Telecine (Film Transfer)

 

In the 1950's broadcast television programmers knew they needed more than live television programming and that the current and previous years of cinema would give them a huge library of films to access. Telecine technology was the process that was developed for replaying films direct to air. Machines that could convert film to the television format through a camera device. There were problems with different frame rates to overcome between film (generally 24 frames/s) and television (30 or 25 frames/s, interlaced) where flickering would occur when playing a film into a television camera. These problems would eventually be overcome but the role of telecine would change in the next few decades. Telecine became the method for transferring film to tape for editing purposes or replay to air. Today far less productions are shot on film and when they are, they are digitised through Telecine into the computer domain.