B&W video in mid 70s

Cafe Society
1

I love this Skynyrd concert recording from 1976. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks to me like video rather than film. If so, why were people still using black and white video in 1976? I’m pretty sure that by then all TV programs in the US and UK had been recorded in colour for several years. Would a band like Lynyrd Skynyrd have found colour video still too expensive then?

On the other hand, I’ve seen colour video recordings from the 70s (and at least one example of colour film from the 60s) that seem to have deteriorated very badly - am I right in guessing that sometimes something that was originally recorded in colour is now routinely shown as b&w?

2

I can’t answer your questions, but if that is an “official video”, they needed to have hired a better crew. You can barely see anything.

Maybe it’s mutliple generation copies, I don’t know. But it almost unwatchable.

3

Color cameras in general were huge, expensive, and not particularly suited for anything but studio recording, and portable color videotape units were - actually I don’t remember seeing any during that era, but I’m sure they existed. That changed rapidly starting in the mid-70s, but in 1976 black and white still would have been more widespread.

The BBC didn’t broadcast in color (colour) until 1967, and the network only had four color cameras at that time. The BBC and ITV didn’t offer a full day of color programming until 1969.

4

Thank you, that answers the question.

Sure, but I was born in '71 so for me there is a world of difference between '69 and '76! I do remember the BBC broadcasting repeats of B&W episodes of their own children’s “Music Time” programme in '76 but I think all other BBC programmes broadcast by then were colour. After that we still got shown American B&W TV programmes such as “Whirlybirds” for a couple of years and “Champion The Wonder Horse” for a few years beyond that.

5

There’s quite a few of those Winterland concerts on YouTube and a bunch more from the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ, as well - all in B&W. They were not intended for TV broadcast and rather were shot to be shown on screens live in the venue while the band was playing.

6

I worked in TV in the mid-70s, and VCR machines were all color by 1975, even the cheaper models used for public access TV.

7

Just to clarify this a bit:

In the U.S., the three big broadcast TV networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) had gone to all-color broadcasting for their prime-time programming by the 1966-67 season. And, by the late '60s or early '70s, they were certainly doing remote broadcasts (such as football and baseball games) in color – here’s a recording of ABC’s first Monday Night Football game, in 1970. By 1976, the year of the OP’s video, one of the TV stations in my hometown (Green Bay) was touting that it had just bought the first live remote (color) video camera set-up in the market, allowing them to do live reporting through an uplink (in a van) to the studio.

But, that, of course, was the big broadcast networks, who had significant budgets. I suppose it’s entirely possible that Lynyrd Skynyrd hired someone to record the concert, who only had a black-and-white camera (though it looks like there are several cameras being used in that clip).

8

Through most of the 70’s it was normal in the UK to use video for studio shots and film for external scenes. The transition was noticeable even on the tiny TVs we had back then. Monty Python even referenced it in a sketch.