Electronovision

Electronovision was a process used by producer/entrepreneur H. William "Bill" Sargent, Jr. to produce a handful of motion pictures, theatrical plays, and specials in the 1960s and early 1970s using a high-resolution videotape process for production, later transferred to film via kinescope for theatrical release.

More than half a dozen films were produced in this fashion, including the production of Richard Burton in Hamlet (1964), the concert film The TAMI Show (1964), and the Magna Film production of Harlow (1965), starring actress Carol Lynley as Jean Harlow.

Electronovision was an entirely separate and more advanced process from the earlier Electronicam, used by the DuMont Television Network in the 1950s to telecast live TV shows with electronic cameras, while simultaneously filming the production with a film camera attached to the side of the video camera. That process had been used on TV series broadcast by DuMont as well as the "Classic 39" half-hour version of The Honeymooners that aired on CBS in the 1955-56 television season, allowing the producers to archive a high-quality film negative for reruns.

While the press releases on Electronovision were deliberately vague, perhaps to add more mystique to the process, it used conventional analog Image Orthicon video camera tube units, shooting in the B&W 819-line interlaced 25fps French video standard, using modified high-band quadruplex VTRs to record the signal.

The promoters of Electronovision gave the impression that this was a new system created from scratch, using a high-tech name (and avoiding the word kinescope) to distinguish the process from conventional film photography. Nonetheless the advances in tape-to-reel time were, at the time, a major step ahead. By capturing more than 800 lines of resolution at 25 frame/s, raw tape could be converted to film via kinescope recording with sufficient enhanced resolution to allow big-screen enlargement. The 1960s productions used RCA TK-60 image orthicon video cameras, which have a characteristic white "glow" around black objects (and a corresponding black glow around white objects), which was an inherent flaw of image orthicon video camera tubes called "blooming." Later vidicon and plumbicon tubes produced much cleaner, more accurate pictures, as well as a higher resolution of 1400 lines.

...
Wikipedia