Lenticular (color) kinescope of Ernie Kovacs' Silent Show.

I browsed YouTube earlier today and discovered rare footage of Ernie Kovacs' "Silent Show", broadcast on NBC in 1957. Only it wasn't the expected black and white kinescope - although the quality is far from perfect (being a dated transfer), it's a lenticular (color) kinescope. Correct me if I'm mistaken, but the footage appears to be one of very few lenticular kinescope transfers. It features Kovacs' infamous tabletop routine and appears to be excerpted from NBC's 50th Anniversary Celebration, which aired in 1976. Anyhoo, enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBg6ansaJA

 

No, there's tons of lenticular kinescopes out there. The trick is figuring out to transfer them today, which is very hard.

 

It was my understanding that there are NO lenticular color machines known to be in existence any more. I know a guy here in NY who has the show, Producer's Showcase, which was done in that format but he can't get them transferred, at least not in color anyway.

 

This question has come up from time to time. I bet there is a way to transfer them, but it's so complex and cost-prohibitive, nobody wants to do it. I know there was a way for NBC to play them back on an old film chain (essentially a projector pointing into a TV camera), but that's like stone knives and bear skins today.

I have transferred lenticular color kinescopes on telecines, but only in B&W. And the picture looks kinda soft and ugly, plus the contrast is really weird. I don't think it'd look great in color; to me, it's a flawed system.

 

What about the lenticular aspect? Do any machines still exist?

 

NBC was the biggest user of lenticular color kinescopes, and I think they tossed all of their equipment and film chains in Burbank 15 years ago (at least). The last time I was at NBC Rockefeller Center, they did have two surviving film chains, but that was in 1994, and I'm sure that stuff is long gone. Lenticular color was rare and obscure even in the 1980s, let alone today.

 

Why is it hard? In my ignorance, I would have assumed that careful telecine grading would be all that is necessary. Then again, I'm only familar with B&W European telerecordings.

 

From what I understand, the color can only be recovered on those particular machines and there were very few of those machines ever made and those that were have been discarded. So basically there's nothing left to play them on.

 

Could someone not build a new one? If people can build new devices to play Thomas Edison recordings from the 30s, I would think this could be done as well. Is there a big enough market recovering color kinescopes?

Derek

 

does anyone know if there is any more of the kovacs special existing in this color form, or just this excerpt?

 

No, because when you put a lenticular kinescope up on a conventional telecine or scanner, all you see is B&W (as I described above). No color.

As far as I know, you would have to fit a compatible lenticular lens on the telecine to decode the chroma information. And the optics on an existing 16mm gate on a scanner are already over $100,000. Tearing one apart to attempt lenticular decoding would be ridiculously expensive.

I'm curious if any color videotape of Kovacs still exists. The problem is that most of his stuff was done before 1963, and so much of that was only B&W (or got thrown out), any color footage would be extremely rare. Hell, it'd be cheaper to just clean up the B&W shows and colorize them -- provided it was done really well. Good-quality colorization is possible today, but few studios want to do it because it takes so much time and money. And the market for Kovacs' stuff is very limited at best.

 

A Book Excerpt Describing The Presentation Of Lenticular Kinescopes

Here's a Google Books link for pages in the book "Jump Cut!" by Arthur Schneider:

Google Books link

In it, he describes displaying lenticular kinescopes during his lectures. Looks like there may at least be one of these devices out there in the wild...

 

That's interesting. You know that the BBC now a chroma recovery process for telerecordings which uses HD scans and computers? I wonder the technique could be adapted to recover the colour from lenticular prints.

 

Yeah. In addition to what Joel says above, I can tell you that when you hold a lenticular print up to the light and twist the film back and forth, you can see a kind of "rainbow" effect come off the emulsion. It's very weird. No question, there's color information embedded in there, somewhere. Damned if I know how to get it out.

 

It seems to be a very strange system indeed.

 

One would almost think that there would be a way to scan lenticular prints with a high end scanner and use compter technology to get the color out. Sounds good, at least.

 

The 1961 remake was indeed B&W - ABC in those days had absolutely no money to produce anything in color, not even so much as one frame. Though the videotape exists (and was shown by Comedy Central when they aired Kovacs' shows), the old Nostalgia Channel (a precursor to today's AmericanLife) used to show a kinescope of the 1961 version every so often.

 

I use a $500,000 Imagica scanner all the time, and have used similarly-priced scanners from Northlight and DFC (formerly Thomson). None of them can handle lenticular.

Every current movie shot on film now in theaters and most transfers on Blu-ray were scanned with one of these devices. As good as they are, getting them to run 16mm is dicey, and all of these lenticular color kinies are 16mm (as far as I know). If the lenses themselves can't translate the lenticular image, computer software can't compensate for the loss.

 

What's tricky about getting 16mm to run these? The telecine operators that have done 16mm transfers for me on Rank-Cintel or Spirit equipment have never mentioned that to me... If I need to give them more praise for doing some excellent 16mm work, then I need to know!

Derek

 

Pardon my ambiguity. 16mm is not the problem, as long as you have the gate and sprocket assemblies. I've personally scanned over a hundred miles of 16mm in my life (and I think that number is low). The 16mm can't be pin-registered during transfer, so that's kind of an issue, but you can always digitally pin it after the fact.

But lenticular color cannot be scanned with conventional equipment. Regular color, regular B&W, positive, negative, IP, 16mm, 35mm... no problem.

 

Were any of Elvis Presley's 1950s live TV performances originally broadcast in color? If so, was a lenticular color kine film made by the network? If so, does the lenticultar print survive and can the color information be retrieved?

 

After this thread came back up, I went Googlin' for some visuals and explanation on Lenticular color television, and was surprised at what little came up. I'm still having trouble getting my head around it...can somebody point me to an easy-to-grasp tutorial?




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