Pilottone

Pilottone (or Pilotone) and the related neo-pilottone are special synchronization signals recorded by analog audio recorders designed for use in motion picture production, to keep sound and vision recorded on separate media in step. Before the adoption of timecode by the motion picture industry in the late 1980s, pilottone-sync was the basis of all professional magnetic motion picture sound recording systems, whereas most amateur film formats used pre-striped magnetic coating on the film itself for live-sound recording.

According to Carsten Diercks, camera operator and filmmaker at West-German Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) during the 1950s, pilottone was invented at the NWDR studio in Hamburg-Lokstedt, West Germany by NWDR technical engineer Adalbert Lohmann and his assistant Udo Stepputat in the early 1950s for single-camera 16mm TV news gathering and documentaries. The first program featuring the use of pilottone was the documentary Musuri - Es geht aufwärts am Kongo ("Musuri: Upstream/progress at the Congo"), shot in early 1954 in Africa and first broadcast on ARD on March 31, 1954. The new technology required new editing suites, and Musuri camera operator Diercks turned to a small nearby 6-man workshop named Steenbeck. The subsequent success of priorly shunned 16mm for TV program gathering facilitated by the pilotone system turned Steenbeck into a multinational corporation.

Neo-pilottone was invented in 1957 by Stefan Kudelski with the Nagra III tape recorder.

The new technology of pilottone was brought to international attention by its use by Richard Leacock, former cameraman of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, in his documentary feature Primary (1960), documenting the competing Democrat presidential nominee candidates Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy. Diercks himself helped the spread of pilottone in the USA when he was the only Western reporter allowed to shoot in Havana during the Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961. CBS secured the licensing rights to Diercks's material via Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR had split in 1956 into NDR and WDR), and brought it on air on May 14, 1961, ten days prior to the German broadcast of the same material. At a time when North-American TV program gathering was dominated by either Movietone (see also Movietone News) or magnetic pre-striping for live-sound recording, and the use of pilottone was still unheard of, according to Diercks the US TV networks were impressed with the system demonstrated by the 60-minute documentary feature.

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