Colour pictures old and new

[Welsh Anorak]

Hi
I think it depends on the care exercised. Recently ITV repeated the Inspector Morse canon in the afternoon. As you know, that was filmed on Arriflex cameras on real film and much care was obviously taken in post. However, the re-run was edited down for timing and the whole lot was copied to tape with jerky motion and washed-out colours - exactly why isn't clear, like the pictures.
I suppose they would say that everyone has seen these so it doesn't matter, but a little pride in a flagship programme of some years back wouldn't go amiss.
I think the re-done credits at the top of the programme said it all - 'Based on characters created by Alan Dexter'.
Oh well, things can only get worse....

Glyn

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by Focus Diode

Paul's comments about old VT material going through several analogue generations is very true. I discovered on old "Fawlty Towers" repeat txd in the 1980s on VHS. The picture quality was considerably better than on later repeats! Can't comment on the DVD set as I've not seen it, but expect it to be upto the usual excellent high standards.

Originally Posted by arjoll

Its being repeated (again!) on TV One here, the quality is excellent both on analogue (VHF) and Freeview satellite.

Fawlty Towers is regularly repeated on various BBC channels and the quality is usually typical late 70s BBC videotape. There have been numerous VHS and DVD releases, and these vary hugely in quality - the worst examples look as if they have been copied from a VHS off air copy, and not a very good one at that. The true explanation is probably that they've been mastered from a Betacam analogue copy made for commercial purposes without much care and attention.

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

I think it depends on the care exercised. Recently ITV repeated the Inspector Morse canon in the afternoon. As you know, that was filmed on Arriflex cameras on real film and much care was obviously taken in post. However, the re-run was edited down for timing and the whole lot was copied to tape with jerky motion and washed-out colours - exactly why isn't clear, like the pictures.

The ITV treatment of the Morse productions has been shameful. Originally these were prestige productions with very high production values. The direction was carefully arranged so the ad breaks (3 per hour) slotted seamlessly into the narrative. They have subsequently been re-edited for 4 ad breaks per hour in a crude and insensitive manner. The transfer to VT also suggests several intervening analogue VT generations, though it isn't the worst transfer around. The new 'ITV corporate' end titles are intrusive and make it impossible to read the production credits.

Presumably the original 16mm film is still in existence, so new digital masters could be made if the budget was available. ITV has made a lot of money out of Morse and it's deplorable that they are prepared to cut corners like this. Says it all about ITV's corporate culture I suppose

Paul

[Focus Diode]

All very interesting indeed! I dug out my recordings of "Fawlty Towers" episodes recorded in 1985 and 1995. The former episode was considerably sharper and had more "gloss" than the 1995 repeat and were episodes from the first 1975 series.

The 2" Quad to 1" debate is interesting too. Presumably the formats co-existed for awhile in the early 1980s as the 1983 "Doctor Who" story "The Five Doctors" is widely reported to have been recorded on 2" Quad tape, the last story to do so.

US material: Usually transmitted from film prints (or mastered to PAL VT perhaps?) originally,such as "Star Trek". By the 1990s however they seemed to transmit from telecine remastered onto NTSC VT with the usual horrible effects as Ajol's photos reveal. Only in recent years have NTSC conversions improved tremendously in all respects, a recent repeat being very good quality indeed.

Now an interesting one. I have the BBC Video "Dr Who-The Curse of Peladon" which survives as an NTSC conversion re-converted to PAL. The NTSC master for episode 3 was destroyed after the original re-conversion to PAL.
The colour quality on episodes 1,2 and 4 are fine, but episode 3 is another matter, very yellow throughout!

In danger of going completely off topic, I agree the recent "Inspector Morse" repeats are shameful. In addition the first episode was edited.

Brian R

[ppppenguin]

Originally Posted by Focus Diode

US material: Usually transmitted from film prints (or mastered to PAL VT perhaps?) originally,such as "Star Trek". By the 1990s however they seemed to transmit from telecine remastered onto NTSC VT with the usual horrible effects as Ajol's photos reveal. Only in recent years have NTSC conversions improved tremendously in all respects, a recent repeat being very good quality indeed.

NTSC based material can suffer very badly. A lot of US shows were originated on film at 30fps and TK'ed for TV at 24fps using a horrible process called 3:2 pulldown. This gives odd motion effects that never seemed to bother US audiences. The fun comes when a recording with 3:2 pulldown is converted to PAL. A conventional converter can give very odd effects. There have been special converters that can detect the 3:2 pulldown cadence and attempt to put it right. This works well if the 3:2 sequence is continuous. Often it is not, due to editing in the NTSC video domain.

