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re-broadcasting and sale of television programmes before the introduction of videotape from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes.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. 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re-broadcasting and sale of television programmes before the introduction of videotape from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes.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 Kinescope can refer to the process itself, the equipment used for the procedure (a 16 mm or 35 mm movie camera mounted in front of a video monitor, and synchronized to the monitor's scanning rate), or a film made using the process. The term originally referred to the cathode ray tube used in television receivers, as named by inventor Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1929. Hence, the recordings were known in full as kinescope films or kinescope recordings.  RCA was granted a trademark for the term (for its cathode ray tube) in 1932; it voluntarily released the term to the public domain in 1950. The General Electric laboratories in Schenectady, New York experimented with making still and motion picture records of television images in 1931. There is some evidence to suggest 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, later 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. However, the evidence for this is purely anecdotal, and indeed there is no written record of any BBC Television production of The Scarlet Pimpernel during the 1936–1939 period. The incident is, however, dramatised 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 35mm camera to a receiver's screen, although most surviving Nazi live television programs such as the 1936 Summer Olympics (not to confuse 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 35mm instead and transmitted over the air as a television signal, with only a 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. Films were made of the television images they transmitted for further evaluation of the target and the missile's performance. 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. 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 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. A complete 7-hour set of telerecordings of Queen Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation also exists.