When I first started working in television in January, 1970. WIS-TV was in the process of upgrading their old TK-42 studio cameras to the new TK-44 models.
Left: Chip Charts like these were used to color balance a camera. I’m sure glad I didn’t work for long with those old four tube TK-42s, which required copious amounts of lighting. This caused television studios to become very warm due to the use of multi-kilowatt lamps (a problem that still exists somewhat today, but is less pronounced). The TK-42 cameras required more than an hour to set up and were comparatively unstable, making frequent adjustment necessary to maintain correct color balance between the red, green, and blue orthicon tubes. I remember having to tweak those cameras around the half way point in the old “Today In Carolina” show that ran from 9 to 10 AM every weekday. One particularly bad day I had to reregister (align the tubes so that the images from each tube was on exactly the same place in the color image) and color balance one of our cameras every time it was moved from the news desk to the weather set or the interview area. I almost made the decision to switch from color to black and white for the rest of the show, but being hard headed I whipped those orthicon tubes into shape time after time. I was one worn out puppy after that show.
Left: Registration charts were used to align the three or more tubes in the old color cameras. Today’s broadcast technicians won’t believe this but it took us an hour to fire up and then set up those cameras every day.
Within a couple of months, the TK-44 models rolled onto the receiving dock to a collective sigh of relief. The TK-44 used three of the more stable Plumbicon tubes that produced much sharper images. One video technician could set up three cameras using registration charts and chip charts in 15 minutes.
I loved those cameras! I had only one incident where I couldn’t get ours to color balance. For some reason one day I could not get the brightness of the blue tube down low enough to balance with the red or green tubes from the camera control unit in Master Control. It should be noted that our Master Control room was on the second floor and the studios were on the first. There was no way that I could see directly into the studio from there. So, with a heavy sigh, I grabbed my tool kit and hiked down the stairs to the studio to get to the broader range controls on the camera itself. The moment I walked into the studio I could see what the problem was.
The theme for the “Today in Carolina” show that day was water and fishing. Our new lighting guy who had tons of experience in stage lighting but was still new to television had placed blue “gels” in front of all the Kleig lights to give the impression that the show was underwater. That is pure genius for stage but not so much for television. The cameras looked really, really bad. Did I say “really” bad. After a discussion with the show’s director, we made the decision to remove the blue “gels” and do the show in normal lighting. I really felt bad for the lighting guy, he had a great creative idea. By this time, it was 15 minutes to air time and I had to scramble to be ready by air time. I spent a few minutes on a tall ladder helping clear the lights. Those lights were 15 feet off the floor. At the ten minute mark I ran upstairs and started the set up. Fortunately I had finished the registration part already, so all I had to do was to do the color balance with the chip chart. A mere thirty seconds before air, while we were in the station break between the “Today Show” and the “Today in Carolina” show I finished the last tweak and the floor crew cleared the chart stand mere seconds before Joe Pinner and Lynn Nevius appeared on camera. That was my closest call.
In 1975 we got our first portable Electronic News Gathering (ENG) camera, an Ikegami HL-75. It was a real breakthrough with tubes that held their registration and color balancing just required that you hold a piece of white paper in front of the lens and push a button. I will never forget the day that we unpacked that camera in the engineering department and started working with it. It would be a few weeks before we could put the recordings the camera made on the air as we needed to install the Time Base Corrector (TBC) which matched the timing of the camera to that of the television station.
I will always remember that day, November 12, 1975, a small tornado came by near the station and did minor damage in parts of Five Points and the surrounding area. When we heard the news department talking on the two way radio to our news crews in the field with their film cameras, Phil Bryant, the other engineer on duty and I yelled “Field Trip” to each other, grabbed the camera, just hours our of the crate, one of the ¾ inch video tape recorders and ran down to the parking lot. We loaded the station’s utility van with me in the back with the camera and Phil doing the driving duties. Five Points was just a few blocks away and we were there in minutes. Phil drove us up and down Hardin Street while I shot video out the side door of the van. Because it was raining we never got out of the van but restricted ourselves to a quick “drive by shooting” of the damage.
The news department was grumbling about not being able to get the film they shot developed in time for the 11 O’Clock Report when we got back to the station. Everybody gathered around the monitor as we played back the tape of the damage. Without the TBC we could not broadcast the raw video, or so we thought. Tom Bradford, our engineering supervisor had the brilliant idea of shooting the monitor with one of the studio camera to get the damage on the air. It worked perfectly, and for the first time in SC history, ENG video was used in a newscast in the state.
Later that evening right after the newscast, I received a call from my good friend, the soft spoken Milton Holladay, Chief Engineer for my old radio station WCOS. That tornado took down their 400 foot tower a few blocks from Five Points at the corner of Gervais and Millwood. When I joined Milton in the middle of the twisted mess that used to be the tower, I said that I wished that I had known this and shot video of the damage. He was just as glad that I didn’t. We got the AM station back on the air within a day by using a long wire strung between two trees in the tower field and the FM on a spare antenna mounted on the top of a wooden telephone pole next to the station. Messy, but it worked until the tower was rebuilt.
By the way, that month, I shot some video of the Carolina Clemson game the week we introduced that camera on the air. I was out there to do a live report at the end of the game. My friend Drew Stewart used in a special report that he recorded in the 90s. It can be seen on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aORQt9u0Q
When I was at SCETV, the next big advance in broadcast camera technology came along. The Ikegami computer controlled camera. One button setup for both registration and color balance. Not only that, but the computer constantly monitored the performance of the camera and made minor adjustments all by itself.
Today, I sit here and marvel at the camera in my cell phone. It does not need to be color balanced or registered. All you need to do is point and shoot and the resulting video is so much better, cleaner and vivid than the best broadcast camera back in the day. So much so that there is an app that many broadcasters can purchase for their reporters phones to get live video back to the station from any where they might be in the world. When somebody figures out how to make a steady video out of something shot with a shaking hand, we will really have something. Oh MY!
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