Field-removed video

Field-removed video (FRV) is a controversial technique used in television broadcasting to give television shows recorded on videotape the same "look and feel" as shows recorded on film.

Once recording television programmes became common in the 1960s, two options were available, film, which was expensive but gave a soft, richly coloured picture and the harder, more immediate videotape. As it was more expensive, film came to be used only in high status drama projects, while everyday programming such as news, sitcoms and soap operas were shot on video, which could be taped over if necessary and did not require developing or more expensive editing processes. FRV was developed in an attempt to give the cheaper video footage a richer, more film-like appearance with all the gravitas that film use implies.

Film records at twenty-four frames per second while video footage consists of forty-eight picture 'fields' in the same period. FRV involves electronically removing half these fields to give the same 'frame rate' as film. The result gives a similar, dignified, impression of movement similar to film but with the more realistic colour and brightness associated with video. The product is neither film nor video but something in between. If the programme is intended from the start to be in FRV, then it can be lit and shot in such a way to work well. Critics of the process accuse it of producing a claustrophobic, artificial image especially in programmes that were initially lit for video and remastered in FRV.

The process usually proves unpopular in programmes which adopt it having previously used conventional, undoctored video. Casualty and Emmerdale both returned to conventional video after poor viewer feedback. FTR use is common in the United States and Britain in situation comedies such as My Family and in some cinema films such as Trainspotting.