computers. But it was really hard-working people doing very complex graphics work, one frame at a time, basically like the electronic version of Disney animators. And a ton of "cheating" going on to make it look like very slick computer graphics, which were not really possible back then.
Well SOMETHING changed in the mid-70s. PAL to NTSC transfers didn't look as crap as they had before, and they did start 3D computer graphics-were those part analog and part digital? I remember watching MUPPET SHOW in 1978 and noticing that they had a smoother kind of transfer without all the "herringbone pattern" effect, but still kind of odd looking when anyone moved(Yes, the first MUPPET season was NTSC, but subsequent seasons looked converted from PAL. Just more of my tinfoil hat musings)
I was thinking more of this! How much of this would be digital, and how much analog(Well, I DO notice that's it's a film transfer!)
