Pilottone and the related
neo-pilottone are special
synchronizationSynchronization or synchronisation is timekeeping which requires the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. The familiar conductor of an orchestra serves to keep the orchestra in time....
signals recorded by analog audio recorders designed for use in
motion pictureFilm encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects....
production. 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
coatingCoating is a covering that is applied to the surface of an object, usually referred to as the substrate. In many cases coatings are applied to improve surface properties of the substrate, such as appearance, adhesion, wetability, corrosion resistance, wear resistance, and scratch resistance...
on the film itself for live-sound recording.
According to
Carsten DiercksCarsten Diercks was a German documentary filmmaker.Diercks startet his career after World War II at the radio station of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. 1952 he became cinematographer with NWDR TV station. In 1953 he participated in the first tests of pilot tone...
, camera operator and filmmaker at West-German
Nordwestdeutscher RundfunkNordwestdeutscher Rundfunk was the organization responsible for public broadcasting in the German Länder of Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia from 22 September 1945 until 31 December 1955. Until 1954, it was also responsible for broadcasting in West Berlin...
(NWDR) during the 1950s, pilottone was invented at the NWDR studio in
Hamburg-LokstedtHamburg is the second-largest city in Germany and the sixth-largest city in the European Union...
, West Germany by NWDR technical engineer Adalbert Lohmann and his assistant Udo Stepputat in the early 1950s for
single-cameraThe single-camera setup is a method of shooting films and television programs. A single camera—either film or video—is employed on the set and shots are often taken out of order...
16mm TV news gathering and documentaries.
Pilottone and the related
neo-pilottone are special
synchronizationSynchronization or synchronisation is timekeeping which requires the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. The familiar conductor of an orchestra serves to keep the orchestra in time....
signals recorded by analog audio recorders designed for use in
motion pictureFilm encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects....
production. 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
coatingCoating is a covering that is applied to the surface of an object, usually referred to as the substrate. In many cases coatings are applied to improve surface properties of the substrate, such as appearance, adhesion, wetability, corrosion resistance, wear resistance, and scratch resistance...
on the film itself for live-sound recording.
History
According to
Carsten DiercksCarsten Diercks was a German documentary filmmaker.Diercks startet his career after World War II at the radio station of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. 1952 he became cinematographer with NWDR TV station. In 1953 he participated in the first tests of pilot tone...
, camera operator and filmmaker at West-German
Nordwestdeutscher RundfunkNordwestdeutscher Rundfunk was the organization responsible for public broadcasting in the German Länder of Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia from 22 September 1945 until 31 December 1955. Until 1954, it was also responsible for broadcasting in West Berlin...
(NWDR) during the 1950s, pilottone was invented at the NWDR studio in
Hamburg-LokstedtHamburg is the second-largest city in Germany and the sixth-largest city in the European Union...
, West Germany by NWDR technical engineer Adalbert Lohmann and his assistant Udo Stepputat in the early 1950s for
single-cameraThe single-camera setup is a method of shooting films and television programs. A single camera—either film or video—is employed on the set and shots are often taken out of order...
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 broadcasted on
ARDErstes Deutsches Fernsehen, marketed as Das Erste , is the principal publicly owned television channel in Germany. It is a joint production of Germany's regional public broadcasters acting through, and coordinated by the ARD consortium....
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
SteenbeckSteenbeck is a brand name that has become synonymous with a type of flatbed film editing suite which is usable with both 16mm and 35mm optical sound and magnetic sound film.The Steenbeck company was founded in 1931 by Wilhelm Steenbeck in Hamburg, Germany...
. 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 KudelskiStefan Kudelski is a Polish audio engineer, famous for creating the Nagra series of professional audio recorders....
with the
Nagra IIINagra is a generic term referring to any of the series of mostly battery-operated portable professional audio recorders produced by Kudelski SA, based in Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne, Switzerland...
tape recorder.
The new technology of pilottone was brought to international attention by its use by
Richard LeacockRichard Leacock is a documentary film director and one of the pioneers of Direct Cinema.-Biography:Leacock grew up on a banana plantation in the Canary Islands , until shipped off to...
, former cameraman of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, in his documentary feature
PrimaryPrimary is a 1960 Direct Cinema documentary film about the 1960 Wisconsin Primary election between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the United States Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States....
