When "Penny Lane" was distributed worldwide in 1967, it would have been by 16mm prints. The black and white clip from Compleat Beatles would have been a 16mm to 2-inch tape telecine in black and white, probably because it was a station/program still broadcasting in black and white. We can't know which station it was for but in the US (where the documentary was made), local and non-prime time programs were still in black and white in early 1967. For a product like Compleat Beatles, in those days, even if the 16mm print was still in the archives, they would have just used the tape due to it being easier. There's also a chance that the print itself was black and white as was the case for many BBC programs sent internationally.Von Grossenshush wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2023 1:08 pmPlease note that the first U-matic VCR was Sony VO-1600 released in 1971, and this initial release was for consumer market - neither broadcasting or professional use. (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-matic) - the distributing music promo "video" by U-matic video tape was happened later mid-70s.therowdyman wrote: ↑Mon Nov 20, 2023 11:22 am * The Daily Beatle provides some good info on the film.
https://webgrafikk.com/blog/uncategoriz ... ban-skies/
Apple used a positive print. So, it's safe to assume they don't have any camera negatives, IPs or anything thing of an earlier generation. They also state that earlier versions came from a "2-inch U-Matic tape". They make a slight error as U-Matic is not a 2-inch tape format (it's 3⁄4-inch tape inside a cassette). Music videos were sent on U-Matic to TV stations back in the day, but U-Matic was not master quality. The master tape would have been a telecine of a 16mm positive to 2-inch quad video tape which U-Matics would have been dubbed from.
By the 1970s, Apple had some kind of a video archive due to The Long and Winding Road/Scrapbook. Without any dates or detailed knowledge of the Apple archive, we can only speculate based on when the "Penny Lane" promo was airing. During the 70s, given the minimal call for playing a song that was current on pop chart show - stations would have used a copy from their archives if they wanted to do a Beatles retrospective. If there was a U-Matic tape, you would assume that a telecine to a higher quality master was made and any U-Matic was struck from that.
One example is this U-Matic struck from the Budokan concert "1-inch master" (the description corrects this as a gen 2 from the " 2-inch VTR master"):
The tape played at the Abbey Road Video Show would have been U-Matic for sure. Higher quality than Betamax and VHS and still in use for those purposes in 1983. The players are small enough to be set up at Abbey Road for a one-off show and packed away.
By the mid-80s, U-Matic was replaced by Betacam SP. As a sidenote, U-Matic was still used through-out the 80s in the audio industry as an early back-up medium for digital recording masters. The production master's for the 1987 CD masters were backed-up onto U-Matic tape, which (and I can't find the article to back this up) was how the Beatles masters were preserved up until the 2009 remaster campaign(!)
Here's The Best of George Harrison production master on U-Matic - https://www.discogs.com/release/2105966 ... e-Harrison
