Showcase Productions, Inc.
Technical Considerations
The great bulk of the materials which we have on hand, are the original 16mm composite kinescope negatives, although there is a sprinkling of 35mm materials, mag tracks, prints, and primitive videotapes as well. As a result of several tests, a procedure was developed to generate digital video masters which meet current broadcast and home video standards: (a) New composite 16mm prints are made from the kinescope negatives. In most cases, because the original printing (timing)instructions are not accurate for current technology, it is necessary to make both a first answer print (to adjust the timing) and a second print. (c) Even though very few prints were made from the original negatives, it is best that the new prints are made with the "wet-gate" process, to eliminate scratches. (d) After the print is made, it is transferred to digital format on a Rank "Turbo" film-to-tape machine. (e) A technician supervises the transfer, as scene-to-scene light level correction is required to counteract the "flares" and "dark spots" inherent in the original vacuum tube television cameras. (f) The digital tape is then run through specialized computer programs; our laboratory, Audio + Video, uses a second-generation Da Vinci computer enhancement system. The Da Vinci system permits significant improvement in both picture quality (removal of any surface scratches, spots, tears, grain,black halos, sharpening of focus, etc.) and sound quality (removal of all static, hisses, pops, etc.); as part of the sound transfer process, stereo soundtracks can easily be created. The end result is a digital master in any format desired, that meets current broadcast and video standards.
Color and Colorization
As indicated above, although the programs were all broadcast in color, most of the kinescope materials we have are black and white. It appears that at least some of them may, however, actually be in color: In the early years of television, the networks affiliates were not hard-wired together (and, of course, satellite broadcasting and the Internet were far in the future); the only way for an early-evening live broadcast in New York to be seen in farther-west time zones at a time approximating the early evening, would be to make a kinescope negative of the live broadcast, use it to create prints, and then rush the prints to the other time zones, where they could be projected on a screen which would then be photographed by a television camera. Once the technical problem of making a Technicolor kinescope negative was solved, a new problem arose -- it took too long for the laboratory to make Technicolor prints. However, in theory, there was a way to shorten the time considerably, through use of another color process, "Lenticular Color." The process, developed in France around the turn of the century, involved embossing tiny lenses on the back of the negative stock; on projection, the image could be separated by the lenses into the three primary colors, which in turn would be projected onto a screen to yield a full-color picture. The advantage was that considerable time was saved in the printing process, making it theoretically possible to move color prints to the other time zones quickly enough to have each program seen in the same general time slot. NBC worked with Eastman Kodak; the French process was successfully adopted for the U.S. Although with the passage of time much technical knowledge regarding the lenticular process has been lost, we believe that there is sufficient expertise available to make it possible to reproduce color materials if it turns out that some of the "black and white" materials held by NBC, Showcase, and archives, are actually lenticular.
A second avenue was explored as well: Time could be saved if another color process, direct color reversal, was used. Commercially, these processes were called "Ektachrome" and "Anscochrome"; we have only recently discovered a single Ansocolor reel of one of the Producers' Showcase programs. It appears to have been made by photographing a color television set, as corners are slightly rounded. Thus, it is possible that some of the materials will eventually turn out to be this type of color.
However, while both of the alternatives to Technicolor appear to have been brought to commercial reality, it all turned out to be unnecessary; by 1957, each of the three networks had connected their affiliates together by coaxial cable, making it possible to broadcast a single signal to all of the affiliates from a single transmitting point. This coincided with the shift of production, in the Fall of 1957, from live to filmed programming, from New York to Hollywood, and generally from longer formats to half-hour formats. A color print could be created at liesure, and then broadcast simultaneously across the entire country, or broadcast to affiliates separately for each time zone.
Leaving aside the possibility that color materials will eventually be located, the consensus is that these programs would be relatively inexpensive to colorize, since (a) they were created primarily on studio sets, resulting in relatively fewer motion and scene transitions, and (b) we will be creating digital masters to work with. Estimates of analog colorizing costs, with the bulk of the work being done offshore (currently in India), are in the $1,200 - $2,000 a minute range. Thus, a typical 90-minute Producer's Showcase program, minus the commercials, would have an actual running time of approximately 84 minutes, so that the colorizing cost would be in the range of $100,000 - $170,000.