T.A.M.I. video question

This is all fascinating, but none of it resolves my major question about the T.A.M.I. show.

Why on earth was Chuck Berry playing second fiddle to Gerry and the Pacemakers?

 

That was different! That was done almost 20 years later and used the "ImageVision" 655-line color highband system invented by Image Transform. Image later took the edited tapes from this show and transformed the video into film, then the film was shown in theaters. I think the Monty Python Hollywood Bowl concert looks kind of weird and murky, but it's not awful. I could never understand why they didn't use the tape for the home video release, but the whole operation that shot it went out of business a few years later. I tend to doubt those old tapes will be easy to find, plus because the machines were modified, it's a unique format that won't be easy to play on a standard VTR.

 

At least there is a decent transfer of the film in the UK. We never got a domestic issue of it. I do have to wonder where those tapes ended up.

 

Wow, that's wonderful, Serene! I'm actually a big fan of your father's work, and always thought he was ahead of his time. I wrote the entry on Electronovision for Wikipedia, and I always thought there should be a book out on his efforts. I pointed out in the entry that everything Mr. Sargent did in the 1960s and 1970s was a forerunner to the all-digital motion picture production that finally started happening at the end of the 1990s and 2000s, ultimately replacing film.

Let me know if there's anything in there that could be expanded or corrected, and I'll be glad to help. People should know about Electronovision, because it's an important early step in the history of filmmaking.

 

In October 1964, Gerry and the Pacemakers were a hot young British band; despite a recent hit with "No Particular Place to Go," Chuck Berry was seen mostly a has-been.

 

That's always the question! Another show that got lost is Richard Pryor Live in Concert, which was a huge hit in 1979 and very, very influential to a whole generation of comics in the 1980s and 1990s. I was at the facility that did some of the post on this show, and the company that owned the rights went bankrupt and so we had a lien on the prints and negatives. I got no idea what happened to the source videotapes or even the negatives. That post company also went bankrupt about two years later, so for all I know, all this stuff got hauled out to the landfill and forgotten about. (Probably right next to Carson's 1960s TV shows.)

 

Only the greatest rock n' roll film of them all, IMO.

Electronicam? More like Electroniexcellent!

 

A couple of years ago I met Moulty, the infamous hook-handed drummer from the Barbarians. I told him that they were totally RAGIN' on the TAMI Show, which pleased him. He urged me to buy the DVD because he gets royalties from it!

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/03/28/small_bands_big_break_restored_on_dvd/

 

Since you worked on Post in the Theatrovision process, maybe you can answer a question. Were they still converting the tape to film using the kinescope process or had they upgraded to the Electro Beam Recording technology by then? Image Transform was already around when they started doing Theatrovision, but they are not credited on those films that I can find.

 

I know that Peter Goldmark of CBS Labs had been working very hard trying to perfect Electron Beam Recording in the 1960s, but as far as I know it didn't work until the 1970s. My guess is that it was just a fancy kinescope. I worked for Image Transform for a year or so in the early 1980s, and their system used two CRTs: one for luminance (Y) and one for chroma (C), and somehow the two images were combined on the piece of film. They kept certain details hush-hush and it wasn't my department, so I only observed from a distance. The ugly secret of the Image process is that they could only record to 16mm negative (!!!), so any theatrical release had to be blown up to 35mm.

I wrote the entire piece on Electronovision in Wikipedia, using all the available information I had on inventor Bill Sargent, who was amazingly (and sadly) way ahead of his time. Sargent had a penchant for huge self-promotion and made a lot of claims about the process -- saying it was "super high-res" and all kinds of stuff -- but I think the truth is that he just shot on B&W PAL and then recorded out a kinescope at CFI in Hollywood. He kept the technical secrets very guarded, I think for fear that somebody would imitate what he was doing. Bear in mind a kinescope is simply a film camera pointed at a video monitor... though with a few tweaks and adjustments to optimize the process.