The Color TV Thread

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by HGN2001, Nov 13, 2011.

  1. Mal

    Mal Phorum Physicist

    Is this what those little white boxes on a black screen that came from the side and got bigger were? As I recall, it was as the adverts began and may or may not have also been between each advert. Maybe I'm imagining it but I could swear this happened on ITV in the early 70s but it's been so long since I saw it or even thought about it that I'm not sure what I'm remembering... I was in London at the time so it was either Thames TV or LWT (or both).

    Couldn't they relay these markers as subcode without it being visible on screen? Is there some reason why it's better to have it visible to everyone?

    :)
     

    Attached Files:

  2. blind_melon1

    blind_melon1 An erotic adventurer of the most deranged kind....

    Location:
    Australia
    ^^ Man, those pictures take me back to when I was a little kid :D
     
  3. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    What I showed above was what they used in the U.S. during the 1950s for early telecasts. After that, they used color bars, and eventually, SMPTE color bars:

    [​IMG]

    (The later versions added the pluge pulse in the lower right.) Here's a whole bunch of them on YouTube:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS9uojwaN7E
     
  4. JQW

    JQW Forum Resident

    Trade Test Transmissions were not just the testcard, there were also many royalty-free colours films interspersed throughout the day on BBC2. The BBC2 daytime schedule on weekdays was sparse, with typically only Play School (a pre-school programme) scheduled to run at all. These Trade Test Transmissions took up the rest of the day. The exception would be when BBC2 were also covering a live event, such as sport.

    Here's a typical schedule from this period:

    09.00 Colour Testcard F
    10.00 Service Information For The Television Trade
    10.03 Colour Testcard F
    10.30 The Colour Receiver Installation Film
    10.43 TRADE TEST COLOUR FILM followed by Colour Testcard F
    11.00 PLAY SCHOOL followed by Colour Testcard F
    11.30 Service Information For The Television Trade
    11.33 TRADE TEST COLOUR FILM followed by Colour Testcard F
    12.10 The Colour Receiver Installation Film
    12.23 Colour Testcard F
    14.30 Service Information For The Television Trade
    14.33 TRADE TEST COLOUR FILM followed by Colour Testcard F
    15.10 The Colour Receiver Installation Film
    15.23 Colour Testcard F
    15.30 TRADE TEST COLOUR FILM followed by Colour Testcard F
    16.30 TRADE TEST COLOUR FILM followed by Colour Testcard F
    17.30 TRADE TEST COLOUR FILM followed by Colour Testcard F
    18.30 TRADE TEST COLOUR FILM followed by Colour Testcard F

    These trade transmissions ended in late 1973.
     
  5. JQW

    JQW Forum Resident

    The testcard does occasionally re-appear overnight when the BBC are performing networking tests. Every January there's a major test of the BBC's analogue failover mechanism, for example, although next year's will be the last.

    It's also possible to get the testcard to appear on Freeview equipment at any time by following these steps:

    Go to channel 105 (BBCi), and wait for the page to load.
    Press Yellow.
    Drop down a channel and back again to 105, and again wait for the page to load.
    Press green twice.
     
  6. Gappleton

    Gappleton Forum Resident


    The little striped box that appears on the top right on ITV is call a cue dot. The BBC cue dot is on the top left. It developed from the cue dot you used to see on multi reel movies which flashed to let the projectionist know to run the next reel and switch over to it in 5 seconds.

    From early days up to the 90's the transmission controller would juggle the sources and feeds manually. They would have accurate timings for pre recorded programme segments so they knew when breaks were scheduled but live programmes, sports OB and such were given some leeway as to when the breaks could be run. The cue dot was triggered by the studio or OB to signal a through to a break. It was usually done by the programme PA (Production Assistant) who looked after the programme timings with many stopwatches and a head that could count backwards in base 60!

    You may be feeding one live programme to many regions who would all be going to their seperate breaks so visually was the best way at the time.

    In the days of VTR's the cue dot was usefull as the VTR would take ten seconds or so for the heads to spin up and they would need to be run five seconds prior to being taken on air to allow the playback to become stable. The usual ITV cue dot would come on a minute to the next event to allow the VTR operator to "stand by" and spin up and it would go off at the five seconds roll point.

