It was barbaric. The transition to 100% digital was a slow walk. In the 90s, I was an assistant editor at a film/video post house. Avid's Film Composer quality wasn't very good and only considered offline quality. The film was transferred to video which was then captured into the Avid. Once the edit was final, it was dumped to a 3/4" and the EDL exported to green bar on a dot matrix printer. The tape and print out was sent back to the film lab where they would load up the film negative based on the print out and then compared to the tape frame by frame to ensure it was correct before actually cutting the negative. The print out indicated if a shot was reused in the edit as that would require creating a dupe neg, as you obviously can't use the same strip of film in more than one place.
When the film was transferred to tape, the tapes only recorded at 29.97 which meant 2:3 pulldown. Capturing tape in Film Composer required starting on an A-frame so it could properly remove the pulldown. This was only for editing video for film. If it was only a video edit, the pulldown was left in. The CMX would attempt to keep the sequence across the edit, but not all editors would keep the pulldown sequence intact. That's been a pain ever since now that we have progressive every where.
Digital video editing was slow to gain adoption, but digital video mastering (i.e. video transfers) was pretty much standard for home video by the early 90s. Telecine setups (even analog) had smart controls, nothing I'd call 'barbaric'. [0]
What was barbaric was the full post workflow for a film-to-tape-to-film edit session as described. Sure, the transfer session wasn't bad, but the full process was
Sony was selling new HDCAM VTRs as recently as 10 years ago. I am sure pros are using HDCAM right now. But it doesn't really answer the question: how were films moved to video formats?
There are plenty of countries that are still using tapes. Hell, there's plenty of small market broadcast stations in the US that are only SD and only uprez to HD just before hitting the transmitter.
> how were films moved to video formats?
Films were transferred to video tapes with a telecine[0]. It was tape agnostic as it just created the video signal. Eventually, the telecine signal was captured directly to digital files bypassing tape altogether.
It was barbaric. The transition to 100% digital was a slow walk. In the 90s, I was an assistant editor at a film/video post house. Avid's Film Composer quality wasn't very good and only considered offline quality. The film was transferred to video which was then captured into the Avid. Once the edit was final, it was dumped to a 3/4" and the EDL exported to green bar on a dot matrix printer. The tape and print out was sent back to the film lab where they would load up the film negative based on the print out and then compared to the tape frame by frame to ensure it was correct before actually cutting the negative. The print out indicated if a shot was reused in the edit as that would require creating a dupe neg, as you obviously can't use the same strip of film in more than one place.
When the film was transferred to tape, the tapes only recorded at 29.97 which meant 2:3 pulldown. Capturing tape in Film Composer required starting on an A-frame so it could properly remove the pulldown. This was only for editing video for film. If it was only a video edit, the pulldown was left in. The CMX would attempt to keep the sequence across the edit, but not all editors would keep the pulldown sequence intact. That's been a pain ever since now that we have progressive every where.
Digital video editing was slow to gain adoption, but digital video mastering (i.e. video transfers) was pretty much standard for home video by the early 90s. Telecine setups (even analog) had smart controls, nothing I'd call 'barbaric'. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLZ3ru3N5k
What was barbaric was the full post workflow for a film-to-tape-to-film edit session as described. Sure, the transfer session wasn't bad, but the full process was
Even into the 2010s I knew of use of professional betacam (HDCAM) cassettes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam
Sony was selling new HDCAM VTRs as recently as 10 years ago. I am sure pros are using HDCAM right now. But it doesn't really answer the question: how were films moved to video formats?
There are plenty of countries that are still using tapes. Hell, there's plenty of small market broadcast stations in the US that are only SD and only uprez to HD just before hitting the transmitter.
> how were films moved to video formats?
Films were transferred to video tapes with a telecine[0]. It was tape agnostic as it just created the video signal. Eventually, the telecine signal was captured directly to digital files bypassing tape altogether.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine