September 13, 1947…The RCA Kinescope Machine Debuts
September 13, 1947…The RCA Kinescope Machine Debuts
In association with Dumont, Kodak and RCA announced the developed a special film camera to shoot directly off a TV screen. This was the first “time shifting” technology to come to television. Nine years later, video tape would become the second.
Officially titled, the “Eastman Kodak Television Recording Camera”, a Kinescope recorder was basically a special 16mm film camera mounted in a large box aimed at a high quality monochrome video monitor. All things considered the Kinescope made high quality, and respectable TV recordings.
The Kinescope was quite the clever device. It’s film camera ran at a speed of 24 fps. Because the TV image repeated at 60 fields interlaced (30 fps) the film had to move intermittently between video frames and then be rock steady during exposure.
The pull-down period for the film frame was during the vertical interval of less than 2 mili seconds, which was something no mechanical contraption could do at the time.
Together, Dumont, RCA and Eastman Kodak found various ways around the problem by creating a novel shutter system that used an extra six frames of the 30 frame video signal to move the film. This action integrated the video half-images into what seemed like smooth 24 fps film pictures.
Of course, the kines were played back on air using film chains running at 24 fps, so the conversion to film was complete and seamless. Until videotape recorders made their debut, the Kinescope was the only way to transmit delayed television programs that were produced live.
NBC referred to their kinescoped films as “Kinephotos”. This is the disclaimer they attached at the end of virtually all of their kinescoped programs……https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDZ7GzXlHA
A well recorded and well transferred kinescope can look quite great. I’ve seen some 16 mm black and white kinescopes of the Danny Kaye show that were transferred from quad videotape at CBS television city in 1964 to 16 mm black and white kinescopes.
When UCLA transferred them to a 2336x 1752 Scan, you would think you were looking at a live picture unless you saw a few specks of dirt go by on the film or some dropouts coming off the video tape.
The ability to make adjustments to black, white, and gamma levels is a big help.
But having a well recorded kinescope in the first place makes a difference.
As other posters pointed out Bad kid a scope processing or handling gives the whole process of bad name.
“Kinnes” were often used as a way of providing copies of performances two artists who appeared on the screen.
When I transferred to SD was of appearances Burrell Ives made on a color red Skelton show. We know it was colored because we could see the chroma dot crawl in the monochrome picture.
http://www.kinescopes.com/
There was a Teledyne color film recorder that used a triniscope arrangement with three
Monochrome CRTs combined with filters and a beam splitter. There also was the 3M EBR 100 electron beam recorder, which wrote directly to B&W stock in a vacuum chamber. The famed 4MC tape to film process used one of these running at 72 fps to write successive RGB separations, which were then combined in an optical printer using filters. Quality was excellent. Then again many places used a Palmer Kinescope Camera and a Trinitron monitor to make color kines. DuArt was doing this as late as the mid 2000s. I have a Palmer setup somewhere… Why I bought it I do not know.
I wonder if during the experimental stage they ever did 30 fps kinescopes? Obviously simpler to do but less economical.
Some kinescopes look really quite sharp, but others are “blown out” with white, or have major distortion. (I’m thinking of some “Cavalcade of Stars” clips which have both problems–contrast is horrible and looks to be shot through a funhouse mirror. Watching the “What’s My Line?” kines on Buzzr and GSN, some look vivid, but so many seem incapable of rendering a straight line; everything seems bent.) My question: Does this come down to the care the operator used when making the film, or were these inherent problems in the system?
the “innards” look like part of a B & K 1077 TV anaylist that had a flying spot scanner.
I loved when they said: “And now, live and in living color from Hollywood, it’s the Dating Game!” And the show was in black and white kinescope. Those type things occur, randomly!
The sponsor of I Love Lucy wanted the show done in New York. He compared kinescopes to watching through cheesecloth. The compromise was to use film. Too bad many kinnies got destroyed for the space or lack of interest.
The lack of time delayed color kines in the 50’s left many color tv owners on the west coast watching many NBC and the occasional CBS color telecasts with B&W kine versions on their very expensive color tv’s. Live coast to coast color broadcasts were seen in prime time in the east & central time zones and late afternoon in the west with far fewer viewers because of the early hour. Video tape finally resolved this problem.
I think some of Kine’s reputation for marginal quality had to do with playing them back on Ike or early vidicon film chains. Modern film transfer system can do a much better job.
I wonder where the electronacam fits into all of this. As I recall Jackie Gleason used this first on the Honeymooners.
and I still do this today for movies (the rare ones these days) that still shoot film & want to shoot a CRT…or even HD ‘film’ cameras that want to shoot a CRT….I just make special flavored 24.000 or 23.976fps ‘NTSC’….
I used to manage the kinescope department at Rombex, a division of DuArt back in the mid-70’s. We modified our monitor to reverse the CRT sweeps selectively so we could shoot A or B wind negatives.
Yes, Stephen, there were 35mm kinescopes. I did quite a few of them for Research Video/Retro Video over the years. The quality was surprisingly good, but eh… a kine is still a kine. The color ones were not so great, mostly because of the mediocre quality of TV screens in that era.
Did they ever use 35 mm Kinescopes? What about color? Most of the shows that were broadcast in color, like the CBS 1957 production of Cinderella, only exists now as a black and white Kine.
Watching “Good Night, and Good Luck” again the other day – highly recommended to anyone interested in Television – I noted that Murrow’s 1958 speech suggested the collection of “A week’s worth of kinescope recordings of all news programmes” for posterity.