    These days there is one main network transmission center and most of the playout is automated. Regions are capable of "pulsing" the breaks electronically using signals in the transmission but I am not sure if there is a world wide standaed for this yet. Remote OBs come from all over the world and not all providers have the capability of providing it and there is always the danger of it being stripped off by some processing somewhere in the chain. Also you may not be throwing back to a pre-recorded event or break, you may be handing back to another live studio so a visual cue dot is a simple was of saying to them "Stand by - coming to you shortly" then "Take it in five!". It is also fairly fool-proof as clever tecnhology can let you down with egg on your face sometime.

    I think you will see them les and less over the next few years. They wer not so noticable with CRTs and when ther used to be a "safe area" bordering the screen but with full frame 16:9 panels they can be distracting and dowright ugly at times.

    The short animations before commercials are called "break bumpers" and were there to give a distinct visual indication that what you were seeing was a commercial rather than part of the programme. It was a different world back then! The were also useful for channel brand awareness. I think the reason they were almost always black & white is that the origional bumpers were hung onto too long into the colour era. They had all but dissapeared when I started in the early 80's.

    Regards,
    Gordon
     
  7. torcan

    torcan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    First color set: 1973. One of the first shows watched on it: Brady Bunch in Hawaii episodes.

    Loved the Saturday morning cartoons the next day. Still remember seeing those in color for the first time as a child and the excitement it brought!
     
  8. Mal

    Mal Phorum Physicist

    Great info, Gordon :thumbsup:

    Just to clarify, the little white squares on a black background that came from the side growing in size (at least, that's how I remember them) before the ads in the 70s were one of these "break bumper" animations you describe? If so, was this particular animation just on Thames and/or LWT or was it used in other regions too?

    I'd love to see this "break bumper" (assuming that's what it was) again - and ones for other regions. Are they available to view anywhere online?

    :)
     
  9. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    RCA also had their own lined, monoscope- and telop-based "bullseye" test pattern which was a proto-"politically correct" alternative to the Indian head:

    [​IMG]

    That RCA offered both those TP's is evidenced by the frequent presence of a curved "CHANNEL" - applicable for the Indian head (near the top of the inner circle within the height circle), but weird-looking on their bullseye variant (confined to the inner lower right quadrant).

    The largest markets (within the Top 10 of such lists as constituted in the 1970's) that I've noticed used this type of TP were Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Washington DC and Dallas; I haven't any evidence of any of the New York (City) stations using them, and I'm not sure of Philadelphia or San Francisco.

    Of the old-style circular TP's, there were color variations all over the place. The most famous are, in order, this variant from the 1960's:

    [​IMG]

    then, by the mid-1970's, had changed slightly (ahem):

    [​IMG]

    (There are at least two stations in the late '70's that had this TP upside down insofar as the color wedges here.)

    Around 1980, a newer design variation took hold:

    [​IMG]

    And New Yorkers may be familiar with this design that was unique to WNBC-TV (Channel 4), first seen in 1975 and continuing right up to the late 1980's/early '90's (with at least two logo variations shown on the inner lower right quadrant):

    [​IMG]

    (Disclaimer and disclosure: These are all recreations, not the original artworks but rather based thereon.)

    Apart from the last example, can anyone chime in as to which stations west of the Mississippi (with "K" calls) used any of the first three color examples, besides KAET (Channel 8) in Phoenix (which used a variant of the first color example, albeit in B&W form, alas), KGO-TV (Channel 7) in San Francisco (which used the second color variant, with the "circle 7" logo smack dab in the middle), and South Dakota Public TV (which used the same TP as KGO, except with the color wedges upside-down; among the stations in that group were KUSD-TV, Channel 2 in Vermillion). Such TP's were most prevalent east of the Mississippi ("W" calls).
     
  10. Scotsman

    Scotsman Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jedburgh Scotland
    Each ITV region had a variation on the break bumpers...STV's was a rectangular star, if you get my drift, whilst Border TV used a circle....in both cases starting small and then almost filling the screen. My memory may be failing me, but I'm sure in the very early days the "bumpers" were used between each advert as well as at the beginning. LWT's was the boxes, as outlined above....
     
