NAEB Engineering Newsletter (Dec 1958)

Engineering Newsletter NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF EDUCATIONAL BROADCASTERS 14 GREGORY HALL DECEMBER, 1958 URBANA, ILLINOIS TV TECHNICAL TIPS (October) —Cecil S. Bidlack All of a sudden summer ends and again we’re plunged into the midst of a busy fall season. School begins, the football season starts, renewed and in¬ creased programming begins on educational as well as commercial stations. Autumn, too, brings a round of technical meetings of value to all radio and TV station personnel. Although two of these meetings will be over before this appears in print, it will give you time to think and plan for next year, since the pattern re- /'7> peats yearly. The first of these meetings is the annual Fall Symposium of the IRE Professional Group on Broad¬ cast Transmission Systems held at the Willard Hotel in Washington September 27-28. We’d guess that 125 were registered for the excellent two-day pro¬ gram just concluded. While the majority of the papers presented were on television topics, there were also papers on FM multiplex and stereophonic broadcasting. Three papers covered television switching facilities by relays, transistors, and a diode matrix vertical interval switcher. Other topics were precise carrier offset, the chroma-key effects system, and vidicon operating techniques. One afternoon session was devoted solely to video tape recording with descriptions of the NBC-Burbank color installa¬ tion and the CBS-New York facilities, followed by a panel discussion of the uses and problems en¬ countered in VTR operation at individual affiliate and network owned stations. There was a tour of the new four million dollar NBC studios in Washington, which houses the WRC and WRC-TV studios and offices as well as FM and TV transmitters. The plant is designed to make most effective use of a minimum of operating personnel. All video controls for live and film cameras are located in one central control and transmission room. AM and FM studios are located in a cluster with all NAEB Engineering Newsletter December, 1958 NAEB Engineering Newsletter, a quarterly publication issued by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 14 Gregory Hall, Urbana, III. $2 a year, edited by Cecil S. Bid- lack. microphone outputs appearing on all control room consoles. Every studio is visible from each of the control rooms. There are two TV studios, one large- and one medium-sized. Eventually these will be equipped for live color originations, with lighting boards relay operated so that the lighting for ten different sets can be arranged and then turned on as required by a control room panel switch. I was interested in the fact that no dimming facilities are provided for light¬ ing. By the use of punched paper tape and readout and memory devices, automatic TV operation is possible once the proper sequence has been set up on the tape. Automation is used primarily for sta¬ tion break operation during long stretches of net¬ work programming. This automation equipment can be clock-operated and switched from network to local, rolling and stopping projectors and switching between film and slide projectors as required and back into the network with operating personnel re¬ quired only to supervise the operation and load the projectors. We’d like to see more representation from educa¬ tional stations at this IRE PGBTS meeting which is usually held the last week end in September. The 1956 meeting was held in Cleveland; Pittsburgh was host in 1957; and the 1959 meeting has tentatively been set again for Washington, D. C., with Detroit also a possibility. —NAEB— The Tenth Annual Convention of the Audio 1