Linear video editing

However, kinescopes (the films of television shows) suffered from various sorts of picture degradation, from image distortion and apparent scan lines to artifacts in contrast and loss of detail.

Kinescopes had to be processed and printed in a film laboratory, making them unreliable for broadcasts delayed for different time zones.

The first widely accepted video tape in the United States was two-inch quadruplex videotape, which traveled at 15 inches per second.

The resulting video tracks were slightly less than a ninety-degree angle (considering the vector addition of high-speed spinning heads tracing across the 15-inches-per-second forward motion of the tape).

When it was used, the two pieces of tape to be joined were painted with a solution of extremely fine iron filings suspended in carbon tetrachloride, a toxic and carcinogenic compound.

This "developed" the magnetic tracks, making them visible when viewed through a microscope so that they could be aligned in a splicer designed for this task.

In the United States, the 1961-62 Ernie Kovacs ABC specials and Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In were the only TV shows to make extensive use of splice editing of videotape.

It was really just a means of synchronizing the playback of two machines so that the signal of the new shot could be "punched in" with a reasonable chance at success.

[citation needed] For more than a decade, computer-controlled Quad editing systems were the standard post-production tool for television.

Quad tape involved expensive hardware, time-consuming setup, relatively long rollback times for each edit and showed misalignment as disagreeable "banding" in the video.

Systems such as these were expensive, especially when considering auxiliary equipment like VTR, video switchers and character generators (CG) and were usually limited to high-end post-production facilities.