  11. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I was gonna say! They're outta phase. (Which is to say, the colors ain't right.)
     
  12. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    Ah, but can you say which West Coast stations used any of the first three color TP's, and if so, during what period? (F.T.R., optical color TP's [meaning, from 35mm slides] such as what are repro'd here are obviously not of the same standard as the electronic variety as represented by color bars up to the SMPTE guidelines as well as Philips' PM5544. However, there's more an iconic bent to them. Besides, DX aficionados preferred the old TP's because even in the worst conditions they could make out the TV stations - unlike, in their opinion, with color bars.)
     
  13. Scooterpiety

    Scooterpiety Ars Gratia Artis

    Location:
    Oregon
    Thought I'd post this here instead of starting a new thread.
    I was watching The Monkees on Antenna TV today and at the very end of the show was surprised to see the old NBC 'snake':
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ev1xhRvY-A
    Any idea why this would be on a syndication print/tape?
     
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  14. JBStephens

    JBStephens I don't "like", "share", "tweet", or CARE. In Memoriam

    Location:
    South Mountain, NC
    On Pink Floyd's "Wall" album you can hear the flyback when he switches on the TV in that one song. When I was young, that's how I knew I was getting ill... when I stopped being able to hear the squeal of the TV set. And when I could hear it again, I knew I was getting better.

    We were a B&W house until around 1966 when my dad built a Heathkit. It had a round CRT and a mask that lopped off the top and bottom couple inches. Those were fun days! The first color show I saw was Batman. And I remember Star Trek in color, too, that was the first run of the show, and it was the episode about the creatures that sucked something out of you with suckers on their fingers, or something. It scared me! But the color set was in the living room, in my room I had an RCA Shelby that I bought used from my grandfather with my lawn mowing money. That was better because it was MINE. Pride of ownership and all. (And that was the set that taught me that flybacks HURT.)

    But my grandparents had a color set before we did, we used to watch Disney on it. And I still remember the theme song. The world is a carousel of color! Wonderful, magical color! And programs brought to me in living color by NBC, and the music that accompanied the peacock.

    I didn't know Speed Racer was in color until I bought the DVD. WHOA!! COLOR! I had to turn off the color on the TV so that it looked like I remember it! I think it would be loads of fun to restore an old color set just for kicks. If I had the space, I would.

    But I also have a rather unpleasant memory of color TV. I thought it was really funny how the picture of my B&W set would bend and squirm when you waved a magnet in front of it. So I went downstairs to show my mom. "Hey, Mom, look what this big magnet does to the TV!" and proceeded to demonstrate my amazing discovery to her. OOOOPS. I didn't know what a magnet would do to a COLOR set.

    My dad fixed it with this big coil thing, and I got grounded. HA HA HA HA
     
  15. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I gots no clue. We didn't use any of them when I worked in local TV during the 1970s. In fact, I've worked in American TV for decades and never heard the term "TP" before. Tele Prompter? The Pope? Toilet Paper? We had telecine, which in those days was a film chain (essentially a camera pointed into a projector), and generally had a multiplexer -- an optical box with electronically-activated mirrors that could show different projectors: 35mm film, 16mm film, and 35mm slides. I'm told some people called them "telops," but I've never heard that term in the U.S.

    Even in the 1970s, we had Tektronix generators that could create test patterns that looked much more accurate than any slide or optical device. It ain't that big a deal. While I was working at the station in the 1970s, I saw the transition from all news film to all tape, which was quite a revolution. We also gradually went from 35mm slides for on-air I.D.'s to digital I.D.'s, either on 2" tape or on digital still-stores, which looked far better -- plus you didn't have to clean or focus them, as we did with glass slides.

    Here's another example of an early color station I.D. slide used by a pioneering color broadcaster, WKY-TV Oklahoma City (which was part of the chain that owned our station):

    [​IMG]
     
  16. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yeah, there's a bit on a Credibility Gap comedy album where they added the 15kHz whine to an entire Johnny Carson sketch, which I thought was hilarious. People forget, that's how bad TV sounded back in those days.

    Naaaa, it's not permanent. Use a coil and you can get rid of it in 10 seconds. Not a big deal. Flat screens don't have this problem.

