Camera and telecine automatics

[old_tv_nut]

The brochure posted elsewhere here for a Philips camera mentioned optional automatic iris.

This got me thinking about: what was usual operating practice?
I'd think that auto iris mainly is something you would want if shooting in a war zone where you couldn't devote attention to setting it correctly. Not a good thing for studio operations and probably not for outdoor sports either (although there is the late afternoon problem of play moving from sun to shadows). Anyone know how networks and locals tended to use / not use auto iris?

The second area of interest is automatics for telecine chains. The early ones had automatic variable density filter wheels, and I always saw transition effects, at least in the local stations in Chicago, and maybe network stuff too. Automatic iris was used in chains built before the light level could be programmed scene by scene, and it resulted in bad effects on transitions. Typical case: movie cuts from indoor scene to night scene (maybe a train rushing through the night); auto level cranks up over a second or so, but the train is still seen only as a few totally clipped highlights of the headlamp leaving multiple images on a totally black background due to the vidicon lag; then the movie cuts back indoors and the first few frames are way overexposed until the filter wheel can crank back down.

Somewhere along the way, I recall WGN installed some weird sort of automatic color correction on their telecines too. It might have worked acceptably for a single still picture, or if it was used to measure a whole feature and pick one settting, but running it instantaneously (like the auto level control) meant that it responded to image content and would change noticeably from scene to scene or if large areas of the frame changed. I always thought it would have been better to let the film run with whatever faded color it had and let the home viewers adjust for it if they cared to.
Does anyone recall other stations doing this ill-advised automatic "correction" or who produced this equipment?