pilottone

For such purposes, special recorders that record pilottone must be used.

The pilottone system is now obsolete.

When the tape is played back on a pilottone-reading tape player, it needs to only resolve the pilottone signal on the tape.

Before the use of pilottone (invented in 1954) and the 1957 Nagra III, sound recording machinery was either extremely heavy or unreliable.

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 Invasion in April 1961.

Townsend thereby effectively used pilottone, a technique that was common in 16mm news gathering whereby a 50/60 Hz tone was sent from the movie camera to a tape recorder during filming in order to achieve lip-synch sound recording.

The new technology of pilottone was brought to international attention by its use by Richard Leacock, former cameraman of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, in his documentary feature Primary (1960), documenting the competing Democrat presidential nominee candidates Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy.

The player has a quartz oscillator of its own, and when the operator hits play, the player tries to match the sine wave of the recorded pilottone with the pilottone being generated by its own quartz crystal.