Looking for the name of a video projection system that used film

[Frank Angel]

I remember seeing information years ago about a video system that allowed a theatre to project big ticket "live" events like sports events and such via video transmission. It used a very ingenus (although massive) system that started with a basic TV receiver and a 35mm film camera. The camera would film the TV tube raster (same basic system as a kinescope), then the exposed film would pass thru a developing/washing/fixative/drying processing of some kind or perhaps some kind of modified Polaroid Land process. Then the finished film would emerge to pass thru a standard 35mm projector head/lamphouse and onto the theatre screen. The system boast of being able to produce a theatre sized image with the same brightness/contrast and large screen as a standard movie; while it did not produce instantaneous reproduction in terms of it being called a "live" event, it was pretty close given the logistics. While this seems like a really elaborate and expensive contraption, the end product at the time (displaying video on a theatre size screen) was more successful than the other attempts of the day to do the same using strictly video systems. All though I do remember one system called the Edophor(?) that somehow used an oil film to modulate an image that could then be lit and focused on a screen, it didn't have the brightness or resolution to produce theatre screen size images.

Does anyone have any information about this video-to-film-to-screen system or even what it was called?

[Randy Stankey]

I was going to say Eidophor but, like you say, it uses an oil film on a sheet of metal.

Printing video directly to film is already a thing. I only know a little bit about it but it is a doable thing. Given that, I can't envision how a video feed could be "live streamed" to a projector.

Processing would have to be very fast and there would still have to be large accumulator loops to hold film between the time it is processed and the time it is sent to the projector. God forbid there be a jam up somewhere in that system!

How large are your reels of film? You'd need huge amounts of raw stock which would need to be on huge reels. You'd, probably, need to make changeovers! Two film processors going into two projectors would be four times as much fun!

What of the film when it's finally done being projected? What do you roll it up on? You'd have to make changeovers with that, too. Are you going to project it again, later? Store it? Throw it away?
How long will the film last? It was hastily developed and projected while it was still green. I doubt that, after going through all that, it wouldn't be much good anyway? Would it? What about archiving it? Will the stuff even last more than a few years?

Again, I don't know. It just doesn't seem practical. Does it?

I think it would be more practical to print video to film in the usual manner then ship the film to a theater. If they made multiple copies, it could be shown in multiple places. The only thing missing would be the live stream aspect. However, if the film lab was close by or even built in to the theater, near the projection booth, video could be received, transferred and projected in less than twenty four hours. Probably less.

Strangely, I seem to remember a system that works just as you say. I just don't know whether anybody had been successful at actually doing it. It could be real or it could be just hearsay.

[Brad Miller]

This is the British solution.

[Brad Miller]

This is the German solution.

[Leo Enticknap]

Both the pre-1936 British system (Baird 240-line) and the original system used for TV in Nazi Germany, from 1935-36 (before they transitioned to the 371 line/50Hz electronic system in 1936 and then to the 441-line system in 1939) were mechanical scan based on the Nipkow disc, for which no electronic method existed of capturing the image: the only option was film, hence the systems Brad shows above. For broadcast, the film had to be projected through another Nipkow disc for transmission. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that fully electronic systems based on the CRT (the Blumlein/EMI 405-line system in Britain, and a Telefunken-derived version of Zworykin's Iconoscope in Germany) superseded mechanical TV within a couple of years.

For this reason it annoys me that so many persist in referring to Baird as the "father of TV" (or some such variant), while only tech history geeks have heard of Blumlein or Zworykin (and to a lesser extent Farnsworth), who actually invented the technology needed for TV to become a viable mass-medium. An equivalent would be to regard Zeppelin as the father of civil aviation and for no-one to have heard of the Wright Bros: sure, he founded the world's first airline to carry fare-paying passengers, but the technology he did it with was rapidly superseded by another that was better, safer, and cheaper.

[Carsten Kurz]

This german system was in use during the 1936 olympics. The germans actually had electronic cameras for their national tv broadcast service, but they were prototypes and produced unsatisfying results in bright daylight. Therefore, they also used the intermediate film process trucks. The benefit also was, they could use it quasi live (with about 60-90 seconds process delay), and at the same time then had a recording of the event to be duplicated/edited later for standard cinema presentations or retransmissions. Recorders for the electronic signals did not exist yet.

Here is a google translation of a german article about the system:

https://www-digitalfernsehen-de.tran..._x_tr_pto=wapp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_film_system

[Leo Enticknap]

Another benefit, though unrealized at the time, was that the need to use film as a recording medium, even temporarily, for mechanical TV, resulted in a large proportion of the Baird system UK and Nazi TV broadcasts surviving. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, several hundred reels of 35mm of pre-war Nazi broadcasting were rediscovered in remarkably good condition. Some of this footage can be seen in the documentary Das Fernsehen unter dem Hakenkreuz (Television under the Swastika), including footage for timeshifted (i.e. not live) broadcast originated on film. Once videotape became a thing, TV material surviving in that definition and tonal range would disappear for 60-70 years!

Apologies for no subtitles, but even with my high school German, I was able to understand most of it.

[Steve Levy]

This was GPL's solution.

[Gordon McLeod]

There was a article in one of the 1950's Theatre Catalogue about that system installed at the NewYork Paramount. There was one installed at the Imperial Theatre in Toronto

[Jim Cassedy]

Somewhere I have a book which goes into technical details about how some
of these 'intermediate' film/video systems worked. I wish I could find out what
type of film stock they used. I do recall that one of the things they did was to
keep the processing chemicals at an elevated temperature, which sped up
the development process. (although from my 'darkroom days' I also seem to
recall that I think that also increases contrast, but there were ways you can
compensate for that during exposure) I'm also somewhat surprised that I've
never actually seen any film that was produced by these systems.
I'm guessing that due to the way the rapid way they were processed, they
were never intended for long-term archival survival.