I’ve noticed on most TV footage from that era it’s quality inconsistent.
Some are clear but with low resolution and others being like it’s being filmed from a camera pointed in the tube.
It may be the ladder cause back then there wasn’t a method to record live TV but was that the reason some footage look flashy and high contrast?
EDIT:Here’s two examples from 1955:
https://youtu.be/oTgNWCqMsuc
In: 1
> Was Early 50s TV that blurry? …TV footage from that era [is] quality inconsistent…
Yes and no. There are multiple issues at play when viewing vintage videos nowadays – with some of those factors making the viewing experience blurrier and others making the viewing experience less blurry.
The first major thing to consider is that television transmission inherently requires a “compression” step. Basically, even if a television show was filmed with extra-super-ultra-high-definition lenses didn’t mean that a television broadcasting antenna could transmit that show at “full resolution” (nor does it mean that anyone’s living-room television could handle “full resolution” even if that were being broadcast). So, basically, all television stations were essentially “compressing” everything down to something like the “standard-definition” “resolution” of that day-and-age.
The second thing to consider is that all clips you see nowadays required an archival step to survive to the modern day. This means that the quality of the copy and the deterioration (or lack thereof) of that copy both play a role in what we see today. This means that there can-and-will be a difference depending on whether one records the definitive archival copy from A) the extra-super-ultra-high-definition master films themselves, B) the perfect “compressed” version as transmitted by the television station using the exact same signal they push through their antenna, C) the signal as-received by a person living 1-mile from the transmitting station, or D) the signal as-received by a person living 1000-miles from the transmitting station during a solar-flare during a snowstorm. Even then, is the copy being recorded to a film with (greater?) equal or lower resolution? And after that, is the film being well-preserved? Is it being left to rot in somebody’s attic or in a proper archive somewhere?
All of the above leads to a quite varied viewing experience in the modern day. Even if *”The XYZ show starring ABC!”* was quite popular back in the day that does not necessarily mean that there was a perfectionist archivist somewhere bridging the gap between 1950 and today preserving that show… sometimes random luck and happenstance can make quite the difference.
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Anecdotally, (I can’t remember a reference to find a link right now) I recall that “I Love Lucy” now has amazingly high-resolution copies available by DVD/Blu-Ray relative to most other television of the time. Why? Because of a couple quirks of history and good archivists.
Apparently, while most TV was filmed and broadcast from the East Coast (with most major motion pictures being produced on the West Coast) the fact that Lucy decided to film from LA meant that high-quality film master copies had to be shipped to New York prior to broadcast. This had the inadvertent effect of creating multiple full-quality film copies of every episode (partly because LA wanted to keep their masters, and partly because shipping multiple copies cross-country was necessary to guarantee NY had a copy to broadcast on schedule). This meant that, instead of CBS in New York deciding to broadcast the show and maybe keep a low-quality copy of their broadcast signal on-site, that it was instead easier to simply keep the high-quality film copy on-hand as the archived copy. All together, this means that in the modern day, whoever decided “Hey let’s put ‘I Love Lucy’ on DVD!” had their pick of the litter when it came to high-quality source material to digitize. They could take their pick from the old CBS copies in NY or the original Desilu versions in LA (or even pick and-choose frame-by-frame depending on whose film was better).
That is a far different story from many other shows that had maybe been copied to a lower-resolution film for archival purposes rather than ever having a high-quality “master” copy that *might* have survived to present day.
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