Fast forward 30 years.  Kent and Reitan are in the middle of trying to restore another early NBC Burbank recording, "An Evening with Fred Astaire."

"The effort involved historical research into the history of RCA's development of practical Color Video Tape recording and playback," Reitan told Quad Videotape Group's Ted Langdell.

"I use the terminology "RCA Labs Color" for the format of the original Eisenhower, Astaire, and other NBC color tapes used on the modified Ampex machines at Burbank from early 1958 through at least April 1959," he said.

"I suggest the term 'RCA Broadcast Color' for the format of the tapes produced by the RCA TRT-1AC, the first color recorder produced by RCA Broadcast of Camden, N.J., and also used by NBC at Burbank starting in April, 1958," Reitan advised.

"These are distinguished from tapes made to the later “Low Band Color“ standard later promulgated by SMPTE."

Recovering color meant major work on the Ampex AVR-1 they were using.

"The machine was the last operable 2" that KTLA had," Kent recalled.

"Some ten AVR-1 boards were modified and replaced production boards within the standard AVR-1," Reitan advised.

Reitan did the design and mods to a spare set of boards.

Testing and adjusting the AVR-1 required the only resources they had... the tapes from 1958.

"We actually DID run the original tapes back and forth to set the machine," Kent says about the early stages of the process.

"Their dropouts were sometimes so bad (depending on the tapes we used) that we weren't really concerned about damaging them any further."

"I did do a thorough cleaning of the tape path each time I reloaded a tape, though. Once the correct deemphasis curve was set, the tapes played pretty well."

"When Ed modified the de-emphasis curve he had to do an opposite pre-emphasis in another circuit," Kent advised.

The entire process took several weeks.  We wanted to get it right the first time," Kent said. 

The AVR1 designer—Al Trost—made a special trip down to help, Kent noted.

Why an AVR-1?

Kent said, "...basically it's because the AVR-1 made a better picture.  It's AGC circuits meant no-banding. 

The 1200 had a "non-standard" setting on it's Colortec, so a heterodyne tape would play from it without assistance, provided that the de-emphasis circuits were modified, but it would still have banding in the picture.  Same for a VR-1000 or VR-2000.  Besides, this is all we had!"

The processing was done through an NEC NTC-10 timebase corrector.  It just made a smoother picture. 

The machine was outputting a fairly decent picture through it's own "buffer" (before digital timebase correctors came along), but we broke the chain and tapped out of the demod signal to feed the NEC TBC. 

D-2 copies of the Quad Astaire and other tapes were made.

While this was going on, their other collaborator— UCLA film and television Archivist Dan Einstein— brought in the WRC-TV dedication tape from the Library of Congress.

Kent recalled, "It wasn't in very good shape, though.  We played the thing for them, but that had been attempted MANY times over the years and the tape was just plain 'messed up.'" 

The playback of the LoC tape offered an enticing tidbit when Robert Sarnoff said something about presenting a copy of the tape to President Eisenhower.

"After some detective work by Einstein  we found the second copy at The Eisenhower Library.  They didn't even know what it was!" Kent exclaimed.

"They sent it to Dan, who brought it to me.  I broke the original hold-down tape on the reel which had been put there in 1958! "

"There were still some technical difficulties in the tape, though," Kent detailed.

It was originated in Washington; recorded in Burbank; and had 5-kilocycle (bandwidth) sound that was delivered via telco on a different path than the picture.  Sound wasn't multiplexed with the picture then. "

"About two-thirds through the show the audio crapped out.  NBC had the backup telco line, so they switched to it (during David Sarnoff's speech).  Sounded like a phonecall!

"I ran it through an equalizer and did what I could to match it, but there just wasn't much there," Kent says.

"The original sound is on one track of the D-2 and the equalized audio is on another track."

"There's also a video dropout in the Eisenhower tape that couldn't be fixed because of missing frames.  I just left it."

Einstein (left), Kent (behind Bob Rosen, the Director of the UCLA Film and Televison Archive at podium) and Reitan (right) recieved an Emmy in 1989 for "Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development (for) Restoration of the Fred Astaire Specials."