More on Eisenhower 1958 dedication WRC-TV colour videotape
 

Hi all. A while ago I mentioned that on 22nd May this year it was the 50th anniversary of colour videotape recording and was talking about that Eisenhower dedication WRC-TV colour video recording.

Anyways just found an interesting site http://quadvideotapegroup.net/ which acknowledges that event and shows some snapshots of that footage on the monitors, quality is very remarkable!!! Interesting to also know the cameras used were the earlier TK-40s, not 41s.

Also mentioned was that this tape was located at the Eisenhower Library in Kansas. So I've browsed the site and have found out they do VHS dubs of their footage at a given price so I've made an enquiry about legally buying a VHS dub of this footage, hopefully it is available for purchase, if not I guess they are going suggest I contact NBC like UCLA archives have done when I contacted them a while back. Anyhow fingers crossed.

Thanks! I love this sort of thing!
 

I am so thrilled every time I learn about the precious things that have been preserved. It's incredible to me that access is granted to so much.
I admire whomever those men are that get to handle the original tapes and machines as well as film, etc. I wish I had such a career to be able to see the unaltered images. I am always greatly irratated when new specials show bits from old film or video and they zoom in or cut the top and bottom preventing many things from being seen that were originally seen in any given shot.

If they bite on making a copy, perhaps it might be cheaper to make multiple ones at the same time. If so then I'm in for a copy.

David

First WRC-TV color were TK-41's...
 

Hi, from the webmaster of QuadVideotapeGroup.com

I've been corrected about the WRC-TV Cameras... they were TK-41's, according to Ed Reitan, one of the three people who restored the dedication video.

Glad you enjoyed the site. I'll be adding more to it in the weeks and months ahead, so please visit again. Some of the comments will be from Ed, about the restoration process.

Welcome Ted!
 

And a big cheer for your efforts with quad and preserving the information! With Ed Reitan and the rest of the elder statesmen of quad in your corner, you will do well.

I was lucky...read old...enough to be around for quad at my old station in Rockford, IL. I was a kid director that the engineers...also kids...seemed to like and would let me touch their RCA TR's. I think I could still thread and set up a quad today.

When I started there, one of my jobs was to go to the Railway Express Agency depot to pick up that weeks supply of some show called The Phil Donahue Show on the what was called the "bicycle". We got five and shipped five to the next station. This place looked like something from an old western movie.

Before I wander too far and be convicted of hijacking the thread, I hope the Eisenhower tape can be made public for all fans of early tv to enjoy with your help. I would very much like to hear the story of how this tape was restored.

Dave A

Thanks for the support!
 

Hi, Dave,

Bicycling! Another one of those terms that have more than one meaning :) And that meaning's about as dead as RCA Broadcast.

One of the things I hope to do as time and opportunities arise is to videotape the people involved in early videotape.

Charlie Anderson, one of the original five members of the Ampex Quad development team works at the Reno PBS station with a friend, Tim Stoffel.

Tim is the Asst. Chief at KNPB and the proprietor of "Quadruplex Park."

(That'll keep you busy for a while!)

Now in his 80's Charlie is still an active guy and is working with Tim on a Quad transfer project.

I hope to talk to the gentleman who is seen bending over the VRX-1000 checking the tape of Douglas Edwards at Television City in Hollywood.

There are some folks in their early 50's that have extensive time with Quad, and work with it every day like David Crosthwait in Burbank or Peter Brothers on the other coast.

Or like Ed, Don and Dan Einstein, have been involved in restoring early tapes.

There are folks that are now retired, but still have the knowledge of where to tap, what to tweak and when to pray (and what prayers to say) in order to successfully record and play Quad tapes.

If we can preserve the machinery to transfer tapes, the knowledge of how to use them and the skills to keep them running, we may be able to watch some of the shows stuck in a vault when it becomes easier to clear the rights involved.

I'd suspect that's the major reason you don't see them in wide release: Artist, musician, music or other performance rights may be hard to clear. Especially if the paperwork regarding who's owed something is not in order or available.

It might be hard to track down some of the orchestra musicians on some shows in order to pay any residuals due. Or permissions to use certain elements or performers may now cost way too much.

I can tell you that hearing and seeing the restored Eisenhower and Edsel tapes at Television City was a real cause for appreciating just how good things could look and sound... and I think there's a market for broadcast and DVD releases of this vintage of material. How much of one is a ??

I'll be posting more about the TVC visit in the Quad History section this week (7/09/08) so check back over the weekend.

Ted

So you think you could still thread a Quad??
 

If you're near Philly, you ought to connect with Charlie Churchman at Churchman Television.

He might let you thread up one of his RCA TR-600's.

Likes early color television sets and broadcast monitors. Maybe you already know or know of him.

Really nice guy. I've had several lengthy conversations with him, and he supplied an extender card and several time code boards for my Sony BVH-2000/2800 collection.

