American Cinematographer - September 1989 - 75

Film to

Tape Mysteries Unraveled

by Frank Reinking
In 1947 there

were roughly 170,000 TV sets
Harry S Truman became the first
president to deliver his state-of-the-union

Eastman Color

in the U.S.

address

on

television.
The Yankee-Dodger

Negative Film

World Se¬

ries was televised, and "Buffalo Bob" Smith
started a puppet show starring Howdy

Doody. There

were no national networks
offering to share its technolo¬
gy with other manufacturers in order to
speed up the sale of TV sets.
A year later there were four
networks vying for the loyalties of millions

and RCA was

of new TV viewers. Milton Berle and Ed
Sullivan became instant stars. Other pro¬

and went. Everything was
produced live and attempts to save shows
for future use were achieved by kinescope
recording.
Kinescope was a method of
making a film copy directly from a cathode
ray tube (CRT). However, in the early 1950s,
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz came up with the
idea of shooting the original / Love Lucy
series on film with multiple cameras in front
of a live audience. The network thought it
was such a crazy notion that they traded
away residual rights in exchange for Desilu
Studios' picking up the added cost of shoot¬
ing on film. That may have been the best
bargain in the history of broadcasting.
grams came

on

the

Soon thereafter, video tape was
in Hollywood. Originally it was

scene

question of whether film or tape would
prevail, but, during the next several decades
a

that issue resolved itself. At present, some
75 to 85 percent of prime time network

RELATIVE EXPOSURE (STOPS)

the rest are
produced live
ratio hasn't
changed significantly for some 30 years.
What has changed is how film is
seen on TV. By the late 1970s, TV networks
and stations in the U.S. were distributing
programming on video tape. That meant film
had to be transferred to video tape for

24 frames per second while the NTSC video
standard requires 30 images per second.
Two video fields, which equal one frame,
were taken from one film frame and three
fields were generated from the next film
frame. Repeating this sequence, referred to
as "3:2 pulldown," generated 30 video
frames for each 24 frames of film.
Gains were made in film chain

distribution.
The first primitive film to video
transfers were achieved simply by focusing
a motion picture projector through the lens
of a television camera. Very soon that gave

optics and controls, but the harsh film
handling characteristics of the intermittent
pull-down mechanism were considered too
risky to use in making transfers from the
original negative.

programs are

way to

the

shot

on film and
or on tape. This

use

of film chains, which fea¬

tured a frame rate conversion to compen¬
sate for the fact that film is typically shot at

That

was

late 1970s when two

the situation until the

significant things hap¬

pened. One: Advances

September 1989

were

made in elec¬

tronic

editing systems which portended
gains in video post¬
production technology. Two: The first Rankmore

dramatic future

Cintel color telecine was installed in the U.S.
in 1977. This device uses a flying spot
scanner to transfer images from film to
video tape.
A moving beam of light scans
each frame of film a line at a time. Photo¬

multiplier tubes translate the intensity of
light passing through the film frame into
analog electrical signals representing the
image. These signals are recorded on video
tape.
It didn't take

long for some com¬
producers to recognize that the
capstan drive used with this device was
mercial

American

Cinematographer

73
American Cinematographer - September 1989

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