Don McLean - Vincent [Live]

Sometimes technology doesn't quite work as well as you want it to. This film features Don Mclean giving a brilliant performance of his (then) recent song "Vincent", about the artist Vincent Van Gough. However, this is not the original copy of this clip. This is a videotape that was filmed from a television monitor for distribution of the ABC Television show "Hit Scene". THERE IS A FULL COLOUR COPY OF THIS CLIP ON YOUTUBE. However someone has dubbed over the sound with the recording of "Vincent" from the "American Pie" album. This sound on this film is the correct live recording of this performance, albeit suffering a huge drop in quality from the filming video process. The filming video results in a slightly fuzzy picture. And, as Australian television was still broadcast in black and white, they did not film things in colour - as you can clearly see! The picture is worse than normal, however, because the picture being filmed from the video tape playback was transferred from film! But this is what TV was like in the 1950's and 1960's - and, as you can see, into the 1970's. And not just in Australia. At the time, videotape was still expensive, as were the machines to play the tapes with. And while good results can be had with filming the video picture, bad results were just as frequent. In America, this process is often known as Kinnescoping. In Britain this process is often known as telerecording. Well, in spite of this clips major flaws, I hope you enjoy this performance. It is a great performance of a great song and, bad film quality aside, I think it's amazing and awesome that it still exists as a time capsule of both a great performance and also of just how rotten television could look and sound back then!