The NBC Peacock was only broadcast by the network at the beginning of their color telecasts. Not nearly enough time for a tv technician to adjust the color on a customer's color receiver. Even if he knew the proper color of the peacock's feathers. Most techs, at the time, had a device called a dot-bar generator. This hooked up to the tv's ant. input terminals and provided a known color bar display to adjust the tv to the proper color/tint. This is a simple explanation of a rather involved time consuming set up of early color sets. -Steve D.
it was common for British film tv series to be filmed in colour for the American market, the earliest was something like ivanhoe ( somebody can confirm what it was if it wasn't ivanhoe ) the second series in the late 50's was filmed in colour The first uk series to be filmed in colour from its start was the Baron in 1965, from 1966 all ATV/ITC film series were made in colour for the American market because they knew the Networks were going to go full colour that year, but the Avengers was nothing to do with Lew Grade but ABC tv in the UK. the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour is slightly different, although it debuted in b/w on BBC1 on 26th Dec, it was always sheduled for a repeat showing in full colour a week or so later on BBC2 on 5th Jan 1968, so it wasn't made in colour just for the US market but also with a nod to the emerging FULL colour service which had started on BBC2 officially in December 1967 ( as has already been said BBC2 had been showing about 10 shows in colour each week since the wimbledon debut in July 67, mostly late night line up , Joan Bakewell in colour phooarrr !! ), Unlike the states the UK used to favour VT over film for much of its TV series which is why so much British colour tv prior to 1971 is lost, the cost of 625 pal vt tapes was very high so the BBC in particular had a policy to wipe and re-use it. Series would often get one repeat and then be wiped forever, other stuff like current affairs, news etc would just get wiped, that any survives at all is mostly down to dumb luck. Film is a different issue, i don't know of any British tv filmed series that has lost episodes, although i'm sure somebody can find one for me lol !
to correct my own thread i should have made the disrinction of live action series, ATV/ITC filmed Stingray in colour in 1962 and 64 and Thunderbirds in 1964 and 66, but apart from the hands that was all puppets lol !!!
i suspect this may have had something to do with the conversion to showing on North American 525 line standard. They took a long time to get the conversion sorted but it seemed to be easier to convert 525 ntsc shows to show on 625 line standard. But if you were to show 525 line show on a 525 line set and a 625 line show on a 625 line set alongside one-another the difference in picture quality would be readily there for all to see i suspect.
oh and for the record our first colour set was 1973 when i was 13 and one of the first programme we watched was the Royal Wedding of Princess Anne, however my Aunt Flo had a colour tv much earlier, around 1969 i remember being fascinated by it. We did however get a dual standard tv in 1964 in order to be able to watch BBC2 from the start. If anybody remembers these sets they had a switch for 405 and 625, to watch BBC2 you had to switch over to 625 before tuning in. I well remember the day when we didn't have to faff about and use that switch anymore as all 3 channels were made available on 625, i guess that must have been the day that all channels went colour in November 1969.
I think the first color set I saw belonged to my future parents-in-law in 1966. In 1968, when I was in the Army, my wife and I used to ogle the color TV sets in the various stores around the post where I was stationed. Military pay being what it was at the time, we couldn't afford one, so finally in 1971 we bought a 19-inch portable from K-Mart.
This is fascinating stuff. I didn't live through the era, but I'm nerdy enough to enjoy reading your recollections of it. I've been obsessed with the TV industry for as long as I can remember, and sometimes scour YouTube for surviving scraps of televisions's earliest era. Pretty much everyone with a set had color by the time I came along, but if you were a kid in the '80s with a TV in your room, it was likely black-and-white (at least among myself and my circle of friends). It was a good day when we were allowed to hook the NES up to the big color TV in the living room.
Seemed to have missed this thread the first time around so had to jump in! When did you or your family get your first color television? 1966 What brand or type was it? Motorola - I remember quite well that it had a bit of blue-ish tint to the color and we had to have it demagnetized before it looked right. What were the first shows you saw in color? I recall "Land of the Giants", "The Monroes"
That is not true in my experience, and I have seen 525 and 625 shown back-to-back with two $25,000 Sony BVM-32 monitors. (It's been awhile, since we last did that in the 1980s and early 1990s, but still.) And it's all a moot point in the case of HD. That's because the copyright holders were too cheap to get any of this stuff fixed in video mastering. These are really trivial, easy problems to solve if they just spend the money. The shows could look 40-50% better with proper mastering, and it'd probably only take 3-4 hours per episode.
We got our color TV in 1965-66, it was a Sears brand in a dark wooden cabinet. Our old Admiral B&W set was relegated to my brothers bedroom. I grew up in So Cal, so I remember watching Bozo, Sheriff John, Hobo Kelly, Gumby and Pokey and an assortment of cartoons usually on KCOP or KTTV.
