CBS Movie Tests New TV Technology : Sharper Image for ‘Innocent Victims’

Director Peter Levin recently began shooting a CBS-TV movie, “Innocent Victims”--on videotape, not film. That’s rare for a prime-time network drama effort. But something even more unusual is afoot.

“Innocent Victims” is the first American network drama shot with the new, Japanese-developed, high-definition videotape process, or HDTV, which boasts a video image with the sharpness of big-screen movies.

Viewers, however, won’t see this edition, which is being taped in Atlanta and stars Tim Matheson in a dramatization of the story of a New Jersey pediatrician who helped pioneer research on AIDS in children.

The program the public will see (an air date has not yet been selected) will be transferred to conventional tape for conventional broadcast.

The reason: TV sets that can show “high-def” programs are still several years away from American consumers.

And even if such sets were on the market now, there are other still-unresolved matters: how the high-resolution process could be broadcast and what action would first need to be taken by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The high-definition version of “Innocent Victims” will only be seen by CBS executives. The undertaking is “simply an experiment” to test HDTV and the special Sony gear involved, says CBS spokeswoman Alice Henderson.

Some experts think the initial uses of TV’s new look will be in cable, videotape and videodisc, followed later by over-the-air broadcasts.

That the major networks are concerned that the new technology may let cable, home cassette machines and even satellite-to-home broadcast get the jump on them was indicated in a speech here last week by Capital Cities/ABC board Chairman Thomas S. Murphy.

“If we lose our audience because we cannot provide high-quality service, the nation will have damaged a local and national asset that cannot be replaced,” he told an International Radio and Television Society luncheon.

Referring to the new TV technology as “advanced television,” he warned that broadcasters, manufacturers and the FCC should face up and adapt to the opportunity it presents. If they don’t, he said, “the effect could be to convert existing television stations into second-class distributors of entertainment, news and sports.”

While CBS’ project is the first drama by an American network taped with the HDTV system, other film, music video and foreign TV productions already have used the process, which is one of at least six competing systems-in-progress that could markedly improve TV’s picture.

The movie “Julia and Julia,” starring Sting and Kathleen Turner, primarily was shot with HDTV, with the tape images transferred to film. The same process was used with Robby Benson’s “Do It Up.”

In TV, “Chasing Rainbows,” a 14-hour Canadian miniseries set in the 1920s, was taped on HDTV last year. Before that, Japan’s NHK network--which began work on the system in 1971--taped several one-hour dramas with it.

Several music videos also have been made with the system, among them Mick Jagger’s “Let’s Work.”

Director Levin says the new system poses no particular production problems.

“It really depends how you light it,” he explained on the phone from Atlanta. “There’s no great mystery about any of this. If you give it the time and treat it with great care and quality, then it’s going to look beautiful. . . . The best description I’ve heard of it is that it’s like one of those wonderfully clear color transparency slides.”

The problem with HDTV and similar systems is the home TV screen in the United States today. Current sets have only have 525 “scanning” lines (the TV picture consists of lines that, like the dots of a newspaper photograph, make up the picture you see).

Today’s sets can’t play the 1,050 to 1,125 lines that various versions of the new, higher-resolution video technology offer.

And when they do come to the United States, the higher-line sets of the future, featuring screens wider than current ones, won’t come cheaply; some estimates put the initial cost at $3,000 or more.

One HDTV monitor now in use here cost $25,000. It’s part of the new-age video gear at the studios of 1125 Productions (the 1125 comes from the number of lines in the HDTV system) in mid-town Manhattan.

The company, which currently has only one other New York rival, Rebo High Definition Studio, was begun in June, 1987, by David Niles, who started a similar studio in Paris two years earlier.

In the opinion of Niles, whose company is working with CBS on the taping of “Innocent Victims,” “what we’re really discovering is that high-def (TV) is really its own medium. It can imitate film and it can imitate television very well. What’s really exciting about it is that film and television are two different mediums, and high-def is still yet another one--a new one.”

He says Americans may start seeing high-resolution TV sets on sale by “no later than 1990.”

It might be two to three years after that that high-resolution TV broadcasts become a reality, says James Carnes, a research vice president of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, N.J.

Various systems proposed for American television must still be tested, then the industry and the FCC would have to agree on an industry-wide broadcast standard, he said in a phone interview from his office.

His company, once part of RCA Inc. but later divested from it after General Electric’s purchase of RCA, last October unveiled a still-experimental high-resolution system it developed with RCA-owned NBC.

Its process, called Advanced Compatible Television, is a 1,050-line system that in its way is akin to the “compatible” color signal RCA developed and which the FCC approved as the industry standard in 1953. That signal, officially blessed after a bitter battle over a rival color “wheel” system developed by CBS, can be received by both color and black-and-white TV sets.

Similarly, the new transmission process of the Sarnoff center--the facility is named for the founder of RCA--can be received by both conventional and high-resolution sets, according to NBC officials.

And, says NBC, the new system could provide what the company calls “a wide-screen, enhanced-resolution picture” within the current frequency spectrum used for TV broadcasts.

Only the new high-resolution TV sets would be able to show the higher-quality TV picture. But the system wouldn’t make obsolete the estimated 140 million conventional sets now in use, according to NBC.

Both CBS and ABC have looked in on the center’s work on a “compatible” signal, Carnes says.

“What we’re doing is trying to find a way to transmit it,” says Jules Barnathan, ABC’s respected president for operations and engineering, in speaking of high-resolution TV pictures. “We start with that as our principle.

“In other words, we believe that what they’re doing”--he referred to the Japanese high-definition TV process--”is backward. We first find out how to improve what we transmit. After that, we set a (broadcast) standard. What they’ve done is set a standard that nobody can handle.”

In his speech here recently, ABC chief Murphy, without specifically citing the compatible broadcast system developed at the Sarnoff center, said such a system is important to the future of over-the-air broadcasting. The industry will be “better off,” he said, if it can find a way to broadcast both high-resolution and conventional TV signals in a way that lets viewers “continue to receive programs on their existing receivers.”

The FCC, which will have to sort things out, is studying the various proposals and their effects on broadcasting. It also is considering arguments that it would be a mistake to establish a single standard for high-see TV, lest that retard the future of direct-to-home satellite broadcasting.

The conventional broadcast industry also is busy, having this year joined forces and funds to establish the Advanced Television Test Center to evaluate rival systems and make recommendations.

The center, which has yet to begin operations, is funded by CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, the National Assn. of Broadcasters and the respective associations of Maximum Service Telecasters and Independent Television Stations.