    I can remember tons of situations in broadcasting and post where we had big speakers next to color TVs, and they'd cause all kinds of interference to the screen. Eventually, they figured out how to shield the speakers and kill the magnetic emissions.
     
  17. Steve D.

    Steve D. Forum Resident

    The Encore Western Channel airs the Virginian series each afternoon. This was a color series first broadcast on NBC starting in Sept.'62. The first season has the animated "Revue Production" color logo at the end of the credits. Revue was Universal's TV production arm. The NBC snake closing, in color, shows up in the series' 2nd season followed by the animated Universal Studios Globe filmed button. Not sure why they retained the snake closing, unless they didn't want to edit it out of all the episodes.

    -Steve D.
     
  18. W.B.

    W.B. The Collector's Collector

    Location:
    New York, NY, USA
    "TP" is used as initials for test pattern in various places on the web, but apparently has caught on only years after your working at such stations. But I clearly meant the color patterns as shown in Post #134, which of the first three (not counting the unique WNBC variation) was used at stations in the western part of the country (and others can feel free to pipe in if they know).

    And I'm familiar with telops - the nomenclature of which was short for "telopticon," a type of system the alternative name for which was "balopticon" or "balop." (This, from a book of TV production published in the '50's that I read.) The glass slides of those systems were somewhat bigger than the 35mm slides. And a more recent glossary mentioned telopticon as being an "opaque television projector." That's why I never use the telop term except in very rare extreme cases.

    And since you mentioned Tektronix generators, my favorite variation of the SMPTE color bars is that elicited by TSG-170A's, with the box of 12 characters in 7x9 matrix to spell out TV stations or production companies. I believe there was a PAL equivalent of this via the TSG-271.
     
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  19. cathandler

    cathandler Senior Member

    Location:
    maine
  20. Mal

    Mal Phorum Physicist


    A little before my time but thanks for the links anyway :righton:

    You inspired me to look a little harder for ads and I finally found what I've been looking for - as Scotsman said, it's an LWT break bumper:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szK2g5bjjxA

    I guess it's because this is how the ads looked when I was little but to me all ads should have these boxes in front of them!

    So, I can tick this one off the nostalgia list - still waiting to see a Nutty bar in it's wrapper though... (seen the wrapper online but not one with the bar!).

    :)
     
  21. cathandler

    cathandler Senior Member

    Location:
    maine
  22. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    By who? We just called them "test patterns"! But realistically, the only thing we ever used was SMPTE bars (which is what was used the most). I think you're making this out to be far more complicated than it really is.

    Now available for $300 on eBay. A lot of this standard-def stuff is completely useless and dead; I'm not sure how it has any use or interest nowadays. It's kinda like being interested in a transmission for a 1956 Buick... :sigh:
     
  23. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member Thread Starter

    Reviving an old thread, we've been watching the full-series DVDs of the old daytime gothic soap, DARK SHADOWS, and after the first 290-odd episodes in black & white, the color ones have been quite interesting in terms of the actual color image. It appears that ABC had some pretty crappy cameras in those days. Often you'll be watching a scene that switches from one camera to the other and the image goes way out of "whack." Smeary blue-color drifting off to the right of lit candles, faces that smear into the background, and then it'll switch back and all will look semi-normal.

    Other times, the color balance will be way off on one camera giving a pinkish cast to the proceedings; other times, everything will be off in the green direction. I suppose that in these early days of color TV, we were a lot more forgiving of what was being fed to us. As long as it was a color picture on the 19-25" TV, it didn't so much matter that it wasn't perfect.

    Harry
     
  24. indy mike

    indy mike Forum Pest

    A revision from a post I made early on:

    The NBC Peacock 1957:


    Say kids - what time is it???
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2CVrm6FhAs

    NBC Peacock Laramie Peacock 1962:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE_oHJt_V5M

    The obligatory "can't be an SH Forums thread without mentioning those pesky British Invaders:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XQ9KZcU294

    Where the hell did the NBC Peacock logo come from in the first place?
    http://www.classicthemes.com/50sTVThemes/themePages/nbcLivingColor.html

    A neat look at color (colour) logos from the U.S. tv networks:
    http://www.kingoftheroad.net/colorTV/colorTVlogos.html
     
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2014
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