Why is some 1970s news archival footage in black and white?

Wasn't the kinescope era over at this point?

 

My guess is that that footage is a black and white copy of original color footage, and the original color source footage is now lost so that's the best they have.

 

figure $ factor

 

The clip posted by the OP comes from the Vanderbilt Archive, which was established precisely because of the scenario you described.

Unfortunately they didn't have the money for color video archiving, so they used that dodgy 1" B&W home video format available at the time.

The upside is they preserved an unthinkable amount of television history. Amazing.

Fifty Years Ago, a Conservative Activist Launched an Effort to Record All Network News Broadcasts | History | Smithsonian

dan c

 

To be fair, ABC might have a color tape of this broadcast. This particular tape comes from the Vanderbilt Archive.

dan c

 

But NBC did preserve the whole color broadcast of Bobby Kennedy's last speech and assassination coverage at the Ambassador Hotel, and coverage of John F. Kennedy's assassination. It's impossible to figure out why they saved or didn't save what they did.

dan c

 

So did ABC regarding Bobby Kennedy with the studio footage in color and the location footage in black and white. Guess ABC still didn't have the $$$ at the time.CBS's footage was all color. Haven't seen NBC's although CBS' s shows a very visible NBC camera.

 

Well at least that's good for movie or TV recreations.

 

If it wasn't for Vanderbilt, I hate to think of how little from the 60s and 70s newscasts would have survived. The networks just couldn't be bothered with the tape and storage expense involved in archiving much of anything. Even kinescopes, which couldn't be re-used, were tossed out on a regular basis. NBC was doing color telecasts on many shows going back to the mid-50s in an effort to sell color televisions. Almost all of those programs, if they even still exist, survive as black and white kines. The Steve Allen era Tonight Show, a handful exist. Jack Paar era, bits and pieces. First 10 years of Carson, a smattering of color shows but not much.

 

Even worse than NBC, NASA themselves apparently lost their original recordings of the landing, which were supposedly in pin-sharp resolution.

 

!!!!!

 

No, although the originals were lost, they weren't "pin-sharp". They were better than what survives, less ghosty with better contrast. The camera used operated at a lower frame capture, beamed to ground station in Australia, relayed to Houston and then upconverted to broadcast standard. The original captured transmission resided on computer reels until sometime perhaps in the late 70s when they were either lost or erased. Hard to believe.

 

Fascinating to read about the Vanderbilt Archive. I wish they had been equally concerned about bias in talk shows, sports broadcasts and other non-news telecasts. If so, a lot more archival footage of those vintage presentations might have survived!

 

I can recall seeing Image Transform color kinescopes of TV commercials well into the 1980s. One reason is that some people wanted to send their commercials worldwide, and one small :30 second reel of 16mm film could be played anywhere on earth without any special processing. Film is film.

I think in the case of news events, sometimes film copies were made to send to AFRTS and other organizations around the world, because 1 hour of 2" videotape cost about $500. A reel of 16mm film might be half that. I think better copies did exist at one time, but narrow-minded idiots threw them out. This is one reason why the 1962-1972 Tonight Show tapes were tossed: because the NBC managers wanted to use that storage space for more offices. The belief was that a huge number of daily TV shows -- gameshows, news broadcasts, talkshows, soap operas, etc. -- were worthless in terms of rerun syndication potential because they were immediately dated. Nobody was thinking of history much in those days.

You can be critical of them to a point, but the truth is that a large number of the shows really are pretty boring and not worth saving. At some point, archivists have to make the decision "what is important enough to save, and what are we gonna have to let go?" You can't save everything. Even in the case of the major nightly newscasts, I think most of what CBS has is just low-quality copies (like on 1/2" and 3/4" cassette), because the cost of saving the 2" originals was just too great. Eventually, they came around to the wisdom that you have to be able to discern what might be historically significant -- and I would say tapes of any major news event would fall into that category.

It's a lot easier now, since saving digital files on hard drives is a trivial expense. You could save 250 hour-long news shows on a single hard drive that cost a couple hundred bucks today, in broadcast quality. But 250 hours of videotape in 1970 would cost about $100,000 and require a small humidity-controlled room to maintain. Multiply that by hundreds and hundreds of shows a year, and pretty soon, you have a warehouse 10 blocks long, 10 blocks wide, and 5 stories high, one that costs millions and millions of dollars.

 

Do you know how much money the networks made back in the 3-network, 2-inch videotape era? Hundreds of millions. Look at it another way. Lets take a show like Dupont Show of the Week, which NBC ran in color back in the early 60s. Lets say a one hour show cost about a hundred grand to produce. I don't know if that low for that era or maybe a little high, but lets take that number. You spend that much and the place you look to save money is by erasing the $300 reel of videotape it was recorded on and you save a crappy black and white kinescope instead? Sheer idiocy. Or what about NBC tossing out decades worth of kinescopes of World Series games going back to the late 40s just to save room?

 

It sucks from a preservation standpoint but if you really try to put yourself back in that era it would be really hard to argue for the budget, space and resources to archive TV material like this.

When a medium is basically live and relatively new, what value does any old baseball game or newscast hold after its been viewed? Exactly *zero* value. Nothing.

Now, yeah of course it would be amazing to have more of that preserved. But in the day "idiocy" was mere pragmatism.

dan c

 

Things are a bit better on the radio side, especially from the 40s and early 50s. It is my understanding that shows were recorded on disks for distribution to stations serving troops here and overseas (there was a draft and many more servicemen in those days). Years later old time radio fans taped the records and shared cassettes, and, more recently, mp3s. Nobody views this as a big copyright issue, and you can go on eBay today and buy 50 thousand shows for the price of a haircut, or download them for free on archive.org. This includes hundreds of WW2 news shows.

 

On the other hand, without individual companies preserving episodes of game shows, the Game Show Network would only have new shows.

 

And because of such a policy, we have a stereo version of Duke Ellington's Ellington at Newport.

 

The baseball games (and who knows what else) were saved, at least up until the mid 70s when some genius got the idea to clear out the storage room and toss them in the garbage.