Good News, Bad News…RCA TK 76
Good News, Bad News…RCA TK 76
The good news was, that now, any news could be covered more easily with the new TK 76 Electronic News Gathering (ENG) camera introduced in 1976. This was the fully self contained portable color camera RCA made for news crews. It weighed 19 pounds.
The bad news was that portable video tape machines were still not up to the job. Granted, there was the Ampex VR 3000 that came out in ’67, which was a suitcase sized 2″ quad unit, and in 76 Ampex rolled out the VPR-1, helical scan, Type C, 1-inch, videotape recorder, but all they could do is record and play back. You could not edit on them in the field.
Basically, you had to either feed pictures live via microwave as is being done in this shot from KETV, or tape the story and rush back to the station to edit it for air. You could also feed the taped story back to the station to be recorded on a machine there for editing, but then you are into a second generation and back then, that was not a good thing. How did you do it? Anyone have stories about how it was done where you were?
After interning at the NBC affiliate in Paducah, KY the summer of 1979, I got my first job shooting with the TK-76B and Sony BVU 110 VCR that fall. It was at the ABC affiliate, WTVW in Evansville, IN. We were jealous of the photogs in Indy and Louisville when we encountered them because they had the much lighter, record only Sony BVU-50 VCR’s. But during that summer in Paducah, it was TK-76’s and Sony 3800’s.
Yup and the microtime image enhancer/noise reducer (which many folks kluged with a 3.58 feed) to pretend you had “High (HUH?) Band color.
At WTOP in Washington, the first live ENG truck was a Chevy van with a PCP-90 and an IVC one inch helical videotape machine, around 1973-74.
Thinking more about it, I believe Sony made a UMatic deck at the time that was a record-only device, which made it lighter. That is what we used at the beginning.
At BCTV (CHAN) in Vancouver, we had, I believe, the first TK76 in Canada. We had it teamed up with a portable UMatic deck. I thought it was a Panasonic, but it could have been a Sony. We were doing UMatic to UMatic editing in the newsroom and airing direct through a frame shaker. We quickly got two more 76s and began to phase out our CP16 film cameras. About a year in, one of our news cameramen got pushed off a wharf into the ocean by an irate subject we were doing an investigative report on. The camera, though weather resistant, made underwater pictures for about 3 seconds. The crew had the foresight to put the camera into a tub of freshwater and bring it back to engineering. The dried it out, cleaned it up, tweaked it, and it went back into service. Says a lot about the design.
About the same time at WFLD we trying to do ENG with a 2″ slant track Ampex (and a COHU industrial vidicon). It was mounted on a cart about as big as a small desk. It never worked. Head clogs and I don’t think we had any kind of usable TBC. Still it was an interesting experiment.
I think it was the 1965 NAB show, Ampex was showing the 3000. They had techs stationed at the WFLD shop and I think they worked all night tweaking the recorders for the next day’s show. There was an early video production company that on multiple day shoots would air ship the 3000 back to their shop every day and have another one come in for the next day’s shoot.
We had a TK-76A and a few Iki HL79A cameras and used the RCA equivalent 1 inch portable occasionally, then switched to U-matic (BVU-110 I think) and Micro Time TBC’s for the playback U-Matics in the studio.
AHHHH, The OLD DAYS!!! Truck complete with “GOLDEN RODS”!
We used the Sony VO 3800s for a while with a 2 man crew at WBTV but later switched to BVU 50s ( a record only machine) which were lighter. A photographer could handle a aTK 76 and a BVU 50 although it was still heavy.
I started shooting ENG in Waterloo in about 1978 using a Sony VO 3800 which was the industrial (as opposed to broadcast) 3/4 inch deck. The video may have been noisy but it still looked better than 16mm since the station’s film chain was on its last legs. But the best part was you had shorter deadlines since you didn’t have to allow 45 minutes to process film.
It was a time in flux: 16mm film still being used, but the transition to 3/4″ had begun. The Sony U-Matic decks were preferred for ease of use, but still had a lot of video noise. We didn’t start electronically editing until around 1979, and then it was still twitchy. Mostly, since Hampton Roads is flat as a pancake and microwaving was the easiest and best option, most remote shoots were zapped back to the homestead “live” or to be edited later.