Image Orthicon look to modern TV footage

Here are some modern pieces of colour TV footage from the 80s and 90s with a classic 50s/60s B&W image orthicon effect applied to them. I am fascinated with early TV camera technology especially image orthicon cameras as the pictures that come from them have some interesting characteristics such as dark haloing around bright lighted objects. I found a way to replicate this effect to a small extent which gives the distinct image orthicon image tone with some haloing around bright areas which looks pretty good. The editing program I used was classic Corel Photopaint 7. I first had to convert the video files to AVIs and cut them into 10 second segments for Photopaint to easily open them. In Photopaint I edited each segment desaturating the picture for B&W, adjusting the brightness to 10 and contrast to -50 as it assists with the orthicon tone and then I applied the "mask unsharp" effect twice which brings out the orthicon look. This process was applied frame by frame, to make it quicker I made a macro using the programs recorder and played back the tasks to all the frames in each 10 second segment. After applying these effects I combined the 10 second segmented video files back together and convert to DVD MPEG. The results are pretty good in the IO tones, only drawback is in post production editing it is that on bright objects the light intensity is unknown and you don't get the nice huge halos that you would get when shooting a scene with an actual image orthicon camera. I dare say an image orthicon effect can be created for use in modern CCD cameras as I believe the light intensities can be picked up and the IO effect can be applied accordingly to the amount of light reflected from objects.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• image
• orthicon
• io
• commercials
• television
• ads
• black
• white
• B&W
• halo
• effect

[blozier2006]

is there anywhere i can see the original color copies of the source films you converted to get this demonstration?

[troysvisualarts]

@blozier2006 I've uploaded the Dynamo commercial to my retrooldcommercials channel just type dynamo 1981 commercial into the search n it should be the first video in the search results. The Neighbours commercial n Fast Forward excerpt I haven't uploaded.

[t00bed]

Oh wow that is really nice ! And thankyou for the description too. I might try this out in video patching software. I am a big fan of the analog video look and try and use it in my own work.

Many thanks for posting this.

[masterawesomeish]

Not as good as the real thing (seen some real footage of OI) but gives an idea.

[masterawesomeish]

the last ad was weird, a 70's guy with mo' with 50's ABC newsreader accent, talking to a 60's looking housewife. and this is from the 90's/80's ??????

[masterawesomeish]

@AidanLunn happens with ALL tube cameras, its awesome!

[analyzingfunny]

cool, very cool....indeed...ol chap..

[rtbvhsrip]

@AidanLunn Hehe, of course cought me, of course. 50 interlaced fields / half-frames played by VLC as 50 progessive frames on BOB deinterlacer.

[AidanLunn]

@rtbvhsrip don't you mean 50 fields, rather than 50 frames? ;)

[rtbvhsrip]

@AidanLunn It's maybe also true... 25 FPS progressiv is simply crap as it destroys temporal resolution FOREVER. Therefore i sometimes offer a interlaced H264 download with full 720x576 resolution who can be watched on VLC with real 50 frames and fluid motion.