More generally, good quality NTSC>PAL conversion has been possible since about 1980 when the BBC "ACE" converter was designed. It was not perfect but certainly much better than anything that had gone before. It had inevitable compromises between several different artefacts. The most noticeable was probably between blurred motion and juddery motion. The best modern converters, first available at a price in the early 1990s, used motion compensation techniques to give excellent results on all pictures. Such high quality converters are still fairly expensive and it's likely that a lot of material is converted using simpler methods.

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by ppppenguin

The best modern [NTSC-PAL] converters, first available at a price in the early 1990s, used motion compensation techniques to give excellent results on all pictures. Such high quality converters are still fairly expensive and it's likely that a lot of material is converted using simpler methods.

I remember watching live coverage of the return of the Queen to Buckingham Palace after the death of Diana on ITV and CNN via a cable system. CNN were using the ITV pictures, which had presumably been converted to NTSC, sent to Atlanta, converted back to PAL and sent to the European satellite. They looked absolutely abysmal - I'd expect CNN to use the best standards converters available given the amount of conversion they must do, but you certainly couldn't see it on the screen. (The commentary by the anchor in Atlanta was also laughably inaccurate but that's another issue).

The most notable characteristic of converted NTSC material is unreadable scrolling credits at the end.

Chris Morris's comedy series The Day Today featured mock American reports by 'Barbara Wintergreen' (Rebecca Front). These were lovingly post produced to mimic typical NTSC converted material - poor definition, tints, crushing, motion blur etc. The sound also had the overcompressed peak limited characteristics typical of 1980s US news reporting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Today

Fortunately less and less NTSC conversion takes place now as more and more US material is sourced in component form.

Paul

[Trish]

Lovely topic. One that I can discuss from experience, as a colourist of the many programmes old and new that are being discussed and are being broadcasted to this date.

Many of the programmes were shot using Plumbicon cameras that ppppenguin and myself know well. They had many defects and if the racks person wasn't exactly up to the mark, the results could be pretty poor. Issues to do with blooming, differential colour lag, noise under low light, registration errors, colour shading differences at various brightness levels. All of those things contributed to the look that early camera's have that is unique to them. Modern chip cameras are far superior to the Plumbicon ones on all fronts.

As for film. Many of the drama productions were shot on 16 mm film. It was (and to some extent still is) an accepted long term format. It enabled prints to be made and distributed, you could Telecine it for 625 and 525 with ease, and it would look good in either format.

What has happened since the late 70s and the mid 80s has been the use of camera original negatives in Telecine, rather than prints. In fact I'm one of the few people that pioneered using the negatives, and getting it accepted by the production companies as being safe. The first place we really used it was on pop video's.

Up to that point most people were using prints. Unless they used low contrast stock and took care on the grading of the final prints, the results in Telecine tended to be poor. The prints on low contrast stock were in the main muted colourwise and had a softness about them, along with a fair amount of film grain. Negative transfers were bright and sharp, they also gave a lot of detail in the black areas, that you couldn't get out on a print. Of course there were drawbacks from using negative, and I could go on for pages about this. But I will stop here for the moment.

As for tape formats having an effect....... I really don't think that had anything to do with the final output. It should be noted that when the A format and C format machines were coming in, it roughly coincided with the increased use of negative transfers. hence why a lot of people think that the recording medium (tape) had a dramatic effect.

As for the tools we had (and have) as colourists. That has changed beyond recognition over the decades. It has gone from simple adjustments of black, gamma, whites and aperture correction, to being able to make any curve we like, plus being able to select any colour and manipulate it, along with niceties as being able to track objects. Noise / grain reduction is now part of the colourists toy box.... So that's another item we have.

I number of the old programmes have gone through regrading and look really good. Unfortunately it isn't normal practice, as the budgets are not there for that.

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

The most notable characteristic of converted NTSC material is unreadable scrolling credits at the end.

That also applies to straight transfers of film. The most recent (last ten years) units that we have, have a specific set of controls to remove the vertical jitter on credits, they can be made to be ultra smooth and earily readable.

As for DVD mastering........ That is something I have almost cried about, especially when I have seen something I have mastered, turned into a heap of blurry, smeary junk by some spotty faced erk, that doesn't know how to read a scope, or know anything on the technical front regarding television. Sadly it's becoming normal to employ people with virtually zero experience to do work that does require a good eye and understanding about compromises.

