Since video colors reproduce poorly onto film, most videographic films are shot in black-and-white with color added optically after video processing is completed. However, as in the case of Scott Bartlett's OFFON and Moon, color can be added to black-and-white film by running it through a three-gun, color film chain. The color is induced electronically through the video circuit and appears on tape. The same reproduction problem remains when a kinescope is made of this color tape, and the final color print must be augmented in optical printing. Videotronically-induced colors are desirable for their unique qualities of electron luminescence, which cannot be duplicated in chemical photography.
Since synaesthetic videotapes are made with no intention of transferring them onto film, color reproduction is no problem. Tapes may be composed entirely through the film chain from looped film information, or composites of film, live action, slides, and other tapes. Color or black-and-white film stocks may be used since videotape color in a closed-circuit playback situation is always superior to the incident-reflected light of movie projection.
Videotronic Mixing, Switching, and Editing
The television switching/mixing console, described by Stan VanDerBeek as "the world's most expensive optical bench," is an array of monitors and switching circuits by which different sources of video information are selected, mixed, and routed in various ways. Within its basic ingredient— alternating current— exists the potential for an art of image-synthesizing that could exceed the boldest dreams of the most inspired visionary. Yet, because the equipment was neither conceived nor constructed for aesthetic purposes this potential has remained tantalizingly inaccessible. Traditional use of the video system to imitate cinema is, in the words of one artist, "like hooking a horse to a rocket." Still most artists are quick to admit that even this limited potential of the television medium has not been fully explored.
Most video systems are capable of handling only three image sources at once. Although any number of sources may be available— most larger systems accommodate approximately twenty-four— the maximum capacity for viewing is any combination of any three of those sources. This is an absolutely arbitrary limitation based only on the intended commercial use of the equipment, for which three video sources are perfectly adequate. A few systems can accommodate four video sources at one time. Still fewer, called "routing switchers" or "delegation switchers," have five available sources, each of whose five input terminals is fed by five more so that the image potential becomes any combination of any five-times-five video sources. This is a positive step in the direction of video synthesizing.
Compounding this image limitation is the cumbersome and unwieldy physical layout of the switching console itself. The primary reason is that video hardware has been design-oriented around the literary narrative mode of the cinema it imitates. It is built to accommodate a literary instructional form in which the elements are relatively simple and linear. In reality, the unique capabilities of video are perhaps even further from the narrative mode than cinema. No amount of written instruction could communicate the complexity of technical and intuitive maneuvers involved in the synaesthetic videographics we are about to discuss; and even if that were possible, no engineer could spend the time required to read and carry out those instructions: the program would never reach the air. Video hardware has been designed around a depersonalized instructional motive whereas it clearly should have been designed to accommodate personal aesthetic motives since all technology is moving inexorably in the direction of closer man/machine interaction and always has been.
The result of this traditional perversion of the medium is that any attempt at creativity becomes extremely complex and often flatly impossible. Even relatively simple effects used commonly in movies — such as dissolving from one matted title to another matted title— are not possible with normal switchers. The desired effect is a background scene over which title credits, either static or in motion, dissolve from one set of words into another set of words without changing the background. In video this requires a very elaborate device called a "double reentry switcher" with six rows of push buttons for each video source. Combinations of any of two- or three-times-six buttons must be used in order to get the effect on the screen.
Stan VanDerBeek at work in "the world's most expensive optical bench," the mixing/ switching control room at WGBH-TV, Boston, Massachusetts. Photo: Gene Youngblood.
Assume that one wishes a video image in which colors are automatically reversed while blacks and whites remain the same; or reversing the blacks and whites while colors remain unchanged; draining a picture of all colors but one or two; enhancing only one or two colors so that they become vivid while other hues in the scene remain stable; warbling a picture so that it looks like shimmering water; composite wipes, so that the edge of the wipe moving across the picture is not a hard edge but rather modulated by the audio or modulated by gray scales or colors; numerical camera controls that would cause one portion of a scene to grow larger or smaller according to the control setting. All of these things are possible in existing video technology, yet are not available to the artist in the form of a mixing/switching console. Moreover, they are potentially possible in a totally random and instantaneous fashion, whereas much labor and many hours are required to achieve the same effects in the cinema.
In addition, there is no reason that video switching must be push-button controlled so that the operator of a common master-control switcher must select combinations of approximately one hundred and twenty buttons. Effects could easily be tone- or voice-actuated, or controlled by hand capacitors, photoelectric cells, or corresponding pairs of voltages for transition effects. All of this could be realized in integrated circuitry, reducing the mammoth proportions of existing switchers by many times. Delegation or routing switchers could accomplish with twelve buttons what now requires more than a hundred.
The potentials of a video system are so vast that it becomes physically impossible for one person to have them accessible to him in a workable manner. This is where video-computer symbiosis becomes necessary. Virtually every possible alternative can be programmed into a computer, which then can employ them in a specific programmed order, or within random or semirandom parameters. Computer-controlled switchers can and will be designed that allow simultaneous processing of the video source by computer program, audio modulation, and manual override. In this way all desirable features of synergetic technology would be available: the randomness of a computer, which can be infinitely more "random" than any human; the video being semicontrolled by its own audio; and finally the artist manually overriding the whole system. Thus it would be possible to preset all conceivable combinations of alternatives for one video source, which could be actuated by one button or one audio tone. These capabilities not only exist within the scope of existing video technology, they are virtually inherent in the nature of the medium.
Until recently the one major advantage of cinema over video was sprocket holes and frames: that is, the ability to do stop-frame animation. For many years the closest that video could come to this was the digital method of videotape editing such as the Ampex Editec system or the EECO system. These methods involved the digital timing of the videotape cue track in hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. Thus it was possible to pre-edit a videotape session by setting a dial, or to do post-editing and single-frame animation, though extremely time consuming and lacking precision. Remarks video artist Loren Sears: