1958 CBS Playhouse 90 Nutcracker

[tornadoman]

Can't believe I didn't come across this earlier, but the full version of the 1958 CBS color quad videotape of The Nutcracker has been up on YT since New Year's Eve of last year. Even has the original commercials too! Decent quality to boot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4m_RMnLpwo

[etype2]

Thanks for posting this.

[old_tv_nut]

Thanks for posting. Decent quality, as you say, but the level of digital coding artifacts is masking the original quality to some extent. It would be nice to find a version coded with a higher bit rate.

[old_tv_nut]

I just fast forwarded through it to see the production techniques.

Things I noticed:

Use of blue screen:
1) In the opening, where you see a typical failure in the threshold setting, and one of the dancers is partially and intermitently transparent.
2) In the scene where Drosselmeyer produces the mice.
3) In the final scene where the princess and prince are in front of a background scene that gradually fades out to the blue screen itself.
RCA had fashioned a way to use the blue channel of the TK-41 camera as a keying signal. Unlike modern keying, where the key color (usually green) can be selected as a hue and saturation as well as brightness, this blue key was dependent on the blue channel amplitude only.

Wavy dream (or watery) effect: done by adding an audio sine wave into the camera horizontal sweep. This had been used previously in monochrome cameras. Probably not the first use in color, but possibly. You can see that it was installed on only one color camera here, as it abruptly disappears when cameras are switched.

One other thing still notable in 1958 was the use of fixed focal length lenses and dollying, rather than zoom lenses.

[old_tv_nut]

Also note: This must have been edited by physically slicing with a razor blade and splicing with adhesive tape.
http://www.quadvideotapegroup.com/ta...otape-editing/

[Yamamaya42]

Originally Posted by old_tv_nut

Also note: This must have been edited by physically slicing with a razor blade and splicing with adhesive tape.
http://www.quadvideotapegroup.com/ta...otape-editing/

AHHH! the good old Schick/ Scotch edit method!

[Penthode]

Thanks for linking this!

I find it interesting that one of the TK41's has the bad pink corner color shading. But also consider they would have likely not noticed it at home or in the studio because all color CRTs were round and the shading would have been cut off.

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Penthode

Thanks for linking this!

I find it interesting that one of the TK41's has the bad pink corner color shading. But also consider they would have likely not noticed it at home or in the studio because all color CRTs were round and the shading would have been cut off.

Actually, they could have seen it at the studio during camera setup, as the professional color monitors had an underscan setting to view the whole raster. But they would have known it was hidden on home sets with normal scan. During production, the monitors would be set to normal scan.

[Penthode]

As I was watching and seeing how soft the video was, I was reminded of a story the late Ken Davies from the CBC told me some years ago. He was working in the '50's on a new CBC microwave cross Canada network link employing full video bandwidth links. That is links which would pass the full 4MHz plus video signal. Ken said at the time the AT&T links used across much of the US were bandwidth limited for many years to no more than about 3.0 to 3.5MHz, which could not carry the full color video signal. To circumvent the link limitations, a process was used to hetrodyne the chrominance signal and subcarrier to around 2.6MHz for the link and then hetrodyned back to 3.58MHz at the receiving end. Of course much of the high frequency luminance information would be lost which would result is soft video.

Ken said the degradation was quite noticable which explained the extra effort CBC put into the wideband link leading up to Canada beginning NTSC color in 1966.


I believe the Playhouse 90 recording reveals many things about the state of the technology at CBS in those early color days.The live studio production in NYC was fed via AT&T microwave link to Television City in Los Angeles where this recording was made. This is my take on further aspects of the color videotape:

1. This live Playhouse 90 production from NYC appears to have used only two TK41 cameras evident by the frequency of the impaired (Pink) camera useage. It looks like the cameras were alternated.

2. The studio switching was very basic: there did not appear to be any split screen or dissolves because I still think it was beyond their color capability at the stage.

3. The color keying was a separate piece of hardware.

4. The apparent bad edits: I suspect this was before the process of the use of the chemical identification of the control track pulse on tape with mechanical splicing. However the CBS Engineers thought it was probably good enough as viewed on a monitor. The monitor scanning timebases would rapidly re-phase so that the splices would not be noticeable. What I do not think the CBS Engineers anticipatedt was how the Ampex Color VTR at Television City Los Angeles would handle it! I believe the NYC splices played havoc with the Ampex capstan and quad head scanner servos. The inherent inertia would track time to find proper phase.

[old_tv_nut]

I found a dissolve at 56:55.

Also, the vertical resolution looks as bad as the horizontal to me, and the digital coding is contributing about as much degradation as the source, depending on motion.

I don't know if I have ever seen something passed through the narrowband links, but I would expect the horizontal resolution to be more reduced, maybe worse than a typical home VCR. I don't know if there are any verified video samples to be found.

[old_tv_nut]

I looked in Television Engineering Handbook (Fink, 1957) which says the L1 cable color signal had 2 MHz luma with heterodyned chroma between 2.1 and 2.7 MHz (so +/-300 kHz chroma bandwidth).

VHS has a luma limit of about 3 MHz. This Nutcracker video doesn't look limited to 2 Mhz to me. Again, some of the resolution degradation could be due to the digital coding.

[etype2]

The video looks reminiscent of the quality I remember from 50’s color sets.

[bluenorm]

an early chistmas gift, thanks cbs

[ceebee23]

That the tape still exists is a Christmas miracle itself! Despite the technical limitations it is still amazing. I do wonder how many people saw it in color in 1958.

BTW Christmas Day 1958 was a Thursday....

[dtvmcdonald]

Originally Posted by ceebee23

That the tape still exists is a Christmas miracle itself! Despite the technical limitations it is still amazing. I do wonder how many people saw it in color in 1958.

BTW Christmas Day 1958 was a Thursday....

I probably did. My uncle had a color set ... about one mile from the transmitter.

One thing I remember from back then (1954-1960) is color pictures
created locally (our local NBC was all-color for in-studio productions) were
better than ones from the network. I'm pretty sure I would have not been able
to say why ... just "it looks better". It did look exactly the same ... if the home set was adjusted right ... at home as in the studio audience looking
at the color monitor as I remember. By 1960 our next door neighbors also
had color .. we were 3.5 miles from the transmitter. By 1957 I was a very expert color set user control tuner. Most people didn't know how to set the
fine tuning.