Lenticular Color Kinescopes - Time To Restore?

[hubcity]

I posted a link in another thread regarding the color Ernie Kovacs sketch excerpt that NBC presented as part of their 60th anniversary broadcast; I think that its existence raises some other issues that folks here may be interested in.

The show aired in 1957 in color, and was apparently recorded for posterity using a lenticular kinescope process, which preserved the color information while allowing for fast development using black-and-white processing. The result looks like a black-and-white piece of film; color is retrieved by projecting light through the film at different angles, and then refocusing the three light paths on a single display. The trade-off is brightness; the resulting product is much darker than the original.

The segment NBC ran in 1976 was projected using the technology of the time, and that segment recently made its way to YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBg6ansaJA

As you can see in the clip, it was a pretty murky presentation; it may even have been murky on the original west-coast playback.

It seems to me that the technical issues posed by using the lenticular kinescope source could be offset by digital restoration, between simple contrast and gamma correction and the kind of fine kinescope-to-video restoration done by LiveFeed, who seem a bit proprietary about their process, but whose results at restoring the live video "pop" to kinescope playback are pretty clearly impressive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fen4NN99_xs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ7ND1o2OJA

(There may be other kinescope-to-video-quality restorers out there as well; I happen to know about that one and was impressed by their YouTube samples. The people doing the BW kinnie-to-color Doctor Who restorations using dot crawl patterns are another good example.)

It was the Kovacs special that led me to the awareness of lenticular kinescope, which at least provides a reliable guide to color restoration, and the above is part of my suggestion to the people at The Criterion Collection suggesting that they take it on, but it got me to thinking...do you suppose there's more color television from the mid-to-late 50's saved on lenticular kinescope that could be resurrected by these means?

 

[FreddyE1977]

It has qualities very much like the early subtractive color and Autochrome processes used in still photography in the late 19th. century. I suspect that with technology similar to the hideous "colorizing" that was used on televised movies in the 90's, you could make this look quite decent. (at least you would have some accurate color data to feed into the program instead of making it up as you go)

 

[Limp73]

Wasn't this also the way some network programs were copied for some stations that aired programming by two networks?

Programs like Star Trek,The Monkees,Tarzan I've seen aired on other evenings at other times in the late 1960s aside from its live feed times.

 

[oldiesfan6479]

Wasn't this also the way some network programs were copied for some stations that aired programming by two networks?

Programs like Star Trek,The Monkees,Tarzan I've seen aired on other evenings at other times in the late 1960s aside from its live feed times.

What you saw were 16mm reduction prints (from the original 35mm). If a station
didn't clear the show "live" and couldn't record the feed on tape for delayed airing,
the networks had a few 16mm prints made which were bicycled around to stations.

The first recipient got to air it x-number of days or a week late, then the next one
on a two-week (or so) delay, and so on. In certain cases, prints were sent out in
time for same-night airing as the network feed (ABC and KTVK Phoenix, for example).

In the case of CBS, there were at least two 16mm prints available, as those were
rolled as the on air backup to the 35mm primary on the New York and TV City
originations.

 

[Ultimajock]

...interestingly, the process you describe was indeed used to restore the second Beatles theatrical movie, Help!, in its last two video releases. United Artists never held onto a good archive print of the thing, and by the time the rights reverted back to The Beatles and independent producer Walter Shenson, the existing prints had badly faded colours. I think Turner and Thames also used it for their restoration of the colour sequences of the silent version of Ben-Hur...