b. The original high quality monochrome cameras were quite heavy and
served primarily as studio cameras.
It was a major effort to take these
heavy cameras outside for a remote telecast. When a small portable camera
and videotape recorders were first developed, they did not meet broadcast
quality standards, as determined by the Federal Communication Commission
(FCC) and could not, therefore, be used for ENG/EFP. But this first small
portable camera recorder unit, generally known as the portapak, and used
primarily by nonbroadcast people, nevertheless demonstrated the production
potential of such a portable unit.
c. The modern ENG/EFP camera recorder systems still operate on the
portapak principle, though they have become much more sophisticated
electronically and more versatile in production.
9.
The color camera.
The color camera works on the same fundamental
principle as the monochrome camera, with the conversion of the electrical
energy (video signal) into visible images.
But the color camera is more
complicated than its monochrome ancestor.
In order for you to understand
some of the do's and don'ts of color production, you need to know some of
the basic workings of the color camera. We will, therefore, briefly discuss
these points; internal optical systems, imaging devices, electronic
characteristics of color cameras, and camera types and operational
characteristics.
a. Internal optical systems. In the monochrome camera the lens catches
the light and focuses it directly onto the front surface of a single camera
pickup tube. The color camera, however, first splits the entering beam of
light into the three primary light colors, red, blue, and green.
These
three colors are then processed by separate channels, called chrominance
(color) channels. Thus, we have a red channel to process red light into the
red signal, the green channel for the green signal, and the blue channel for
the blue signal.
b. Beam splitters. The color separation device that splits the white
light into the three primary colors (or, into some other colors for ENG
cameras) is called the beam splitter.
There are three types of beam
splitters, the dichroic mirror system, the prism block, and the striped
filter.
(1) Dichroic mirror system. In the dichroic mirror system, the light
that comes through the lens is separated by three dichroic (light
separating) mirrors into the three primary light colors of red, green, and
blue, and directed by other mirrors and lenses into the three camera pickup
tubes (fig 1-6).
10
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