Speaking to the visibility of yellow for safety: I am utterly convinced of my memory of starting school in 1960, when they told us to wear red for safety. Then they changed it to yellow within a few years.
Is my memory correct?
The video dances around this and names a bunch of secondary reasons, but the primary reason was simply that video overlay tech was primitive until fairly recently. Overlay graphics couldn’t have drop shadows, outlines, glows, or other things to set them off complex moving backgrounds like we have now. Yellow is not common in the scenes of whatever is happening onscreen, so it’s likely to be high contrast with whatever it is sitting on.
Anyone who’s done any titling of images or graphic design groks this, and those of us who did some video editing in the 80s knew that yellow was the only choice if you wanted decent odds of it being legible. Same reason the typefaces were always heavy block sans serif and bold serifs. To be legible over a very noisy background.
You see yellow go away in the 90s as video overlays got more sophisticated and we started to be able to do drop shadows on text. That was a big deal. Then with digital and HD, we could finally do clean outlines and glows. This is why all the fancy shows in the early HD era suddenly went to tiny Helvetica overlay text with fine borders for credit sequences and such. It was so damned exciting to finally be able to do stuff like that.
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