FIRST EVER VIDEO RECORDING…September 20, 1927? YES!
FIRST EVER VIDEO RECORDING…September 20, 1927? YES!
Until yesterday, I had never heard of this and found it hard to believe, but here is the amazing proof laid out, fittingly…in 3 video reports.
In the 1996 report (top video), a single disc of the John Logie Baird video record or Phonovision had just been discovered. As you’ll see, no one had ever seen it, because even Baird had not created a way to play it back, so another Scotsman had to build a way to see it, which is covered there too.
The images were from 1933 and showed The Paramount Astoria dancing girls, shot with a horizontal 30 scan line mechanical system. In the 1998 story (bottom video), 11 more Baird discs have been found, with the earliest dated September 20, 1927. This report includes bits from those newly discovered discs, and at the end there is interesting archival film of Alexandra Palace being made ready for the tests of the competing Baird mechanical system, and Marconi-EMI’s new electronic system.
For more, here is the site of the man that built the playback machine with a great deal more on Phonovision. http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-1927-28/
You learn something new every day, and after all…isn’t that what life is all about? -Bobby Ellerbee
He was offering CD-Roms with the content, but hasn’t been able to for a while.
The evolution of recording TV images is well documented on this site: http://www.earlytelevision.org/pdf/Television_Recording_Origins.pdf.pdf
So the quality of the pictures is inversely proportional to the quality of the content?
Amazing! Thank you for posting this.
I had the opportunity to work on an episode of Tomorrow’s World in 1971, I I believe the year is correct, that was shot in San Diego. We used our truck with GE 350 cameras, but shot in B&W since BBC had not gone color yet. It was a fun time trying to understand the differences in commands and names of positions as the BBC called things. I was TD (Vision mixer) on this shoot and edit. Took us a little while to know when they said the Scanner would arrive at such time, we finally understood they meant the Remote Truck.It was a fun shoot.
Makes me wanna see some of the home video recorded of those fisher price video cameras that sold back in the 80s using a cassette tape as the medium. Apparently the tape speed was fast.
Lasted longer than Betamax!
Wow…the very first vertical videos!
Fascinating, and we thought getting two inch videotape to produce a picture was tricky.
wonder how that would look on a 4k TV…..:)
Donald McLean, who pioneered this work, has a website here: http://www.tvdawn.com/