What if TOS Season 1 was filmed in Black and White?

[Christopher]

Sometimes you had to move the antenna and your body into just the right orientation to get a good picture, and then stay there because it'd fade out if you moved.

Who says interactive TV is a modern innovation?

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

Mom's kitchen tin foil sure came in handy, didn't it?

I never thought of it before, but I imagine the idea of wearing 'tin foil hats' must be an invention of the radio age. Wouldn't have meant much, earlier that that, would it?

 

[Maurice]

^Oddly, I can't see any difference in the image on this page, but when I click on it, it opens a new page where the image is slightly different.

The last time I posted a gif image, it "worked". I know not what was difference was this time..

When I click on it it opens in another window and the roll animates.

 

[Melakon]

Sometimes you had to move the antenna and your body into just the right orientation to get a good picture, and then stay there because it'd fade out if you moved.

Who says interactive TV is a modern innovation?

This is why people had children during the 50s and 60s, so dads could watch the game.

"OK, son, now move the rabbit ears a bit to the left... rotate them to the right a half turn... now raise your right arm... perfect! Don't move."

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

Also worth remembering that TV screens at the time had rounded corners so portions of the image would be cut off. And can you do a gif of the picture flipping because you don't have the vertical hold knob set juuuust exactly right?

If I'm remembering right, wasn't it supposedly not a good idea to have anything critical happen on a program around the edges of the filmed area, because tv sets tended to get cut-off images at the edges? I think it was about ten percent of the top of the image, as I see many head shots of actors on older programs who were framed rather low in the shots. I always assumed that was so the tops of their heads would't get cut off the edge of the screen.

When I click on it it opens in another window and the roll animates.

Yeah, that's what I get too, Maurice.

 

[Christopher]

I never thought of it before, but I imagine the idea of wearing 'tin foil hats' must be an invention of the radio age. Wouldn't have meant much, earlier that that, would it?

Well, sure. The idea is to block The Government's mind-control signals. Or the aliens'. If there's any difference.

The principle is that of the Faraday cage: surround something with metal and it'll block radio signals. The problem is, you can't completely surround the brain with metal because the face and the neck get in the way. It turns out, then, that tinfoil hats would actually amplify any signals because they're sort of shaped like radio antenna dishes.

 

[The Old Mixer]

So is all of this nostalgia for crappy old-fashioned broadcast signals a sign that in the age of HD, perhaps picture quality has become a little too perfect...?

Sometimes you had to "OK, son, now move the rabbit ears a bit to the left... rotate them to the right a half turn... now raise your right arm... perfect! Don't move."

There may be youngsters in this thread who think you're joking....

 

[Warped9]

No question watching TOS today is better in terms of picture quality and sound...and no commercials. But the televisions back in the day were all we had and there was no better alternative. Nonetheless we were still excited to watch a show that was unlike anything then on TV.

A distinct plus in the old days: commercial breaks were fewer and a lot shorter than today. Today's commercial television is a huge pain in the ass.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^Yet still long enough to make a quick run to the kitchen or bathroom, back when we didn't even have VCRs....

 

[bbailey861]

So is all of this nostalgia for crappy old-fashioned broadcast signals a sign that in the age of HD, perhaps picture quality has become a little too perfect...?

In my case it isn't so much that - although I do find the 4K picture too perfect - but that the nostalgia for the 'crappy old-fashioned broadcast signal' takes me back to my childhood which for me brings back a lot of great memories. Watching Star Trek back then is one of them.

 

[Warped9]

I remember a time when TOS was being rerun daily after school around 5pm. Every evening my mother would have to call me to the dinner table more than once..or twice. Later on I'd ask to be excused and eat dinner on a coffee table in the family room so I could watch Star Trek. Boy, would she get exasperated sometimes.

 

[Christopher]

A distinct plus in the old days: commercial breaks were fewer and a lot shorter than today. Today's commercial television is a huge pain in the ass.

On the other hand, now we can record shows and fast-forward through the commercials.

