Radio Memories Vol. 18

When I walked into WIS-TV’s Studio Facilities I recognized two old friends, Master Control sported a Gates board almost identical to the one we had at WUSC. The other audio board down in the production suite was also an old friend of the Altec knockoff the WUSC had of the Western Electric 25-B console that we had at WCOS. Beyond that, everything was different. The biggest difference was that, unlike radio where in most cases the DJ ran his own board and had control of everything that was live, everything in television required a team. 

The smallest team in television worked in master control during the periods when there was no live show on the air. 

It consisted of an engineer who ran the videotape machines and kept the electronics repaired. There were two large Ampex VT-1200 quadruplex video tape machines, “VTRs” for short. One of the VTRs also had recording capability complete with a crude “punch and crunch” “EDITEC” electronic editing system on the front panel. We didn’t use the manual videotape splicing system that physically spliced videotape the way we used to audio tape. 

Then there was the master control operator, nicknamed “switcher,” who punched the buttons on a console also called a “video switcher.” The video switcher’s workstation was in front of a bank of five black and white monitors and three color monitors. Two of these 21” monitors “belonged” to the switcher and the third to the video operator who was there only during live shows. Many times of the day, the video operator was also the videotape operator.  The video switcher consisted of three horizontal rows that contained at least 10 buttons. Each of those buttons was a video source, from left to right they were; Video Black, Color Camera1, Color Camera 2, Color Camera 3, Color Film Chain, Black and White (B&W) Film Chain, VTR 1, VTR 2, the B&W Camera and Network. The bottom row also contained an 11th button, “M/E 1”. “M/E 1” was the mix/effects bank of 2 rows of switches in the M/E bank that was used to “fade” or “super” between the same sources on the top and bottom row.  BTW, “Video Black” or just “Black” for short consisted only of the sync and color burst parts of the old NTSC video system and was used to “blackout” the TV screen between elements of the show. Hence the term “Fade to Black.”

Fading was accomplished by moving a “fader arm” from top to bottom or from bottom to top. Usually, this was done between cameras “Supering” was accomplished by mixing the video on the bottom row on top without fading either. This normally involved text being shown on the B&W camera over a color camera, film, or slide. This text was typed on a black plastic film stretched over a translucent plastic drum in the corner of the studio. The B&W camera was focused on a part of that film. There were two types of “Supers,” fixed and moving, the latter being called a “crawl.” Fixed supers were typically called “lower thirds” which showed the name of the news anchor, reported or the person being interviewed. Crawls were the closing credits shown at the end of a show moving up from the bottom of the screen as the plastic drum was being rotated in the studio below. 

There was a series of “following relays” in the Gates “Yard” Audio board that automatically switched the audio from the source selected on the video on the air, all except for the two studio microphones which had to be switched on manually. 

You’re probably wondering what a “Film Chain” is. We had two, a Color Film chain and a B&W film chain. Each of these “chains” consisted of two 16-millimeter (MM) projectors and a 35MM slide projector aimed into a box that contained mirrors that reflected the image of one of the three into a camera attached to the same box. Normally the switcher would fade to black momentarily as he “flopped” the mirror between projectors. Failure to do that required an entry into the “error log” that was reviewed weekly by station management. 

It all sounds overwhelming but you get used to it. 

I mentioned that I was initially hired as an audio projectionist and as such I was in master control part of the time. The duties of the projectionist were to edit the commercial film reels together using a 16 MM hot splicer. The process involved cutting the heads and tails off the small reels containing the individual commercials, and then splicing them together using glue and heat. The other duty was to make sure the correct commercial reel and times when we were running movies the correct movie reel, prepared by the film department, onto the correct projector and cue it up three seconds before the first video frame.  In the case of the commercial reels, they were automatically cued up by a small metal tab we placed on the optical track of the reel. So at the end of a commercial break, the reel would run until it reached the metal tab at the beginning of the next commercial. 

Absolutely none of this technology is being used today. Recently I visited the WIS-TV studios and was given a tour by their Director of Engineering. Brian Reeves. He showed me the space that is now their master control. What used to be three large areas filled with machines and operators is now a single computer in a cubicle farm.