When TV series used filmed inserts for outside shots there were obvious changes in hue when the action switched inside. Someone might arrive at a door wearing what looked like a deep pink sweater then, when they stepped inside the "house" the sweater would suddenly be bright red. It was fascinasting watching a DVD of a 1969 series called Hadlieigh, made by Yorkshire Television. In one episode a scene was shot using three electronic cameras. One character was wearing what looked like a yellow shirt.....which appeared to vary from pale lemon, to cream to bright yellow depending on which camera was being used.
As a kid growing up in the late 70's and early 80's, I can still remember shows that started out with "IN COLOR" slides. THE BRADY BUNCH and the SPIDERMAN cartoon are two that come to mind. As the old 16mm syndication prints gave way to videotape masters, the slides vanished. I can also recall through my youth that WCBS Channel 2 in NYC *STILL using their old B&W test pattern (seen here) on early weekend mornings. On Christmas of 1993 (If I recall the exact year correctly), I woke up around 4:30 or so and popped on the TV and there it was in all of it's 1K-tone glory. I hadn't seen it used in a few years as the age of the overnight-infomercial had begun a few years back. I actually rolled tape on it for a good chunk of an hour before they came back on air, because I kinda knew it was going to be one of the last times I ever saw an honest-to-goodness test pattern on TV. I was right. I haven't seen one since that Christmas morning.
That's a crap color-correction post issue. If somebody was doing their job well, you'd never see a difference. Color quality in the 1960s and 1970s was very primitive, and they often had color matching problems with either film or video. We can fix it today, but stuff like that was almost impossible back then. Yes, both BVU 2210's, as I remember -- both with EBU phosphors, the one on the right set up for normal 525, the one on the left set up for 625 PAL. I did thousands of PAL jobs in the 1980s and 1990s in Hollywood.
interestingly ITV early colour progames were much more likely to use colour VT for outside shots than tge BBC which nearly always used film, thats not to say ITV companies did not use film as well but were also not against using colour vt, there is a outside road sequence in an 1969 early episode of Doctor in the House which is a very good example of this - all recorded on colour VT, the beeb would have almost certainly filmed that.
thats very interesting, i've always found the most useful comparison is golf, on ntsc the grass is a vivid green like its been painted, on pal its much more subtle
SPIDERMAN - IN COLOR (and phasey/synched up <stereo>, too)! Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo94Z6Vm-gg A little something to watch those color tv shows on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKqntuJvWEE
Many here on the forum will like this. The first tv show I ever saw in colour was The Monkees! My older sisters and I went to a house they were babysitting at and I saw it in glorious reddish colour! For years I begged my parents for a colour tv and they finally purchased one in 1976. It was a Zenith tv that sat on our console unit. The black and white tv never was powered up again. We lived in a small northern BC town with only the CBC for a channel. So that is what we watched but it was soooo much better. I can't recall what was the first tv show though. Doesn't matter, it was colour!
Naaaaa, there's no difference if the same guy is doing the color correction. That's a human decision, not a technical problem. It wasn't reddish in 1967, trust me.
Fly over to the UK an watch it on my tv, then you'll see, every golf tournament of the modern era cant just be about the colour correction.......
You're watching NTSC in England? Note that they don't make TV cameras for specific countries: they're world cameras that can be switched to any standard. The pickups are the same. The colorimetry is the same. The electronics are the same. The only thing different are the morons running them. If you get a different guy who yanks a control in a different direction, the pictures will look different. Every colorist (including live camera video control operators) have different prejudices and different inclinations. One guy wants things more red; another guy wants it more blue. The differences you see reflect people, not technology. This is why an album mastered on the West coast might sound different from same exact album mastered on the East coast. Different people, different technology, different sets of values. The standard itself has no color. I can make NTSC, PAL, HD 24P, and HD25P all look the same in terms of color and brightness.
Yeah, but PAL has full-range Colour. NTSC just has abreviated color. When I was in Europe PAL TV looked terrific on what looked like vin ordinaire sets. When I worked for a videographer, we shot in PAL. My experience is that PAL looked better than NTSC including the colour.
I'm not sure. I think I might have bought the first one for my mom and dad in 70 or 71. I am sure it was no more than 19 inches. What I remember most about color TV is my dad would take us to the Silver Cloud Bar on New Years Day to watch the parades in color. We sat at a table with chocolate milk and donuts. My dad at the bar with his Pabst Blue Ribbon.
Only in transmission. I'm strictly talking about what we see in control rooms on closed-circuit feeds. There ain't no difference, especially in color. PAL has zero differences in brightness, contrast, and color if the sets are adjusted accurately, and assuming zero setup. For a long time, NTSC had a setup (black level) at 7.5 units, but this gradually went away towards the end of the 1990s to the point where it was only added in the final dub for the client. In the control room, we had 0 blacks which was identical to PAL (and HD). For this reason, we often had to correct clients who would say, "how is this in PAL?" And we'd say, "PAL is a transmission standard for TV sets. What we're seeing is 625-line 25 frames pictures. It's compatible with PAL, but this is closed-circuit right out of the machine." Your experience is not my experience. 525 and 625 is just a switch being flipped; the camera stays the same except line rate and frame rate. Everything else is the same, especially color.
