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Who worked in master control back in the day?

O

oldschooler1

I know others have replied about MC ops in other threads, but I wanted to dedicate one to just this subject.

It would be especially cool to hear from folks who worked in a local TV station master control in the 50s and 60s (even the 40s, if you are out there...).

In the oldest days, what sorts of skills did it take to keep a station on the air for an 8-hour shift? Did you work alone? How many others worked the same shift with you, and what did you/they do? When I did radio, I took great pride in running a "tight" board -- no dead air, everything timed perfectly -- did you get that same thrill?

What were some of the trickier or more difficult maneuvers, like switching a film reel during a commercial break, or going between film, VT, slides? Were you responsible for those live station IDs we used to see and hear, with an ID slide up?

Do you remember your first VT machine, when it arrived, when you were figuring out what it could and couldn't do? How many VT reels did you have to use, at first? Ive heard some stations had only a couple reels, and just used them over and over and over.

How did you do "dead rolls" on film and VT, so shows would start right at the top of the hour? Did you use a stop watch, the sweep hand on the station clock? I'm talking about the days well before automated/semi-automated ACRs and other such carousel devices.

How did the network feed you, in the earliest days? Microwave? Longline? What was on the monitor when the network was "down", not feeding a network show? Did you see WNBC/WCBS/WABC local programming, etc.?

For dual or triple affiliates, how did you get feeds from more than one network?

Were you responsible for directing any live commercials from MC, or was that exclusively in the hands of production control, or as some stations called it, "subcontrol?"

When the networks started going to color in 1954, and you modified your transmitter to carry it, did your station also have a color program/air monitor in MC? Or did you just rely on B & W program/air monitors? In fact, how did the move to color change your jobs, if any?

In one very old book about TV production from the early sixties, I heard this sort of work referred to as "residue" directing -- anyone ever hear that term?

As you can tell, I am really curious about this aspect of broadcasting. To me, running a MC, knowing your way around all the units (film chain, slides, VT, camera shading, etc.) and keeping 100s of thousands of watts of electrical power running is such a cool thing to do.

Hope you oldtimers share your experiences and stories!
 
I too would be interested in hearing from some "old timers". I didn't get into TV until the late 1980's. Even I have seen and experienced the great change to automation and server-based video playback. The kiddies in master control today couldn't even run a 1990's-era manually operated tape-based master control with a Betacart. I can only imagine what it was like to run shows and breaks from 16mm film! 2" quad was tricky enough.

(begin rant)
The worst part is now stations (and even well-known cable outlets) can and do hire unskilled "master control operators" who don't even know what a waveform monitor is, let alone how to use it. Back in the day you actually had to know what you were doing!
(end rant)
 
davect said:
(begin rant)
The worst part is now stations (and even well-known cable outlets) can and do hire unskilled "master control operators" who don't even know what a waveform monitor is, let alone how to use it. Back in the day you actually had to know what you were doing!
(end rant)
Click to expand...

Also back in the day, each station had its own master control, unlike today, where many stations nationwide can be mastered from a single location.
 
I'd love to hear what it was like running Master Control before I did it in the late 1990s.
While I was there, we switched from running spots off tape to doing it digitally but we still ran shows off tape. I did know someone who had been a station engineer from 1949 to 1998 and he had some real stories to tell.

And damn, does it drive me nuts to see dead air or network programming returned to a few seconds late, because I and the other people at the station I worked for prided ourselves on running a very
tight board.
 
A friend of mine worked master control and production at various station. The best stories revolved around down time. He would talk about playing chess or poker between stopsets during network programming. The GM would walk upon this recreation and start to raise hell. My friend would show the GM the log indicating no spots were missed and the next local break was ten minutes away and two minutes before everyone would take their place. The GM grumbled and walked away.

His other story was during his time at KBHK San Francisco. During down time they would remove pictures of celebrity from magazines and then cut out their mouths and place the picture on the chromakey wall. An engineer would go on camera and his mouth was inserted in place of the celebrity mouth. A viewer at home at three in the morning would see a picture of, let's say, Cheryl Teague and the obvious voice of an engineer giving the legal ID.

