[QuadList] Cronkite's first half-hour newscast... count the tape roll ins

[Dennis Degan]

		On Jul 18, 2009, at 4:27 PM, Ted Langdell wrote:

 > True enough about monitors and sets.
 > This is from September 1962... so the question would be... did CBS, 
NYC have Intersync on playback machines at that time?  The Geritol spot 
also rolls when taken.
 > Intersync was introduced at the SMPTE conference in April, 1960.

		I reply:

	I think it's safe to say that CBS had Intersync.  There are a couple 
of possible answers to the question concerning the breakups.  My first 
thought was that the tape was rolled and taken too soon; before the 
tape had finished locking up.  But at the end of the Kennedy interview 
clip, there's another breakup when switching back to Cronkite's live 
studio camera so it appears that the VTR playing the Kennedy interview 
was not vertically locked.  Cronkite said that the interview took place 
earlier that day.  Cronkite himself was seen in the interview clip.  
It's certainly possible for Cronkite to do the interview in the morning 
and fly back to New York to do the newscast that evening.  They 
probably did not have a telco link back to New York from the remote 
site.  The tape was most likely hand-carried to a local affiliate (in 
Boston, I'll bet) to feed it back to New York with no time to edit it 
(notice that the clip has no apparent edits in it; it's a straight lift 
from the interview).  Since the playback was coming from out-of-house, 
from a facility likely to not have a sync reference such as a cesium or 
rubidium frequency standard (nor a method to adjust it to match New 
York's timing), the breakup on-air was inevitable.  Who knows why they 
may have done this, but having worked with time-critical events such as 
this, I can tell you that sync lock was the least of their concerns.   
;)
	Another breakup occurs when Cronkite leads to the Dan Rather story 
from Plaquemine, Louisiana.  Probably, the same thing happened in that 
case as well:  The story was a feed from a local station in Louisiana 
running without the benefit of its sync matching into New York's.  Even 
if it originated from a film chain, breakup would be expected.
	As for the Geritol commercial, I have no way of being certain, but 
this could have been a live commercial coming from a different studio 
also not locked to CBS New York.  Or I could simply be completely wrong 
about any or all of this . . . .   ;)

			Dennis Degan, Video Editor-Consultant-Knowledge Bank
	  					NBC Today Show, New York