American television directory (1946)

obtains pretty largely throughout the country. News and special events invite a great deal of argument in television circles. The people who believe entirely in “live” production say that the most important factor in news and special events is “immediacy,” that is, seeing it on your screen at the moment it hap¬ pens. And further to bolster their argu¬ ment, they have invented the word “instantaneity,” which is a philological handspring of the first order. The best definition of this dreadful word is “alibi.” We go to newsreels and see events that happened several days ago, and we enjoy them because we get a satis¬ factory coverage of it — a coverage that is edited to bring out the important feature of what happened ! "Instantaneity" on Film! There is no argument about this “immediacy” thing. It is, in general, a lot of nonsense. But if you want to admit “immediacy,” “actuality,” or “in¬ stantaneity,” again we make the state¬ ment that it can be done better with film. Eleven years ago, at the Olympics in Berlin, Fernseh — A.G., the television subsidiary of the Reichsrundfunksgesellschaft, became involved in a problem of televising a part of the Olympics at a time when there wasn’t sufficient light. The Jerries, who are pretty fast on their feet technically, got together and said to each other, “We will now do this with film, but we will also heed the warnings of people who say that we must do it at the same time it is hap¬ pening.” And so they devised equipment that permitted them to make motion pictures of the Olympic games and to project those onto the television screen with a lag of approximately three minutes. That sounds incredible, but today high¬ speed processing of film is a matter of course. Everyone is familiar with the same-day newsreel presentation of foot¬ ball games, world series games, and so forth. These are done with a lag of from 3 to 6 hours. And nobody, inciden¬ tally, objects to that time lag — because the picture is good! Also, it is edited. Let's Go to a Fire You are sitting in your house and the fire trucks go roaring past. You say, “There is a fine fire somewhere. Let’s get it on our television.” So you go and turn on your television set and you find an announcer talking to you from the studio. Says he, “There is a terrific fire over at 630 Fifth Avenue, and in a couple of minutes we are going to bring you some shots of that fire. Our equip¬ ment is on the way over there.” And after a radio buildup — possibly also radio announcer talking from the scene of the fire, we finally hear “And now we bring you the picture from the ac¬ tual spot.” What we bring you is a carefully edited picture of that fire — but what you see actually happened three minutes ago. However, the fire is still going on. You know that because from your window you can see the smoke. You don’t know whether the man who jumped out of the window jumped out at the actual mo¬ ment you saw it on the screen or whether he took off minutes earlier. But that three minutes gives sufficient mar¬ gin for a pretty fair job of editing by an experienced film cutter at the scene. Thus you avoid the type of thing which some of you may have seen in special event and news television broadcasts in which everybody runs in all directions through the smoke clouds and the whole story is completely mixed up, uninte¬ grated, told in outrageous order with a wholly baffled announcer talking about something you can’t see. We want to make it clear again — and you must bear with me if I repeat myself frequently — that editing is the most important part of a picture. If you can’t edit your pic¬ ture you haven’t got a picture. Unsolved Problems Facing Us One problem is the ratio of sound volume to picture size. One of the rea¬ sons that present-day television is sometimes alarming is that you see midget images and hear full-sized voices. Much experimentation must be done to make this make sense. The problem of what photographers call “gamma” is important. Nobody has thought of that yet: most television producers haven’t even heard of it. (Gamma is the relation of the contrast in the original with the contrast in the picture.) There is a great deal of in¬ vestigation to be done in that direction. Besides there is a tremendous job in the adaptation of motion picture tech¬ niques. Hollywood motion pictures don’t do very well in television because they are not geared to television’s require¬ ments. There must be investigation into the psychology of short pictures — of various types of shots. The present-day people, for example, in “live” television utterly refuse to use long shots and thereby stultify their efforts, because a long shot is of the highest importance in establishing the inter-relation of characters, locations, etc. One of the things that needs investi¬ gation is the elimination of ugly shots. The only way that you can keep from giving an animated cartoon of the ton¬ sils in operation in a close-up of a singer is to pre-record. The singer sings a song into a mike without any camera and then stands up in front of the camera and smiles prettily, “mouthing” the song in synchronization with the playback of what she has just sung. Pre-recording, amazingly enough, was discovered in the motion picture indus¬ try only comparatively recently. At that time, everybody had counted Jeanette MacDonald’s teeth forty or fifty times every time she sang a song. And some¬ body said, “Why does she have to make faces?” They decided to do it a very simple way: a way, however, that took much costly experimentation before it was perfected — just as our acquisition of technique and experience will be time-consuming and costly. Looker-Listener Habits Another thing that must be investi¬ gated is the average length of television shots. They will probably vary from the accepted 12(4 second average of theater motion pictures. There must be a great deal of in¬ vestigation into the mass psychology factor. Motion pictures — theater motion pictures — are looked at by a large num¬ ber of people at the same time. Tele¬ vision pictures, on the other hand, will be looked at by only a few people. It is obvious that the factor of mass psy¬ chology must be carefully considered, and experimented with. Much research remains to be done on color reproduction. Current methods used for color television are already obsolescent. Investigation is indicated in the use of camera movement as against cuts. With “live” television, the camera has to move in for close-up, and the audi¬ ence is constantly disturbed by a “busy” screen, full of people who dash off into the upper right hand corner, run away from you, or rush at you, increasing alarmingly in size. Camera movement is all right in its place, but it occupies too much of a place in “live” television. To get this motion picture quality in television an enormous amount of ex¬ perimentation is necessary. We can’t just make movies in the con¬ ventional way. We must adapt accepted techniques and create new ones in step with the conventions of an art that is now half a century old. Our eventual technique will come partially from research into writing problems. Writing for motion pictures is not as easy as it looks. Writing for a highly specialized type of motion pic¬ ture is going to be harder. Scripts will have to be written so that they can be broken down to be shot virtually in sequence. This is contrary to general practice. Who Will Develop Television Programs? Television programs, if they are to meet exacting standards, are almost certain to be more expensive than radio programs. Yet unless television pro¬ grams do meet the public’s critical standards, I do not believe that tele¬ vision will develop into a mass advertis¬ ing medium. The initial expense of developing pro¬ gram techniques and of providing pro¬ grams which will develop the medium 117