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It doesn’t begin at the transmitter either, in the earliest days even the camera was essentially part of the same circuit. Yes, the concept of filming a show and showing the film over the air existed eventually, but before that (and even after that, for live programming) the camera would scan the subject image (actors, etc) line-by-line and down a wire to the transmitter which would send it straight to your TV and into the electron beam.

In fact in order to show a feed of only text/logos/etc in the earlier days, they would literally just point the camera at a physical object (like letters on a paper, etc) and broadcast from the camera directly. There wasn’t really any other way to do it.



Our station had an art department that used a hot press to create text boards that were set on an easel that had a camera pointed at it. By using a black background with white text you could merge the text camera with a camera in the studio and "super-imposed the text into the video feed.

"And if you tell the kids that today, they won't believe it!"


It's kind of amazing the sort of hoops people needed to jump through to make e.g. the BBC-1 ident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfpEZDeVo00


It seems like imagination was more common in those days. There was no "digital" anything to lean on.


The live-action PBS idents from the early 90's were some of the best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ap_JRofNMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJpiIyBkUZ4

This mini doc shows the process:

https://youtu.be/Q7iNg1dRqQI?t=167




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