Kinescope , shortened to kine , 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and sale of television programs before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes. Kinescopes were the only practical way to preserve live television broadcasts prior to videotape.
Typically, the term can refer to the process itself, the equipment used for the procedure (a movie camera mounted in front of a video monitor and synchronized to the monitor's scanning rate), or a film made using the process. Film recorders are similar, but record source material from a computer system instead of a television broadcast. A telecine is the inverse device, used to show film directly on television.
The term originally referred to the cathode-ray tube (CRT) used in television receivers, as named by inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1929.Albert Abramson, Zworykin, Pioneer of Television, University of Illinois Press, 1995, p. 84. . Hence, the recordings were known in full as kinescope films or kinescope recordings.Popular Mechanics April 1953 Page 227Audio Engineering Society, Inc. Retrieved October 29, 2015 RCA was granted a trademark for the term (for its CRT) in 1932; it voluntarily released the term to the public domain in 1950."RCA Surrenders Rights to Four Trade-Marks," Radio Age, October 1950, p. 21.
History The General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York, experimented with making still and motion picture records of television images in 1931."Schenectady-to-Leipzig Television a Success; Movie Also Made of Images Sent by Radio", The New York Times, Feb. 13, 1931, p. 15.
There is anecdotal evidence that the BBC experimented with filming the output of the television monitor before its television service was suspended in 1939 due to the outbreak of World War II. A BBC executive, Cecil Madden, recalled filming a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel in this way, only for film director Alexander Korda to order the burning of the negative as he owned the film rights to the book, which he felt had been infringed. While there is no written record of any BBC Television production of The Scarlet Pimpernel during 1936–1939, the incident is dramatized in Jack Rosenthal's 1986 television play The Fools on the Hill.
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.
According to a 1949 film produced by RCA, silent films had been made of early experimental telecasts during the 1930s. 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. By the mid-1940s, RCA and NBC were refining the filming process and including sound; the images were less jerky but still somewhat fuzzy.
By early 1946, television cameras were being attached to American guided missiles to aid in their remote steering.James L. H. Peck, "Doom on the Wing", Popular Science, February 1946, p. 84, 86.Transatlantic Roller Coaster Designed to Bomb U.S.A., Popular Science, October 1947, p. 111. Films were made of the television images they transmitted for further evaluation of the target and the missile's performance.Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1942 to 2000, McFarland, 2003, p. 9. .
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..Getty Images: A view of the "Cafe Continental" stage set in the television studio at RadiOlympia Theatre, London, September 1947. Hall sings "Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep)" and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love", as well as accompanying herself on ukulele and dancing. 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. The six-minute footage of Miss Hall is all that survives of the show.
From the following month, the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten 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. A complete 7-hour set of telerecordings of Queen Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation also exists.
The first near-instant replay of a sporting event occurred in 1955 during a Hockey Night in Canada broadcast on CBC Television, using a kinescope to replay a goal scored, mere minutes after had been broadcast live.
Worldwide program distribution
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. A Royal Air Force aircraft would fly the telerecording from the UK to Canada, where it would be broadcast over the whole North American network.
Prior to the introduction of videotape in 1956, kinescopes were the only way to record television broadcasts, or to distribute network television programs that were broadcast live from originating cities to stations not connected to the network, or to stations that wished to show a program at a time different than the network broadcast. Although the quality was less than desirable, television programs of all types, from prestigious dramas to regular news shows, were handled in this manner.
Even after the introduction of videotape, the BBC and the ITV companies made black and white kinescopes of selected programs for international sales and continued to do so until the early 1970s, by which time programs were being videotaped in color. Most, if not all, recordings from the 405-line era have long since been lost as have many from the introduction of 625-line video to the early days of color. Consequently, the majority of British shows that still exist before the introduction of color, and a number thereafter, do so in the form of these telerecordings. A handful of shows, including some episodes of Doctor Who and most of the first series of Adam Adamant Lives!, were deliberately telerecorded for ease of editing rather than being videotaped.
Eastman Television Recording Camera
In September 1947, Eastman Kodak introduced the Eastman Television Recording Camera, in cooperation with DuMont Laboratories and NBC, for recording images from a television screen under the trademark "Kinephoto". NBC, CBS, and DuMont set up their main kinescope recording facilities in New York City, while ABC chose Chicago. By 1951, NBC and CBS were each shipping out some 1,000 16 mm kinescope prints each week to their affiliates across the United States, and by 1955 that number had increased to 2,500 per week for CBS.Wesley S. Griswold, "Why TV Is Going Movie-Mad", Popular Science, February 1955, p. 118. By 1954, the television industry's film consumption surpassed that of all of the Hollywood studios combined.Wolpin, Stewart. "The Race to Video ". Invention & Technology, Fall 1994.
Hot kinescope
After the network of coaxial cable and microwave relays carrying programs to the West Coast was completed in September 1951,"Coast to Coast", Time, August 13, 1951. CBS and NBC instituted a hot kinescope process in 1952, where shows being performed in New York were transmitted west, filmed on two kinescope machines in 35 mm negative and 16 mm reversal film (the latter for backup protection) in Los Angeles, rushed to film processing, and then transmitted from Los Angeles three hours later for broadcast in the Pacific Time Zone.Arthur Schneider, Jump Cut!: Memoirs of a Pioneer Television Editor, McFarland, 1997, p. 23–32. . To save the time to make a print, the 35 mm negative was broadcast, and electronically converted to a positive image. The soundtrack for the 35 mm film was recorded on a separate 16 mm filmstrip, and synchronized at playback. The soundtrack for the 16 mm reversal film version was recorded on the same filmstrip as the image.Albert Abramson, The History of Television, 1942 to 2000, McFarland, 2003, p. 48. . In September 1956, NBC began making color hot kines of some of its color programs using a lenticular film process which, unlike color negative film, could be processed rapidly using standard black-and-white methods.Showcase Productions, Inc.: Producers' Showcase, Technical Considerations.Abramson, The History of Television, 1942 to 2000, p. 67. They were called hot kines because the film reels being delivered from the lab were still warm from the developing process.
Double system editing
Even after the introduction of quadruplex videotape machines in 1956 removed the need for hot kines, the television networks continued to use kinescopes in the double system method of videotape editing. It was impossible to slow or freeze frame a videotape at that time, so the unedited tape would be copied to a kinescope and edited conventionally. The edited kinescope print was then used to conform the videotape master. More than 300 videotaped network series and specials used this method over a 12-year period, including the fast-paced Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.Arthur Schneider, Jump Cut!: Memoirs of a Pioneer Television Editor, McFarland, 1997, p. 105–106, 134–135. .
Alternatives to kinescoping
With the variable quality of kinescopes, networks looked towards alternative methods to replace them with a higher degree of quality.
Change to 35 mm film broadcasts Programs originally shot with film cameras (as opposed to kinescopes) were also used in television's early years, although they were generally considered inferior to the big-production live programs because of their lower budgets and loss of immediacy.
In 1951, the stars and producers of the Hollywood-based television series I Love Lucy, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, decided to film the show directly onto 35 mm film using the three-camera system, instead of broadcasting it live. Normally, a live program originating from Los Angeles would be performed live in the late afternoon for the Eastern Time Zone and seen on a kinescope three hours later in the Pacific Time Zone. But as an article in American Cinematographer explained,
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.
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