Old sitcoms.... why did they use film for location shoots?

NG

noggin Founding member 13 February 2011 2:45pm

Civilisation looks great on BBC HD - and thankfully they've pillarboxed it to preserve the original aspect ratio.

I'd be interested to see what Robin of Sherwood looked like. Was it shot film/edited 1" or shot and edited on film? I don't remember it having the "35mm sheen" (aka massive overlighting) of US TV drama of the same period.

ST

stuart621 13 February 2011 2:50pm

I think it was edited on film. I didn't see much of it but from memory, it didn't have the telltale electronic titles - they looked as if they were optically printed.

NG

noggin Founding member 13 February 2011 3:12pm

stuart621 posted:

I think it was edited on film. I didn't see much of it but from memory, it didn't have the telltale electronic titles - they looked as if they were optically printed.

Yep - I have a very dim recollection of at least some of the series having optical titles.

DA

davidhorman 13 February 2011 6:20pm

stuart621 posted:

Robin of Sherwood has been remastered in HD and released on Blu-Ray but I haven't seen it so don't know what the quality is like. I think it was probably shot on standard 16mm.

I found this screenshot - and it's a PNG so should be an accurate representation of (still) image quality:

http://www.theblurayblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/robin_of_sherwood_09.png

David

TE

Telefis 13 February 2011 8:34pm

As another date flag, as late as early 1992 a video and film combo was still being used for the BBC's first series of As Time Goes By. Very late indeed. But then, location shoots were extremely rare on that programme, usually limited to front door scenes.

(January 2011)