Kinescope
Kinescope /ˈkɪnɪskoʊp/, shortened to kine /ˈkɪniː/, also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program on motion picture film directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor.
The process was pioneered during the 1940s for the preservation, re-broadcasting, and sale of television programs before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes.
The term originally referred to the cathode-ray tube (CRT) used in television receivers, as named by inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1929.
[5] The General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York, experimented with making still and motion picture records of television images in 1931.
Some of the surviving live transmissions of the Nazi German television station Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, dating as far back as the 1930s, were recorded by pointing a 35 mm camera to a receiver's screen; although, most surviving Nazi live television programs, such as the 1936 Summer Olympics (not to be confused with the cinematic footage made during the same event by Leni Riefenstahl for her film Olympia), a number of Nuremberg Rallies, or official state visits (such as Benito Mussolini's), were shot directly on 35 mm instead and transmitted over the air as a television signal, with only two minutes' delay from the original event, by means of the so-called Zwischenfilmverfahren (see intermediate film system) from an early outside broadcast van on the site.
The films were produced by aiming a camera at television monitors – at a speed of eight frames per second, resulting in somewhat jerky reproductions of the images.
[10] The first known surviving example of the telerecording process in Britain is from October 1947, showing the singer Adelaide Hall performing at the RadiOlympia event.
When the show was originally broadcast on BBC TV it was 60 minutes in length and also included performances from Winifred Atwell, Evelyn Dove, Cyril Blake and his Calypso Band, Edric Connor and Mable Lee, and was produced by Eric Fawcett.
[14] From the following month, the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip also survives, as do various early 1950s productions such as It is Midnight, Dr Schweitzer, The Lady from the Sea and the opening two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment, although in varying degrees of quality.
[citation needed] In the era before satellite communications, kinescopes were used to distribute live events such as a royal wedding as quickly as possible to other countries of the Commonwealth that had started a television service.
Although the quality was less than desirable, television programs of all types from prestigious dramas to regular news shows were handled in this manner.
NBC, CBS, and DuMont set up their main kinescope recording facilities in New York City, while ABC chose Chicago.
But as an article in American Cinematographer explained, In the beginning there was a very definite reason for the decision of Desilu Productions to put I Love Lucy on film instead of doing it live and having kinescope recordings carry it to affiliate outlets of the network.
[24]The I Love Lucy decision introduced reruns to most of the American television audience, and set a pattern for the syndication of TV shows after their network runs.
[25] An Electronicam technician threw switches to mark the film footage electronically, identifying the camera takes called by the director.
The DuMont network did not survive into the era of videotape, and in order to gain clearances for its programs, was heavily dependent on kinescopes, which it called Teletranscriptions.
[26] Attempts were made for many years to take television images, convert them to film via kinescope, then project them in theatres for paying audiences.
[27] The promoters of Electronovision (not to be confused with Electronicam) gave the impression that this was a new system created from scratch, using a high-tech name (and avoiding the word kinescope) to distinguish the process from conventional film photography.
Offering high quality and instant playback at a much lower cost, Quadruplex tape quickly replaced kinescope as the primary means of recording television broadcasts.
[clarification needed] In the 1950s a home telerecording kit was introduced in Britain, allowing enthusiasts to make 16 mm film recordings of television programs.
Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions, the producers of such TV game shows as What's My Line?, had a significant portion of their output recorded on both videotape and kinescopes.
All of the NBC Symphony Orchestra telecasts with Arturo Toscanini, from 1948 to 1952, were preserved on kinescopes and later released on VHS and LaserDisc by RCA and on DVD by Testament.
The original audio from the kinescopes, however, was replaced with high fidelity sound that had been recorded simultaneously either on transcription discs or magnetic tape.
Kinescopes continued to be made after videotape was introduced to Australia; most existing episodes of the 1965–1967 children's series Magic Circle Club are kinescopes (per listings for episodes on National Film and Sound Archive website) Telerecordings form an important part of British television heritage, preserving what would otherwise have been lost.
In 2008, the BBC undertook color restoration work on the existing 16 mm monochrome telerecording of Room at the Bottom, a 1969 episode of the sitcom Dad's Army.
Various solutions to the mapping problem have been developed resulting in successive improvements to the quality of the image at the traditional 24 fps frame rate.
[31] This procedure had the advantage of capturing both fields of the frame on a film, but required significant attention to produce quality reulity results.
When making a negative film, in order for final prints to be in the correct emulsion position, the direction of the image was reversed on the television.
Defects often encountered in photographic recording include relatively poor image resolution; a compressed brightness range often limited by kinescope display technology to a brightness ratio of about 40:1; nonlinearity of recordings, as exemplified by lack of gradation in both the near-white and near-black portions of the reproduced pictures; and excessive image noise due to film grain and video processing artifacts.
[36][a][37] In the era of early color TV, the chroma information included in the video signal filmed could cause visible artifacts.
