16mm B&W kinescope film vs 2 inch quad colour videotape

Many programs of the 50s, colour and B&W survive on 16mm B&W kinescope films but some from the late 50s fortunately survive on 2 inch quad tape. This footage is excerpts from "Another Evening With Fred Astaire" from 1959 featuring a mix of the 2 inch quad colour videotape and the 16mm B&W kinescope film copy which was mixed in where the videotape had major dropouts during the transfer. This is an excellent example illustrating the difference in quality between 16mm B&W kinescope film and 2 inch quad colour videotape.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• kinescope
• film
• black
• white
• quad
• colour
• color
• videotape
• video
• 1959
• another
• evening
• with
• fred
• astaire

[bctvguy]

I am not buying that this clip shows 16mm kinescope footage. The artifacts of a kinescope are not present including the inherent distortion of shooting a film image off a B&W picture tube, "blooming" and halation in light areas and increased contrast - not to mention scratches, dirt and film sprocket wobble.

Also, the sound is too clear on the B&W sections. Optical sound tracks on 16mm lacked good fidelity.

This is either from B&W tape or from a color tape with color burst removed.

[oldtvhistory]

@bctvguy If you watch it on DVD the motion in the B&W portions is not fluid like video. Also as for haloing, the colour cameras used RCA TK-41s, they use a specialized image orthicon tube type unlike B&W cameras which has reduced haloing effect plus the colour filters that lower the light sensitivity, there is most of the time little to no haloing on the highlights unless they are extremely bright i.e spotlights.

[oldtvhistory]

@bctvguy Also the audio would be from the videotape too as the editors mixed and matched for best overall results so they would of use sound from tape and vision from B&W film. The lack of scratches, dirt and wobble would of been cleaned up during the editing process. Films can be well cleaned up to look nearly as good as the original videotape, especially UK kinescopes from the late 60s.

[guimbadriver]

this is not kinescope 16 mm film, it is video without chrominance signal

[oldtvhistory]

@guimbadriver This footage is actually a mix of 2 inch colour quad video n 16mm B&W kinescope film as you will see watching the clip n read in the description, the B&W portions of the clip is the kinescope footage. I used this example to illustrate the vast difference between the two n show how 1950s live feed television really was opposed to their typical low quality 16mm B&W kinescope film recordings which these days is all that exists of most 50s programming.

[b3organ]

I've seen late 50s Kinescopes look as good as this one. Also... I've just looked at it again and I can see different artifacts in the two. There's shading on the left hand side of the Kinescope and a scan irregularity at the top which isn't present in the video.

[bctvguy]

@b3organ - No one disputes that this Fred Astaire special from 1958 was shot with RCA-TK41 cameras which employed 3 image orthicon tubes. There were no other color TV cameras at that time.

However, RCA TK60 B&W cameras used what were probably the best image orthicon tubes ever made yet even they showed some halation in high contrast situations.

Halation was even more common in kinescopes as a result of filming an image off the face of a picture tube which is how kines were made.

[bctvguy]

@oldtvhistory - The Fred Astaire special was restored in 1988 - more than 23 years ago before a lot of the computer restoration technology you refer to was developed. Certainly the ability to correct film wobble had NOT been developed nor the ability to correct the slight curvature of the film image from shooting off the face of a picture tube.

IF this was a 16mm kine, I could buy your explanation that the sound track is a result of using the tape audio under the film image.

[b3organ]

The "blooming" is due to charge depletion which occurs mainly in iconoscope camera tubes. This was obviously recorded using a color image orthicon system.

[pal625line]

Colour Recovery has been developed by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) It uses dot crawl/ Chroma Dots. Developed for the Pal 50/25 frame 625 line system it has already been successfully used for colour recovery from Kinescope material on bw 16mm film. Examples under colour recovery can be seen on utube. It would be interesting if software has been developed for the NTSC colour recovery.

[wado1942]

I seem to remember that somebody came up with software that will analyze the dot crawl and use it + luma reference to restore the missing color information from digitized kinescopes. Brilliant stuff.

[boston19801]

its amazing how colour changes every thing