CBS Television Staging and Lighting Practices

Television as a visual medium must be operated within the boundaries of its technical characteristics to achieve good visual reproduction. The system handles a limited range of luminance, introduces luminance transfer distortion, exhibits spurious effects (halos, image orthicon ghosts, clouding, streaking) and has finite detail resolution. It is necessary to provide guidance whereby production personnel can fully exploit the present system. — Accordingly, rules have been formulated for each of the major production operations at CBS, viz., staging, lighting, camera operation and direction. Individuals working in these phases are thus enabled to perform their separate functions with assurance that their combined efforts will produce images which are both technically correct and artistically pleasing.