Ye Olden TV Days

[David Kaye]

Dang! I'm busy as a bee here today posting all kinds of stuff. Well, I'm
waiting for some stuff to arrive, so I've got the time.

I began in TV engineering in ye olden tube and film chain days, at least
KCSM-TV still had them, and there were still some remote trucks out there
that had them when I went to the Valley and did some gopher stuff.

There's a broadcast engineering list I read and one post caught me because
it highlights the vast differences between then and now in TV. With
attribution to H.A.Stanton:

"Go to a remote, set up the excessively heavy gear and then
and then and then, it wasn't tall thin Jones. But soon as you
got a signal back and clock was perhaps 2 or 3 minutes to air
somebody would flick the breakers at the wall, the truck goes dark,
and you have to wait for tubes to warm up,and set up the cameras
again. This was black and white, and you still had to set shading etc.
Blow a slide projector lamp or the auto lamp changeover had a blown
spare bulb in the film projectors. That's cause "somebody" didn't replace
the main and you were on the spare not knowing it. All this without film
splices
etc failures. More in the next one."


Imagine that -- cameras with tubes that had to light up, cameras that had to
be calibrated (I remember fussing with chip charts and trying to get just
10, count 'em 10 simple shades of gray, and sometimes you STILL couldn't get
those shades. And then color. Color was a different animal entirely. You
had to balance your lighting or someone would come out looking like they had
a sunburn or jaundice.

And film chains. When I was at channel 31 in Sacto I was chastised because
I managed to wreck 3 filmed McDonald's commercials. I don't believe I
wrecked all 3, but I know that the film chain tore sprocket holes out of at
least one film. Y'see, commercials came on tiny little reels of 16mm film,
and the tension on the reels was designed for full-length movies lasting
half an hour per reel. So, unless you were super-careful you could damage a
spot and get the client angry. Naturally, McDonald's was one of our largest
clients and I caught all hell for stripping their spot reels.

And then there were pre-rolls. Videotape machines were slow to start and
sync, so anytime you had to use one you had to pre-roll from 5 to 8 seconds
before taking it to air. Different machine formats had different sync
times, and as a TD (technical director or board op), you had to have an
innate sense of timing to get the pre-rolls right or else you'd either upcut
something or have a black screen. A couple seconds of black and no worries.
But give them 5 or 6 seconds of black and the PD and the manager and whoever
else is awake is calling you wondering what's going wrong.

And the headaches you'd get if you had to work around the de facto video
standard of the day, the Ampex VR-1200 series. They made an annoying whine
that made it hard to talk. Many stations had them in a separate room so
that the control room people wouldn't go postal on each other. But poor
stations like Sacto's channel 31 had the VTRs in the same room, causing lots
of stress among the staff. Imagine spending a 6 or 8 hour shift listening
to an annoying whine from 3 or 4 video machines.

Phew! Well, the delivery guy hasn't arrived yet, but it's time to go
anyhow...