Videotape

The question of film vs. videotape is increasingly becoming irrelevant as HD starts to take over everything, but some shows are still recognizably one or the other, and this Ken Levine post caught my eye:

George Spiro Dibie was, until his retirement a few years ago, one of the best and most respected video cinematographers in television. He also did some filmed shows, like the cult classic Buffalo Bill, but his main specialty was making videotaped shows look good; his most famous credit was as cinematographer of Barney Miller, and in the ’80s he shot literally every multi-camera comedy pilot produced by Warner Brothers television. When videotaped sitcoms became popular in the ’70s, he was called upon to train other cinematographers in the art of shooting on video while still giving the lighting and camerawork a film-like feel; some veteran Hollywood film cinematographers including James Wong Howe turned up at the workshop. He’s also credited with a number of innovations in the art of video shooting, including new rear-projection and lighting techniques. In an interview, he talked about what he felt was the best work he had ever done in all the hundreds of TV episodes he shot:

Yes, it’s another “what’s wrong with the multi-camera sitcom?” post. (Nobody ever gets tired of those, since we TV-analyst types only do 34 of those a day.) This is something I’ve been wondering for a while, as far back as the late ’90s when sitcoms were still popular: why don’t some network sitcoms go back to using videotape?