What does TV yellow have to do with TV?

[Funkwire]

 

I saw some female TV reporters recently covering a story in a local apartment complex...their make-up was orange, they looked vaguely pumpkin-ish...I would assume fro the same reasons...

 

 

True. I work down the street from one of the local TV stations. On a regular basis, I will watch the early news show before I go to work, then see one of the reporters walking down the street later that day between broadcasts. They look 'normal' on camera, but IRL the makeup looks thick and oddly-colored.

[tvvoodoo]

Oh yeah, they pour that pancake on!

[dabbler]

 

Sorry, Doc, no urban legend. The reality comes down to the amount of light a filming required, especially so for live show (and most TV was live back in the '50's). These cameras don't have adjustable shutter speeds, they have to shoot 30 frames every second and prime glass ain't ever cheap. They needed to duplicate near daylight in studio conditions. White reflects too much light and overwhelms video. If you watch those old shows, you'll see what happens when white is accidentally used in the shoot, every time it reflects the light back to the camera there is just this giant white blur where the camera is over whelmed. To this day, even in color TV, no one wears white on TV, instead it's a light blue or light gray shirts and lap coats that will appear white once lit and color balanced.

 

 

True enough. In fact those video cameras had no shutter at all (though some did back a few years) and the imager was a tube, three in fact, one each for red, green and blue. The bloom caused by a white object is in fact due to the fact that the luminance range (difference between the brightest and darkest object that can be simultaneously captured without issues) was limited. And unlike the impacts to sound when you overload an amp tube, the image results when you overload an imager tube (or a cathode ray tube like was used in TV sets ) are very ugly indeed!