Radio before Movies [Archive] - Literature Network Forums

TurquoiseSunset

03-09-2012, 07:17 AM

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_movies) says...

The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with the perfection of the audion amplifier tube and the introduction of the Vitaphone system.

Hawkman

03-09-2012, 07:51 AM

It should also be remembered that film was around before voice modulated radio transmission. Early radio was only possible through on/off CW spark or perhaps a buzzeer tone, using morse code. Voice recording at this time was still on wax cylinders, powered by clockwork (which runs down) using a resonating box and a horn for amplification. Synchronised sound and picture requires a constistant speed in both frame rate and audio.

You should also remember that early cameras were hand cranked, at about 18 frames per second, but naturally, this was not a precise or consistant rate, and might vary from cameraman to cameraman and probably varied if he started to get tired!

Early sound pictures used a record sychronised to the projector, but it was not until about 1931 that movies employed sound all the way through. The next breakthrough was printing the audio track along the edge of the film running through the projector and was read by an optical sensor. Tape recorders were not available until WW2, in fact most recordings were still done on records. Certainly this was what the BBC's war reporters were using. It was a lot of kit to lug around with you.

I think it was the Germans who first experimented with wire recordings, the same principle as magnetic tape but using a long continuous strand of wire instead. Again this was very heavy and the wire ran at a very high speed and was prone to breaking.

Portable tape recorders came into their own in the mid 50s. The sound recording would then be sychronised with the clapper board on an editing desk, where the sound and picture could be manually lined up. Up until the 1980s, News cameraman were using 16mm film, striped with a strip of magnetic tape, for sychronous recording. Editing this was no easy job, because the position of the tape head was not in line with the optical gate of the camera.

It's much easier these days!