Like every other television news operations in the 1950s and ‘60s, WRAL-TV’s news department relied on 16mm film cameras for all its early newsgathering.

At WRAL, the Auricon was one of the more common cameras that went into the field, but the “cameramen” of the day also used Bell & Howells and Bolex cameras to shoot their news footage.

In those early days, news camera operators used reel after reel of black and white film to capture the news of the day. Eventually they made the transition to color, but film technology still had one glaring limitation – before it could air in a newscast the film stock had to run through a time-consuming chemical processing machine. As a result, news crews had to be back at the station by mid-afternoon to get their film processed in time for the evening newscasts.

This time constraint set the stage for one of the most revolutionary advancements in the history of the television industry – videotape.

As always, WRAL would not be left behind. In a 1966 promotional booklet, WRAL boasted that it was equipped with two TR-22 color videotape recorders and one TR-4 machine for tape playback. The booklet went on to expound on the virtues of the new technology: “Immediately after recording, video tape can be shown without chemical processing.”

These early videotape machines were the size of washer/dryers, so they didn’t exactly lend themselves to the on-the-run gathering of news. WRAL found other uses such as the recording and play back of full-length programs, commercials, editorials and other non-news content.

It would be the mid-1970s before portable videotape cameras and recorders were small and portable enough to find their way into the WRAL News operation. By the end of the 70s, however, videotape had taken over and film cameras were a thing of the past.