Speaking of old days, here are a couple of videos of WRET Charoltte circa 1977.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAp1Q7BTUxQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JAWv7SLLdo

Warning, the engineers utter dirty words but they are used in a sentence.
 
radiorob2.0 said:
A friend of mine worked master control and production at various station. The best stories revolved around down time. He would talk about playing chess or poker between stopsets during network programming. The GM would walk upon this recreation and start to raise hell. My friend would show the GM the log indicating no spots were missed and the next local break was ten minutes away and two minutes before everyone would take their place. The GM grumbled and walked away.

His other story was during his time at KBHK San Francisco. During down time they would remove pictures of celebrity from magazines and then cut out their mouths and place the picture on the chromakey wall. An engineer would go on camera and his mouth was inserted in place of the celebrity mouth. A viewer at home at three in the morning would see a picture of, let's say, Cheryl Teague and the obvious voice of an engineer giving the legal ID.

Speaking of old days, here are a couple of videos of WRET Charoltte circa 1977.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAp1Q7BTUxQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JAWv7SLLdo

Warning, the engineers utter dirty words but they are used in a sentence.
Click to expand...
Those WRET videos were fun and funny! Notice, they were recording all that directly on to 2"? It's quite possible WRET did not yet have TK-76 3/4" portapaks yet - they may still have been shooting news footage on 16mm film.

And how cool was it to see them racking up a tape on the 2" machine? You could tell he was checking video and audio levels. This is TV at its mechanical finest.

Notice also, about 3:45 in to the second one, you saw the film chain rolling the movie -- and they walked by the rack of 16mm film. The 2" ACRs they were pointing out were state-of-the-art commercial playback systems for their time. I know WSTM in Syracuse was still using them up to the mid 90s.

The Gates audio board in production control -- and the ITC cart machines -- worked with both of those in radio in the 70s and 80s.

This is what it's like to work in TV master control --- a buncha foul-mouthed guys with nothing better to do in their down time than to play with the technology and poke fun at each other. But they knew their stuff.Great stuff, radiorob! Thanks!!!!!

Oh, and yes, bosses in TV could never understand that TV was often ten minutes of madness every hour, filled with 50 minutes of "down time." Frustrated the hell out of them. But so few of them ever rose from the ranks of engineers, so they didn't understand.
 
oldschooler1 said:
Those WRET videos were fun and funny! Notice, they were recording all that directly on to 2"? It's quite possible WRET did not yet have TK-76 3/4" portapaks yet - they may still have been shooting news footage on 16mm film.

And how cool was it to see them racking up a tape on the 2" machine? You could tell he was checking video and audio levels. This is TV at its mechanical finest.

Notice also, about 3:45 in to the second one, you saw the film chain rolling the movie -- and they walked by the rack of 16mm film. The 2" ACRs they were pointing out were state-of-the-art commercial playback systems for their time. I know WSTM in Syracuse was still using them up to the mid 90s.

The Gates audio board in production control -- and the ITC cart machines -- worked with both of those in radio in the 70s and 80s.

This is what it's like to work in TV master control --- a buncha foul-mouthed guys with nothing better to do in their down time than to play with the technology and poke fun at each other. But they knew their stuff. Great stuff, radiorob! Thanks!!!!!

Oh, and yes, bosses in TV could never understand that TV was often ten minutes of madness every hour, filled with 50 minutes of "down time." Frustrated the hell out of them. But so few of them ever rose from the ranks of engineers, so they didn't understand.
Click to expand...

The person who put up these clips mentioned that the camera with which they shot this video was a Norelco PCP-90 - which pre-dated the TK-76 in terms of portable video cameras. He said something about the studio cameras at then-WRET being Philips/Norelco PC-100's. I did notice an RCA TK-27 chain.
 
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