Ted

Wow- Great to have one of the guys who was "present at the creation", as it were...

By "one of the guys who was 'present at the creation,'" I'll assume you mean Charlie Anderson, not me.

Quad was introduced a year and four months after I was born.

My early reading (pre-10 yrs) was Perry Mason paperbacks and technical books from the library. At that time Quad was the only game in tape... and I knew how it worked in a block-diagram sense. (Math dislexia? derailed my path toward engineering :(

My first videotape handling was in high school... the Ampex industrial 1" format that was an ancestor of Type C.

My path took me to shooting 16mm film, then shooting and editing 3/4"... now digital with Final Cut Pro.

I have a collection of Type C machines and linear edit controllers that are the guts of the edit suite I could only drool over when you'd have to pay half a million dollars to get into the game.

With the website, I'm more of a historian and knowledge archivist, hoping to keep the ability to recover content available for future generations to use.

And who knows... I may run across a working AVR-2 I can add to the collection :)

Ted.

Hi all. I've got a reply from the Eisenhower Library and just like UCLA archives they said I need to obtain permission from NBC and get a receipt of written release before being able to purchase a VHS dub of the footage from their library. So I've just sent an email to NBC asking for permission and I await their response. Hopefully they will grant me permission to purchase a VHS dub of this footage. If they do I will be cheerin.

I've just got a reply back from NBC in regards to getting permission to purchase a VHS dub of that footage from Eisenhower Library and to my disappointment they cannot grant me permission as NBC News does not provide or give permission to private collectors to obtain this footage, so I'm not happy about that at all :(. Who knows maybe one day I'll somehow get to see it.

Nixon Khrushchev Color Videotape...
 

I'm really enjoying this tread, but it reminds me of old color footage of Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev clowning around while being videotaped in the late 1950s. I think I saw the footage on a TV show called "The Secret Life Of Machines".

From what I understand, Nixon was trying to sell the idea of NTSC to the Soviets. And Khrushchev loved seeing himself on playback several times.

Would love to see more...

I wonder who they give permission to? It sounds like you got a boiler plate response, and was just ignored. I could try to send them an email, I work for Time Warner, so maybe they would respond in a more positive way to another media company.

Another place to look for a copy would be through the BBC. Although it sounds crazy, they actually own a company that sells B-roll and other footage to news organizations and they have stuff like this. I'll try to dig up the web site for it.

David

I can guess they'd provide permission to big wigs in the TV/film industry such as producers, directors, archivists, researchers etc. for broadcast usage on TV shows or news reports, and politicians would obviously have easy access to that material, and maybe it may be accessible to universities for historical purposes, that's my guess anyhow. I also tend to wonder if rich people can pay a big wad of cash for permission rights to this footage too?

Anyhow all n all it sucks that much of this material is unavailable due to strict copyright policies, but that's the TV/film industry works. I hope you'll have better luck obtaining permission to purchase this footage.

Anyhow this was the actual response I got from NBC News Archives:

The reply is peculiar in its wording. I'll see what their rules are for getting a copy and get back to you.

David

Regretably, NBC News is correct. In this case, they may not be the copyright holder anyway and can do nothing. They are bound to protect copyrights regardless of useage...private or scholarly. And they have layers of lawyers. Scholarly does get a bit of an edge though for restoration and research. And excerpted useage for a price is possible but severely limited. Mere seconds of footage just like excerpting printed copyright material for a review.

Copyrights are like patents and we all know what Sarnoff did with that concept. And add on the ongoing rights to performers, composers, union personel, etc. And somewhere upstream, someone actually owns the program. Way more than NBC wants to sort out.

In this case, it was a WRC News program and they would be the initial copyright holder. If the program went to the full NBC network, add another layer of copyright. But the tape came from the Eisenhower Library. You tell me who owns it. Expiration of the copyright would be in question but a long battle.

A great example is the Napster dustup a few years back. Now Napster is a venue to purchase copyrighted material. And don't forget the troubles Youtube has. The movie "It's A Wonderful Life" seemed to fall in to public domain for a few years and could be found on every station for weeks at a time near Christmas. Oops, the music was still copyrighted and that ended that.

Have you ever noticed that photographers keep complete control of their work product? Maybe they were ahead of their time.

But sometime, somewhere, these tapes will be available to be viewed in the name of scholarship and restoration. The ETV convention is a good place to pull up a chair and view because some of the scholars do attend and can show the work product...for viewing only. I saw the most spectacular Ernie Ford Show in it's restored color production there.

Dave A

I think it's slightly less complicated than this. NBC definitely owns whatever copyright may still exist in the material; WRC was an owned-and-operated NBC station and the O&O stations' material is owned by the network. The Eisenhower Library is a repository only, and has no rights interest at all, just because they have a copy (any more than they would have some rights interest if they have a copy of "Citizen Kane" in their collection.) NBC News most likely employs this policy because they don't have the resources to deal with private individuals seeking material--think of all the people who've ever been on television, or think they were, in the days before VCRs. This blanket policy keeps them from having to deal with these requests on which they will make no money whatsoever. The other factor is releasing material to people who have no vested interest in keeping it from being copied. Producers sign contracts limiting the use of the footage and can be sued if they misuse it; individuals would in theory be able to sign similar agreements but in practice going after them for damages should this material end up on the internet, or in other people's hands, is going to be more trouble for NBC than it's worth. It's unfortunate but it does make sense. At the moment I think the best hope for this sort of stuff may lie in institutions like UCLA being able to make the footage remotely available as a secure stream on the web--but that's a long way off.

Of course the big question--which is irrelevant if NBC won't provide the material anyway--is whether there is still any copyright at all. If indeed it was actually copyrighted in the first place (not too likely), it fell into the public domain in 1986 if it wasn't renewed (extremely unlikely.)

What I usually tell people is that basically copyrights are eternal. No copyright has really expired in the U.S. in the last 20 years. Every time something comes close, they just extend the time.

Anyway, the entire video is not available for broadcast and they will not copy the entire video. They will make copies of 30 sec intervals for research and documentary use. Cost depends on use, and how many people will see it and how many times it will be distributed. Home video rights are a separate license (how annoying). I've been told the clip of Eisenhower pushing the button to go from B&W to Color is cheaper. Anything else would require the digital master to be pulled and a duplication of the piece (you pay for that as well).

Well, sorry, dead end. But it was interesting to try

David

UCLA to screen Eisenhower Color Tape Friday July 25
 

UCLA will screen the restoration of the earliest surviving color video tape (from May 22, 1958) . It will be shown on Friday July 25, 2008 at 730 PM in its Wilder Theater in the Hammer Museum on Wilshire Blvd in Westwood (Los Angeles). Don Kent did the playback using Ed Reitan's modifications of the Ampex AVR-1 to play this earliest color tape format.

Billy Wilder Theater
Courtyard Level, Hammer Museum
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90024

FOUR PRESIDENTS ON TELEVISION

Dedication Day: NBC Washington Studios Dedication Ceremony
5/22/58. 30 min
DIR: Frank Slingland. WITH: Stuart Finley, David Brinkley, Ray Scherer.

Preserved from the oldest color videotapes known to have survived, this historic program documents the dedication ceremonies of WRC-TV, NBC's new studios in Washington, DC, the nation's first installation designed and built from the ground up for color television broadcasting. At the ceremonies President Dwight D. Eisenhower serves as chief speaker, his appearance marking the first color telecast of a president to originate from the nation's capitol. With the push of a button from NBC executive Robert Sarnoff, the black-and-white image miraculously turns into color.

The program will also present:

NBC News Special Report: "Nixon-Khrushchev Debate"
7/25/59. 20 min

At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow on July 24, 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev held an impromptu debate while standing before an exhibit of American color television equipment. Their lively exchange was recorded on color videotape and flown to the U.S. where it was aired on all three American networks the following day. The Archive presents this historic encounter as presented by NBC

See http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/screenings/screenings.html
under Preservationist's Choice.


Ed Reitan

G'day Ed. Thanks for letting us know about about the screenings. Pity for myself I live in Australia, I would of otherwise been able to somehow make the event and of course the 2007 Early TV convention to see those restored 1954 colour kinescope recordings you presented, but it's really good at least it's getting shown to the public for their enjoyment and hopefully sometime in the distant future when I get the money to do a USA trip, I'll have an opportunity to see it myself in a future screening.

More on Eisenhower 1958 dedication WRC-TV colour videotape
 

Hi,

Sorry I was not able to provide you with a copy of the NBC Special, but we have posted on the Archives website the moment the broadcast goes from black and white to color.

I hope you enjoy it.
http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/...-02-28-2011.do

Best,
Luis

Luis--

Nice job with the aspect ratio. Was your staff not aware that the television image was 4:3 in 1958, or did they just think that poor Robert Sarnoff was particularly short and stocky (and the Presidential seal is elliptical)?

Jeff Martin

I do not remember President Eisenhower being so fat.

It is a shame that even NBC cannot seem to get the aspect ratio correct.

Oldest Color Videotape--How to get a copy
 

Perhaps you have to be interested in selling it? Ask how to license it for sale.

Copies are being sold here:
http://www.dvdsentertainmentonline.c...first-color-tv

I have no idea whether this is a licensed vendor or not. Buyer beware.

It is on YouTube and several other video hosting sites.

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

I can tell you that the restoration to D-2 looks quite good on a broadcast monitor.

The story is here:
http://www.quadvideotapegroup.com/Ei...estoration.htm