A-1 shared cameras and the control room with Studio A. It was used for small setups and voice-over work when the staging crews were setting and lighting programs in A.

Studio A-1 became STUDIO Q in 1974. In another attempt to snatch videotape commercial business, Paul Ballentine came in from a production house to set up Cue Productions. A hard cyclorama, found in most commercial houses, was constructed to serve as a background. The advantage of a cyc is that it can be "painted" with lights and serves as a great generic background. Single camera film style production was now de rigueur with adverting agencies. The studio was designed as a stand alone facility with the camera cabled to a dedicated videotape recorder, set in the entrance way between Q and A.

Ballentine had great expectations. He wanted to land national commercials, with $100,000 budgets that built Chevrolets on the tops of mountains. I tried to convince Paul that we would do better to produce ten $10,000 commercials. We never built a mountain top Chevrolet. Our regular clients, such as Goldblatts, left us, as they were not properly serviced. By July 1976, Cue Productions was a thing of the past, and commercial production was never again seriously attempted at WMAQ-TV.

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