Re: HDV footage Color Correction to look 70s style

One thing that comes to mind is that studio shots never matched the outside stuff.

For studio, very flat blanket lighting. They did use 3 point lighting but the fill would be so high that you'd hardly tell. Direct colour recording - Quad was actually very sharp in the luminance channel, but softening the chrominance and adding a little YC Delay would add some period vibe. A bit of comet-tailing on highlights would be a nice touch and some microphony on loud noises (watch what happens to the picture when an explosion happens on set during Tom Baker era Dr Who or Blake's 7 to see what those effects are/were).

Outside it was routinely pretty crappy 16mm reversal. Soft and low res, frequently with a slight green cast, grain, dirt and slight cratches, but all that soft as well (early telecines were pretty soft even if the film itself was sharp). Quite a lot of gate weave and vertical jitters on cuts (tape joins, they were never cement joined in a lab).

Am I giving away my age here? I remember the stuff that Look Around You is spoofing from my childhood and actually started as a trainee at the BBC in the '80s, just when technology was making a big leap, but there was still some of the old kit around (2" Quad VTRs, twin lens telecines, etc).

You can get the general low contrast/low saturation with the 3 way colour corrector, but I'd go to bad tv and bad film effects myself.