[QuadList] MTV and first video music shows

[Chuck Reti]

On Jun 16, 2011, at Jun 16 9:50 AM, David Crosthwait wrote:

> I think many engineers were so fed up with the TK 42 that they  
> personally guaranteed their destruction i.e. opened the dumpster  
> for the deposit. The ones that Chuck were referring to had  
> apparently been given special treatment (as was the case many times  
> with educational TV stations). Meaning, many of those entities  
> existed only on donated and discarded equipment. It was a personal  
> goal for each and every member of the staff to make the equipment  
> do what it wasn't supposed to do in terms of performance. Chuck  
> said:   "It was kind of an ad-hoc hobby gig, as we were working at  
> "real" day jobs early in our TV careers. A great many of us are  
> still doing this (since we have no other marketable or useful  
> skills)."  Even though the cameras that Chuck's associates used  
> were at the end of their production life, the care and feeding of  
> them produced really good clarity and color for what beasts they  
> were for the most part. And that is a real trick when you consider  
> that the light path was split up four different directions between  
> and Image Orth. and three vidicons. So, the video engineers in who  
> took an interest in those cameras deserve an award as far as I am  
> concerned.

In an exchange of emails with David regarding the look of these  
particular TK-42s, I passed along comments by my old friend Michael  
Hennessey, who was the person responsible for the set up and look of  
these cameras. This station we shot at was a very small, privately- 
owned UHF in suburban Detroit, quite literally operating on a  
shoestring, not an educational outlet, though we had done some  
earlier B&W shoots at university and educational TV studios. Mike's  
comments on TK-42 setup as folllows:

"...4.5 inch IO's had inherently good resolution and handled high  
dynamic range lighting very gracefully: Remember how good the TK60  
and Marconi (4.5 inch IO, BW) looked? One trick to achieving this  
look was to use no video processor gamma correction for the luminance  
channel. The camera was slightly underexposed on a log chip chart and  
then target voltage was adjusted to just cause the mid gray chip to  
"lift off". The exposure was then adjusted for a clean looking "X" on  
the scope. The color channels were then set to match luminance.  
Lastly, color channel pedestals were lowered to clip the bottom chip  
- - - this is where most of the color noise and lag were. I also  
cheated the IO's G4 and G5 adjustments (I think that's right, it's  
been a while) for best corner resolution.
Basically, RCA's recommended setup was based on how the camera should  
have worked, not on what made it look best..."

Mike often had big differences of opinion on this issue with his  
engineering supervisor at the TK-42-equipped station where his  
"regular" job was.

Chuck Reti
Detroit MI
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