Kinescope

Kinescope /ˈkɪnɪskoʊp/, shortened to kine /ˈkɪni/, 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and sale of television programs before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes.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 can refer to the process itself, the equipment used for the procedure (a movie camera mounted in front of a video monitor and synchronized to the monitor's scanning rate), or a film made using the process. Film recorders are similar, but record source material from a computer system instead of a television broadcast. A telecine is the inverse device, used to show film directly on television.

The term originally referred to the cathode-ray tube (CRT) 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 CRT) 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 anecdotal evidence 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, 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. While there is no written record of any BBC Television production of The Scarlet Pimpernel during 1936–1939, the incident is dramatized 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 35 mm camera to a receiver's screen; although, most surviving Nazi live television programs, such as the 1936 Summer Olympics (not to be confused 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 35 mm instead and transmitted over the air as a television signal, with only 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.