Strange behaviour of TV companies - Page 2

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

Joe Hamiltion is holding the uncut masters for Ransom - Warners owns the rights, but he owns the only Physical uncut master tapes. We can assume Warners did the syndication edits and then wiped the safty copies they used or returned the master tapes they used when they prepared the edits. He's taking advantage of their lack of holding onto uncut masters.

Why? Pehaps his father didn't get a big enough cut in the first place,or Joe wasn't the heir to any residuals and wants a piece of the action. Who knows.

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

You may have information I don't have, or half-information I half-have, or misinformation. I can't speak to any of that. But I think a lot of what you're saying is based on half-truths at best, or misunderstood information passed on as fact. (I mean this respectfully! Please understand that!)

The first two or three seasons of "Cheers" were edited on film. There are complete film cuts of these episodes, and if those 44 or 69 episodes were kept in good shape (my memory fails at whether they made the change after season two or after three), striking an HD master from those prints is a piece of cake. Past that, it is almost certain that all film elements -- that is, all takes of every scene in every show, from four cameras running simultaneously -- is stored together. For this series alone, that's thousands upon thousands of reels of film. Making HD masters from these is about as far from a piece of cake as you can get. You say Paramount did this already? If so, I'm very impressed. But again, this is "Cheers," one of the most successful comedies of all time. Can you really imagine them doing this with unsuccessful series?

Why shoot on film in the first place? Because even in SD over-the-air, it looked better! While videotaped shows looked harsh and like filmed stage plays (which worked great for shows like "All in the Family," by the way), filmed shows were more nuanced, more flattering to the actors, and just felt more comfortable. (I thought this in the '70s, watching on a fairly crappy CRT.)


I remember that thread, and I had no idea where those numbers came from.

To remaster what kind of episode? Because one number does not fit all here. Again, remastering an episode shot and cut on film is one thing, and it's quite different from remastering an episode shot on film and cut on videotape (or on a computerized video system, be it laserdisc-based as was common in the early '90s or hard-drive based as it's been ever since). And of course, there are shows shot on video in the first place. And there are various forms of video at that.

I did a series that ran five seasons. The first two were shot on film and posted on an Avid (hard-drive based editing). The last three were shot on hi-def video (24p) and posted the same way, but never finalized in HD. The studio that made it is now making HD masters of those last three seasons, because going back to the 24p masters is a largely automated process. But they will never go back to the film elements of the first two seasons, because it would be prohibitively expensive.

And what does it cost this studio -- an independent studio, mind you, not a bloated major -- to make HD masters of these relatively easier 24p-based episodes?

$45,000 per episode. (Half-hours, by the way.)

This is a real-world number. It's fact. So if these bloated majors can do the same thing, or maybe the more elaborate return-to-film-elements version, for only $7,000, then they must be doing something right!


Nonsense. It's almost impossible to bring a television episode in on budget under the best of circumstances. Trust me, it's what I do for a living. Unless you're blessed to have a huge hit on your hands, you're always dropping speaking parts, losing sets, giving up songs, and too often letting writers and crew go to somehow make your budget. The idea that you'd add on top of this the very significant additional cost of shooting and posting your show on film so that, sometime in the future, if your show is ever heard from again AND hi-def technology actually happens, it can be sparkly and nice looking... I'm sorry, I don't mean to be harsh, but it's just ludicrous.


But again, if you shot on film back then (as many, many shows did at the time), you cut it on film. That was simply the available technology. So let's not canonize Mr. Arnaz too much.

Okay, I've probably come off as a jerk here, and if I have, I regret that. I just think it's important to be realistic about this situation.

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

Its all good info Mike, thanks!

Thanks for the info as well Matthew, on Rhoda. I watched it, and Phyllis as a kid. Loved both shows, but i sure dont remember them very well.

I was thinking about Paramount. I know they have made mistakes, but shows like Hawaii Five-0, Mission: Impossible, and Perry Mason all look great on DVD. All filmed shows, and all being restored...to some point.

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

They were talking about straight telecine with no need to redo editing (most film-based TV shows prior to about 1985). And they, too, claim to have industry contacts. The thread is here (the meat is in the first few pages before the thread degenerates into a condescending attitude towards people who don't like most modern TV shows, of which I am one):

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf/...structure.html


You were watching on a crappy CRT off of crappy film chains. The networks may have had ones that were decent by the standards of the era, but with local stations you never know what kind of quality to expect. And although I wasn't born yet I have seen tapes of what film chain transfers look like from people who taped network broadcasts, and early home video releases of movies.


If you were being realistic you would look at both the pros and cons. You only look at the cons. I don't consider you a jerk. I consider you a fatalist, not a realist. I hope you're not the one who approves budgets, because if it were up to you, we would never have moved beyond kinescopes. Or had color TV.

I got the Cheers info from the following site:

CBS Television Distribution Syndication Bible

It has every show CBS offers for syndication, what format, whether they offer network or syndicated versions. There were 69 shot-and-edited-on-film episodes.

I'm not asking them to rebuild unsuccessful series in HD from scratch. Because if they can't (or won't) even do it on successful ones, the flops (even ones with cult followings) haven't got a prayer. And ironically, they look worse than videotaped shows of the same era because you add video noise and film grain.

Quite frankly, I consider the standardization of the whole filmed-but-edited-on-tape workflow was a mistake. But you shoot down all suggestions on how to rectify that error for shows in the past.

Rhoda (the show whose wretched DVD treatment inspired this thread) was not the most successful or acclaimed MTM Productions series, but it was far from a failure. If it were it would not have run 5 seasons. Every second of that show was shot and edited on film. If its appeal to the modern syndication/cable TV market is limited (an arguable point), the dismal quality of available masters limits it further. That is the point.


Joe Hamilton died in 1991. His son, John Hamilton, inherited any rights he held. The syndication edits to the two NBC seasons were made in 1986 at the behest of Lorimar-Telepictures (which is how WB got into the picture) when they brought the show back in first-run syndication. All copyrights are registered to Joe Hamilton Productions.

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

And I, for one, don't have a problem with videotape. It adds more of a sense of nostalgia to watching it years later than film does.

You feel like you are watching something of a moment, like say SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. If on film, there is no dating to it.

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

I always loved the feeling of immediacy of videotape for certain types of shows. I did always feel like I was watching a live stageplay. There's puh-lenty of 70s/80s/90s sitcoms that I can't imagine having been done on film: Alice, Three's Company, the Jeffersons, Family Ties and yes, Mama's Family. Videotape makes the viewer feel more like an active participant in the storyline. Maybe the reason is psychological, because the videotape is free of film grain and other obstacles? But nevertheless, if you followed any of those shows (and many more) it felt like you really were there. I think that format works best for "around the house" sitcoms; film is best when the actors move around and they do location filming.

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

I agree.

For example, The Twilight Zone suffered on video. However, I don't think Three's Company would've had the same air about it if it had been filmed.

Re: Strange behaviour of TV companies

You have a point there. Many of the shows from that era are written like stage plays, so it's appropriate. It's also interesting you mention film working best for outdoor location shooting, because taped British TV shows like Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and The Benny Hill Show did that all the time in the 1970s. Whenever someone would go outside you would switch from video to film.

I didn't mean to say that all tape is bad. It obviously has benefits; it's cheap, you can see what you have done without having to process it, and it takes less time to manipulate the image. When a show originates on tape, that's that, but for shooting film, if telecine improvements have been made since then, and a way can be found to take advantage of those improvements in a cost-effective manner, why not?