Post by teleadm on May 13, 2017 17:57:28 GMT
The final season was recorded on colour video-tape , but again, it was cheaper to keep B&W kinescopes (colour video tape was very expensive).
There are actually several dozen lost episodes of the series. Many 1950-1952 episodes were simply discarded by CBS, and other episodes (as recent as 1967) are also lost.
With video or film, storage and handling together represent the single most significant factor impacting the durability of either medium. We often dealt with decades-old and functionally obsolete original 2" masters that were technically every bit as viable as the 1" ones being produced at the time, and it holds just as true for video as for film that recent material can suffer degradation more advanced than that from decades earlier, depending on those two factors.
I'm afraid I know little about digitizing, as that postdates my time in the industry, so unless you can explain it to me, I know of no reason in theory that there should be any more difficulty in doing so with videotape from 1958 than with that from 1998. Although constant advancements and refinements were made to videotape substrates and oxide coating, recording equipment, cameras and displays, the NTSC specs adopted for color origination and broadcast remained constant for over 40 years from their adoption in 1953. If both the source elements and the hardware they require are available and viable, I'm unclear on any age-dependent technical barriers to digital encoding.
I do realize it was common practice to recycle videotape, but it was a penny-wise/pound-foolish approach that, as I understand it, had more to do with short-sightedness about future revenue potential for ancillary distribution. Once initial investments in new hardware had been made, duplication and distribution utilizing even the earliest Quadruplex video system immediately became less expensive than the lab costs associated with doing so on film, and very few series were kinescoped for either archival or long-term distribution purposes. Inasmuch as a show like What's My Line? was broadcast by CBS, I might take a wild guess that producers/owners Goodson-Todman chose to continue kinescoping as they had in the pre-videotape days to avoid allowing the network to amortize the costs of their own equipment upgrades into the budget of their show for preserving it on videotape. While it's probably a near certainty that neither they nor anyone else at the time imagined the market for those shows a half-century hence, I consider their decision, whatever the reason, to have been ill-considered.