Electronovision?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Anyone have experience with this? I read it on a film collectors forum.

 

Electronovision?

Charles Brubaker » Mon Nov 08, 2021 10:47 pm

Electronovision is something I learned about today, a process where a videotape was transferred to film (mostly 35mm) for theatrical distribution, used in the 1960s and 1970s. It was mostly used to record concerts and stage plays.

Trying to find information about the exact technical aspects has been a bit difficult (at least from a Google search), other than that the videotape used was higher-resolution than standard at the time. I'm guessing this was simply a higher-end version of the Kinescope process? Anyone ever owned a print of an "Electronovision" production?

I know there were a handful of theatrical movies from the time period that was shot on videotape then transferred to film. "Norman Is That You?" is one such example. I don't know if that was specifically Electronovision or not, though.

[Phil Rhodes]

I've never heard that term; the UK terminology is telerecording, and it's through this process that we have some examples of early Doctor Who, for instance. I wasn't aware that it had been used to create theatrically-released material.

In PAL-world, at least, it involved one film frame per video field, so the results were at 50fps.

Some interesting work has been done since on monochrome telerecordings of material which actually contained composite colour video information, visible in the telerecording as dot crawl. Modern computer techniques have made it possible to reconstruct the colour information from those images. Because the colour burst is not visible in a telerecording, the hue angle must be manually set. It's sort of entertaining.

P