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In broadcasting, if you have film footage rather than video, the way you get it into a TV signal is with a machine called a telecine. I think about these a lot, because to my modernly-adjusted brain, they seem like rare and arcane contraptions, but really the opposite is true.
Videotape wasn't available until the late 50s; it wasn't conveniently man-portable until 71. There's some nuance to these statements but practically speaking, field-gathered news footage, in particular, was all on film for decades.
Off the top of my head I don't know when TV news started shooting in the field. Early television was entirely in studio, and I think they got the idea to shoot field footage in the late 50s. So from about 59-71, at a minimum, news was absolutely dependent on film.
I'm not sure how quick the update on Umatic videotape was, but it's also true that prior to the invention of the camcorder in the early 80s, it was more complicated to shoot video in the field. You had far more moving parts, things to adjust and maintain and to break.
I think to the average still photographer who was around for the digital switchover this seems like a no-brainer - obviously you'd switch to cheap, reusable, instant-playback, non-light-sensitive videotape as soon as you could, right?
There are lots of problems, I think. You're using more batteries and more power. You have a fragile, heavy camera plus a fragile, heavy tape recorder, joined by an umbilical cable. None of this technology is as proven or remotely as simple as 16mm film.
https://twitter.com/robcruickshank/status/1246523804811243523 here we go, firsthand, in this tweet and the followup - still using film in '84. That's 25 years of dependency on film.
So, from a sort of basic-nerd perspective (that is, mine before I did any research) the telecine seems like sort of a "oh, i guess we might need that" tool, like a strap wrench you use to take off a stubborn oil filter once every four years.
It feels like a funky little adapter, like DVI analog-to-Digital-Flat-Panel, some bizarre little thing you have around in case of a day where you just couldn't have your way. but no, these were the absolute backbone of every TV station for - let's just say - thirty years.
https://twitter.com/robcruickshank/status/1246525353998405634
and yep, there it is - a reality of Industry is that you just cannot assume that everything *eventually* gets coerced into a "modern" format.
(god i couldn't do this thread right without @robcruickshank thank you so much)
and yep, there it is - a reality of Industry is that you just cannot assume that everything *eventually* gets coerced into a "modern" format.
(god i couldn't do this thread right without @robcruickshank thank you so much)
That's a 40+ year run for film, from newsgathering in 59 to running an ancient print of Heidi in 2002. There's almost no videotape format that has a run that long.
The furthest you could go is if you had a very early U-Matic tape and wanted to play it now, that'd be a 50 year span, but that WOULD actually be a rare one-off situation where you'd need to dig up a dusty old machine. Nobody's using U-Matic for day-to-day.
