Camera and telecine automatics

[W.B.]

Originally Posted by old_tv_nut

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?

What you described seemed to be worse on film chains that were made by RCA - and was very noticeable with their TK-27's. It was highly noticeable, in New York, on such stations as WOR-TV and WPIX (though WNEW-TV used the same chain). This "auto iris" fixture seemed in place so as to lessen human involvement in monitoring film picture quality from scene to scene. And Chicago, in terms of telecines, was most definitely an RCA town. (As opposed to New York where several stations had RCA's and a handful - WCBS-TV and WABC-TV come to mind - had General Electric chains.) NBC was the network that used RCA chains in their setup (no surprise - RCA owned them then), but CBS and ABC networks used GE's. Looking at old TV clips online of old network film presentations, did you see such auto-iris examples from CBS or ABC?