What year did color become more common than black and white for film and TV?

The switch to colour broadcast TV here in the UK was somewhat complicated. BBC2 first broadcast scheduled colour output in July 1967 in PAL, with the Wimbledon Men's Singles final. The service on BBC2 was experimental, and it wasn't until December of that year when colour became standard on that station. (We usually use 'channel' instead of 'station', but that causes confusion!)

The other two stations, BBC1 and ITV, were still broadcast exclusively on the 405-line system back then, using VHF. These finally switched to colour in November 1969, broadcast in PAL on additional UHF frequencies. However at launch this only covered a portion of the country, and it wasn't until 1976 that the last main UHF transmitter sites went live. Even then many more relay transmitters needed to be built to bring colour pictures to some homes - the VHF network wasn't switched off until the beginning of 1985.

Once colour went live, it took some time for everything new to appear in colour. One of the BBC's set of studios, Riverside, was never upgraded to colour prior to its closure in 1974, although the odd colour broadcast was made from there using outside broadcast equipment. Schools programming (broadcast on daytime mornings to schools and colleges) was particularly late at switching, and was still being made in black & white in 1973, with these programmes being repeated several times afterwards. The last main regional BBC studio to switch to colour only did so in 1976 (regional studios tended to just produce local news output and an hour or two of other local programming a week). Even then there were the odd minor regional studios that switched even later. The situation was similar with ITV.

 

There are a whole bunch of 1950s/1960s films where I bet the color production (film stock, lighting, etc.) took one of the biggest chunks out of the budget. I think Roger Corman said a few of his 1960s horror films cost about $150,000, and $50,000 was just the color film stock and extra lighting needed for color.

 

Thanks for your reply and information. In Spain we had some B&W broadcast till the mid 1970's. I recently got to know that Franco's burial ("our" former dictator) was broadcasted live in color thanks to a mobile unit German's ZDF sent to Spain for the "event" so it could be used by Televisión Española,the national (and only broadcaster at the time) public TV, and that was in November 1975. All the news that were shown in color were shot to 16mm film and telecined for broadcasting.
Changing subject I'm sorry to bring up such a tragic event but I have never seen any footage from 09/11 terrorist attacks in HD, everything I've seen looks NTSC to me, and that was in 2001, I think you started broadcasting in HD in the US in late 1998, am I right?

 

How did you managed to broadcast at both B&W 405 lines and PAL 625 lines? How was a 625 lines system converted to a 405 lines one back in the 70's?

 

I owned HD TV sets and projectors in 1998 and 1999, but widespread broadcasting didn't happen until about 2001-2002. I don't think all of American TV really switched until much later; the Today show, which extensively covered the 9/11 disaster when it happened, was SD until 2006. The Tonight show went HD in the fall of 2002. The big "analog shutdown" was in June of 2009, and that's when a lot of stuff finally switched to high-def in America.

BTW, all the early HD equipment we bought got obsoleted very quickly, because the industry moved to HDMI connectors and we were kind of shut out with older gear. But that's kind of typical for the industry, where standards change and things come and go and technology progresses.

 

Do you use HDMI on pro equipment? I thought you'd use a different kind of connector.

 

No, we're using a calibrated LG C9 OLED as the main Rec709 display via HDMI. Everything else is HD-SDI.

 

I don't think there were any major American films still in B&W in 1967 except for "In Cold Blood", which was unusual and considered a specific artistic choice.

 

In Australia the politicians couldn't decide between PAL or NTSC so we had to wait until the early 70's. All the commercials were still black and white for years. I think colour sent the Christian Television Association into bankruptcy.

 

Billy Wilder apparently loved the combination of B&W and widescreen, except for "Irma La Douce" in color in 1963. I guess being one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood gave him the clout to continue to do whatever he wanted at that time. And of course "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" in 1966 as well - again a specific artistic choice. But those 2 and "In Cold Blood" were probably the last major American films in B&W until Picture Show" as you mentioned.

 

That was Billy Wilder. He was resistant to color. That would be about the end of B&W as not really being an artistic choice, some sort of statement like it would be later.

I have never seen that movie. I saw a bit of it, it just seemed a bit off to be doing B&W that late in the day. For no reason. I hate Kiss Me Stupid, which preceded Fortune Cookie for Wilder. B&W just made that crapfest even worse.

 

There were different transmitters for the 405 and 625-line systems. 405-line was broadcast on either Band I or Band III VHF, whilst 625-line was on new UHF transmitters. Dual-standard TV sets were produced that could receive either system, initially in black & white for the launch of BBC2 in 1964, and later in colour once BBC2 started broadcasting in colour three years later.

At the broadcast side there were standards converters that allowed pictures intended for one system to be shown on the other. Most of these would have been electronic, but some were simply just a TV camera pointed at a screen.

 

Have either of those caught on yet? Not in my house they haven't! Not like those talkie movies. Now those are pretty good, at least for a fad.

 

I found this article interesting. Apparently before the mid 1950s, color film production had reached 51%, but fell to 21% by then due to the war with Television. I'm not sure when color again reached 51%, but by the mid 1960s there was no going back.

 

Depends on your television market, maybe. I was in Terre Haute IN, and it wasn't until we got our 2nd television station in the market until 1065...but, neither stations immediately went color for their studio productions until a few years later ("why should we if they don't..."). Small-town advertising was cheap, and local advertisers wouldn't pay for decent film production, nor did their salespeople school them in why some cheap color spots come out looking like crap. We were just too far removed from the big boys in towns like that. Once the two news departments started competing for real, and color studio cameras were budgeted, it became katie-bar-the-door.

I'd have to guess that, one of the things that finally opened the floodgates across the country for getting color and better production quality into local teevee production, were those "PM Magazine-style" local show franchises in the late '70s, that popped-up when the FCC mandated local "family hour" programming, most often the hour in-between your local news and the start of Prime Time. The production departments could share camcorder and editing facilities with their News departments, and everybody had an excuse to get a guy with a camera in his hand out into the van.

This model, serving the competition of both departments and leading directly to profits for the efforts, dragged a lot of smalltown television kicking and screaming into the level their networks and larger-market competition had been working in for years.

 

Actually, B&W perfectly suits the seediness and the bleakness of the environment in which the film is set. You should watch it

 

The Sound of Music film (and soundtrack) were huge. My school even took our 4th Grade class to see it.
I never voluntarily stuck Mom's LP on the turntable but I know it backwards and forwards.
Over the years I've found pristine mono and stereo originals with the booklets for $1 each - don't ask me why.

 

Oh I know, my local goodwills LP bins are practically swimming in Sound Of Music