(1960), documenting the competing Democrat presidential nominee candidates
Hubert HumphreyHubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. served under President Lyndon B. Johnson as the 38th Vice President of the United States. Humphrey twice served as a United States Senator from Minnesota, and served as Democratic Majority Whip. He was a founder of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and...
and
John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
. Diercks himself helped the spread of pilottone in the USA when he was the only Western reporter allowed to shoot in Havanna during the
Bay of Pigs InvasionThe Bay of Pigs Invasion , was an unsuccessful attempt by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba with support from US government armed forces, to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F...
in April 1961.
CBSCBS Broadcasting Inc. is an American television network, one of television's original "big three", which also include NBC and ABC. Like NBC, CBS started out as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System...
secured the licensing rights to Diercks's material via
Norddeutscher RundfunkNorddeutscher Rundfunk is a public radio and television broadcaster, based in Hamburg. In addition to the city-state of Hamburg, NDR transmits for the German states of Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Schleswig-Holstein...
(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
MovietoneThe Movietone sound system is a sound-on-film method of recording sound for motion pictures which guarantees synchronisation between the sound and the picture. It achieves this by recording the sound as a variable-density optical track on the same strip of film used to record the pictures...
(see also
Movietone NewsMovietone News known in the U.S. as Fox Movietone News, produced cinema, sound newsreels from 1928-1963 in the U.S., from 1929-1979 in the UK , and from 1929-1975 in Australia...
) 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.
Technology
The synchronization is obtained when a pulse cable is connected from Motion picture camera to an audio recorder such as those made by Nagra. A camera with a Sync motor sends a 60/50 Hz signal to the recorder. This sine wave is recorded in the centre of the audio tape by a special push-pull head with its head gap oriented orthogonally (at 90 degrees) to the audio record head gaps. (The recorded pilot frequency can only be played back by push-pull head oriented similarly and not by the normal playback head) All the speed variations of the camera and tape are recorded as on pilot track as deviations from 60/50 Hz, and compared at the time of playback with in built quartz reference oscillator. These variations are rectified (resolved) at the time of transfer to the perforated 35mm/16mm audio tape. At that time the mains power supply frequency is also taken as reference. (The selection of the 60/50 Hz equipment depends on the power supply in the country where filming is being conducted. North America has a supply of 60 Hz whereas Europe and some Asian countries have 50 Hz.)
Normal audio recorders have a good system for regulating their speed with a
tachometerA tachometer is an instrument that measures the rotation speed of a shaft or disk, as in a motor or other machine. The device usually displays the revolutions per minute on a calibrated analogue dial, but digital displays are increasingly common...
, but such a system cannot guarantee that a playback machine will exactly match the speed of the recorder over long periods of time. Such a system would need to record exactly how much tape passes the head in such an amount of time, and would have to be accurate to a quarter inch after 800 feet or more. Pilottone provides such a system.
When the tape is played back on a pilottone-reading tape player, it needs to only
resolve the pilottone signal on the tape. The player has a
quartz oscillatorA quartz clock is a clock that uses an electronic oscillator that is regulated by a quartz crystal to keep time. This crystal oscillator creates a signal with very precise frequency, so that quartz clocks are at least an order of magnitude more accurate than good mechanical clocks...
of its own, and when the operator hits play, the player tries to match the
sine waveThe sine wave or sinusoid is a function that occurs often in mathematics, music, physics, signal processing, audition, electrical engineering, and many other fields...
of the recorded pilottone with the pilottone being generated by its own quartz crystal. When they match up, the player knows that the tape is moving across its play head exactly as fast as it was across the record head when it was originally recorded.
Replacement by SMPTE
The pilottone system is now obsolete. The use of SMPTE timecode in digital format ensures a steady speed for all recorders and cameras. All new digital recorders and VCRs use this system. This reference Timecode is generated with the help of a built-in quartz oscillator.
In such a situation when the speeds of the camera and the recorder are absolutely free of any variations there remains no need for a pulse cable to run between the camera and the recorder. This has made the work of a sound man much simpler. It also give more freedom of movement to the camera at the time of motion picture filming.
External links
- Interview with Carsten Diercks on the invention of pilottone (3:17 min, RealMedia
RealMedia is a multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. Its extension is ".rm". It is typically used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio and is used for streaming content over the Internet....
; in German), with excerpts from Musuri - Es geht aufwärts am Kongo (1954), world's first use of pilottone