Technical Considerations

With a very few excepitons, the Showcase programs were preserved on kinescopes, a 16mm movie made by NBC by photographing a "kinescope tube." This was essentially a studio monitor which showed the signal being broadcast, as opposed to other forms which photographed a television screen showing the signal as received, subject to atmospheric interference. Because of the extremely low sensitivity of Technicolor film in use at the time -- an ASA of about 3 -- lighting which would have been bright enough to expose color film, resulted in an unviewable picture. Accordingly, 16mm black and white kinescopes were made of color programs until late in 1956, when technical advances made it possible to make color kinescopes. The first color kinescope was made of a PRODUCERS' SHOWCASE program, "THE LORD DON'T PLAY FAVORITES," on September 17, 1956. Despite this, with a single exception (for a single reel of "JACK AND THE BEANSTALK"), all of the kinescope materials Showcase has so far found, are black and white. This is not surprising, given that the Showcase budgets for programs costing about $500,000, allocated only $150 for the kinescopes on which they were preserved for posterity.

The great bulk of the materials which Showcase has on hand or has access to, are the original 16mm kinescope picture/track or composite negatives, or prints made from them. Over the years, Showcase has, by dint of numerous mastering and restoration experiments, in combination with the ceaseless march of digital technology, developed what Showcae believes to be a unique expertise in digitially mastering and restoring kinescope materials so that they meet at least the threshhold technical requirements for modern digital exhibition. The process is semi-proprietary; the best illustration of what Showcase has been able to achieve to date, is the Alcoa production of "AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS." Since that was mastered in 2007, the state of the art has continued to evolve. Most intriguing, tests have since then demonstrated clearly that a kinescope mastered in high definition, makes visible far more detail than can be seen from even the most expensively-mastered standard definition master; when the high definition master is "stepped down" to standard definition, it is still noticeably more detailed than a standard definition master. Showcase intends to routinely master and restore its programs in high definition, beginning in 2009, and stepping down to standard definition where required for licensing, even though the cost is significantly greater than standard definition mastering. Showcase's challenge to you is simple: Just screen AMAHL, and compare the technical quality to any other kinescope production available on video today. The technical superiority of the AMAHL, for both sound and video, is clear.

Color and Colorization

As indicated above, although the programs were all broadcast in color, most of the kinescope materials Showcase has physically inspected 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 from the three primary color negatives. 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 nineteenth century, involved the 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 in adopting the French process 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 for the Showcase library in archives, are lenticular, as has been reported by former NBC tedhnicians. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure, will be to physically examine the archival materials by hand.

A second possible solution to the time-zone prolem was also explored: Time could be saved if another color process, direct color reversal, was used. Commercially, these processes were called "Ektachrome" and "Anscochrome"; we have discovered a single Ansocolor reel of one of "JACK AND THE BEANSTALK," a PRODUCERS' SHOWCASE program. The kinescope negative appears to have been made by photographing a color television set, since the corners are slightly rounded, as was the cathode ray television tube in use in television sets at the time. Thus, it is possible that some of the archival materials will eventually turn out to be this type of color.

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, which could be located at any point in the coaxial cable. 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. (By that time, the major studios had figured out that television could be an important source of revenue for them, and they began producing television programming in Hollywood, with a vengeance.) 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 for the Showcase programming will eventually be located, the consensus is that these programs would be relatively inexpensive to digitally colorize, since (a) they were created primarily on studio sets, resulting in relatively fewer motion and scene transitions, and (b) Showcase will be mastering in high definition anyway, so that there will be hith-quality masters to work with. As with virtually all digital costs, estimates of digital colorizing costs, with the bulk of the work being done offshore (currently in India), have been dropping steadily, with the current cost of colorizing a full 90-minute Producer's Showcase program, now estimated at under $100,000, much less than half of the costs when colorizing of black and white movies was first developed. While this is a possibility, experience to date with the joint venture video releases, has been that black and white is not a drawback; in an odd way, it seems to lend authenticity to such historically-important programming.