Trish

[Andy Green]

Originally Posted by Trish

Many of the programmes were shot using Plumbicon cameras......<snip>.... Issues to do with blooming, differential colour lag, noise under low light, registration errors, colour shading differences at various brightness levels. All of those things contributed to the look that early camera's have that is unique to them. Modern chip camera's are far superior to the Plumbicon ones on all fronts.

Thanks Trish for putting what I had observed in to the correct terminology!

Originally Posted by Andy Green

Also, older tube cameras suffered from 'lag' or 'smear' when panning across bright objects, - sometimes, this 'smear had a different effect on some colour tubes, resulting in coloured 'smearing'. Also, one could see the effect if any cameras had not been converged correctly, with coloured 'fringing'. This was pretty common to see here in Ireland in the early 80's - maybe the budget wasn't there to align the cameras before every show!

Can you explain the greenish tinge I spoke about in my previous post?

Andy

[ppppenguin]

Originally Posted by Andy Green

....there appeared to be a greenish 'tinge' to some scenes of videotaped drama, which wasn't present with film, or even well lit 'live' TV - to this day, I don't know if it was the camera or the VTR process - I suspect the camera, though.

I can't see any reason for this. The cameras of the time were capable of very good colour fidelity. Certainly within the BBC there was a lot of effort made to match the appearance of filmed inserts to studio based material.

Originally Posted by Andy Green

If you look at some american colour videotaped material from early60's, you can see the blooming effect when a black halo surrounds a bright object (that we used to see on Black and white cameras) - I think they were using Image orthicons but in a colour camera - maybe someone with more knowledge of camera types can elaborate further.

The Plumbicon camera tube arrived just in time for the start of colour TV in Europe. Before then you had the choice of image orthicons or vidicons. The vidicon was OK for telecine with high and consitent light levels but matching 3 tubes for studio colour was all but impossible. Image orthicon cameras, with 3" or 4.5" tubes were huge. I believe that there were experimental cameras with an IO tube for green and vidicons for red and blue. A valiant attempt to reduce the size without reducing the quality too much. Remember that most of the fine detail comes from the green channel.

I think that both the BBC and ITV companies were dreading the idea of starting a colour service with the massive US style IO cameras so the Plumbicon arrived just in time. The first generation Plumbicon cameras (Philips PC60, Marconi MkVII and the legendary EMI 2001) could all give very good results. The latter 2 used 4 tubes, the 4th tube for luminance, which simplified many of the conundrums of camera design. It particularly helped colour registration.

[Trish]

Originally Posted by Andy Green

Thanks Trish for putting what I had observed in to the correct terminology!
Can you explain the greenish tinge I spoke about in my previous post?

YW Andy

May I just say a word about the green cast. I'm not sure if you just mean the images from studio cameras, or all sources.

Shading errors that exist on cameras tend to appear on the green channel first. It doesn't take much for that to show through.

On the Telecine / film front. We always joked about the Denham green look and we attributed that to the Rank film lab that was based at Denham. Invariably the prints they produced had a green look to them, and it wasn't that easy at the time, to remove that bias without screwing up other colours. Nowadays it can be corrected fairly easily.

The 'Inspector Morse' series was graded by people that I knew. Without slagging any of them off, they seem to have eyes that couldn't see the errors. It annoyed the hell out of me at the time.

Trish

[Andy Green]

Originally Posted by Trish

May I just say a word about the green cast. I'm not sure if you just mean the images from studio cameras, or all sources.

Shading errors that exist on cameras tend to appear on the green channel first. It doesn't take much for that to show through.
Trish

Well, I was specifically talking about images from studio cameras, I only noticed it on videotaped shows from the 70s, and only on some indoor scenes. It was quite prevalent, and it wasn't just our TV!

[ALANS ANITAS]

I seem to remember, back in the 70s & 80s that Granada seemed to have one camera, used on 'Coronation Street', that had gross convergence errors. Does anyone remember this and know the cause?

ALAN

[Tazman1966]

Hello Alan.

I sure do remember and if I trawl through my...ahem!...the wifes Coronation Street DVDs I'll find out from when it was.

All the best,

Tas

[Welsh Anorak]

Hi
Thanks Trish for mentioning the dire quality of Rank prints - you could always spot the colour tints originating from there (I used to show 16mm film).
They don't keep, either - we saw a cinema (35mm) screening of 'Life of Brian' recently and it was virtually blue-free and washed out, and tailed with the Rank logo....
Glyn