Although modern TV has its own drawbacks. My least favorite is interference. In analog TV, if there was signal interference or loss, it just caused a snowy picture and white noise, and you could still roughly see and hear what was going on. Digital is more all-or-nothing -- if there's an interference or dropout, the picture and sound may just freeze for a while and then jump forward, so you miss what happened in the gap.

 

[HGN2001]

If I'm remembering right, wasn't it supposedly not a good idea to have anything critical happen on a program around the edges of the filmed area, because tv sets tended to get cut-off images at the edges? I think it was about ten percent of the top of the image, as I see many head shots of actors on older programs who were framed rather low in the shots. I always assumed that was so the tops of their heads would't get cut off the edge of the screen.

Yes, it's called the "action safe" area. All four sides of a picture were chopped off by the rounded corners and sides of TV sets, so shows had to confine action to the middle of the frame.

Today's DVDs/Blu-rays usually give us the whole picture, and digital TVs allow us to display them.

Harry

 

[Maurice]

Title safe: An area visible by all reasonably maintained sets, where text was certain not to be cut off.

Action safe: A larger area that represented where a "perfect" set (with high precision to allow less overscanning) would cut the image off.

Underscan: The full image area to the electronic edge of the signal.

From Wikipedia (link) w/example images.

 

[diankra]

As a side note, this difference between the full image and the viewable image has been a bit of a problem in restoring the Doctor Who episodes which were made on videotape, but now survive as film prints - made, effectively, by filming a TV screen (but using specialised equipment to avoid the problems that many of us will have encountered when we tried to get our dads to record the TV with their cine camera back in the pre-VCR days!).
The filmed copy would be slightly zoomed in to avoid showing the edges of the screen, so the 1970s episodes where an off-air colour VT recording have been used to recolourise higher definition black and white films copies had to be put through a cropping process to match them up (and lose the extra little bits of image on the edges of the VT copy).
To further complicate it, the actual amount cropped was purely down to how the guy doing the transfer set up the equipment that day, so it varies from episode to episode; in some cases, two film copies of a particular episode were made at different dates, so there's sometimes been a choice between a severely zoomed copy that survives in good quality, and another copy with more of the original image but which is of lower definition, or more badly damaged, with all the restoration headaches that involves.

Getting back onto Trek, I wonder... would NBC be consistent in how much of the TOS film prints went out on air, or would the transfer vary from episode to episode, or between the East Coast and West Coast transmitters (and ISTR that the Solow-Justman book mentions that they had to ship a 16mm print to Canada a day ahead of delivery to NBC?).

 

[Michael]

I know I'm a bit late to the party. The idea of seeing how Star Trek looks and works in black and white really fascinates me. I'm a huge fan of the look of shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. And I wonder if Star Trek would work as well as it did without color.

So I edited a little video showing some scenes from the first season. My main focus was on two kinds of sequences: Those which employed a varied palette of color and those which made use of stark contrast, lights and shadows.

You can watch the result here.

 

[Warped9]

As I said upthread that looks very much like what it was like when I first started watching TOS although the original broadcast wasn't as sharp.

Seeing it now with good resolution I think it looks awesome in b&w. The monochrome look takes away what some might consider a dated colour palette and gives it a touch more atmosphere. The sets look just a bit less austere in some places.

I like it!

 

[plynch]

Maybe I will watch my next one in b/w. It's gonna be Return to Tomorrow, which is not so moody an ep, but we'll see.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

I know I'm a bit late to the party. The idea of seeing how Star Trek looks and works in black and white really fascinates me. I'm a huge fan of the look of shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. And I wonder if Star Trek would work as well as it did without color.

So I edited a little video showing some scenes from the first season. My main focus was on two kinds of sequences: Those which employed a varied palette of color and those which made use of stark contrast, lights and shadows.

You can watch the result here.

Find the official release of "The Cage" print in B&W.

 

[plynch]

Just watched the montage. Wow. I like it better than color. At our wedding, I asked the photog to do some in b/w. Color is kind of overwhelming and b/w allows you to focus on details of faces more, I think.