You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind,

a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.

That's the signpost up ahead, your this episode of the Twilight Zone, you'll notice.

Things look a bit different. things sound a bit different, things

are different. The reason is that this episode of the Twilight Zone was recorded on videotape.

Now in a hall there were six videotaped episodes of the Twilight Zone and tonight's episode was the first to be broadcast.

The network insisted on some cost cutting as the Twilight Zone was quite an expensive show to produce,

so filming on videotape in a single location. It lowered the cost of hiring equipment and stages and lots. And there was also

the benefit of videotape being easier to handle than film. Film had to be developed and edited

and scored. But editor Jim Brady could edit the taped scenes on the spot and avoid the costs of film development.

Now at this point as we watch we've only got through a handful of episodes

but they had actually filmed 16 and Buck Houghton said

we were inching up to around $65,000 an episode which at the time was frightening and Mark Zickri does quite a big

section on this in the Twilight's own companion and he says in an attempt to cut costs the

network suggested that six episodes be done on videotape rather than film tape was

less expensive than film and the editing costs were negligible since most editing was done on the spot, switching from camera to camera as in live TV.

Ultimately the shows would be transferred from tape to 16mm film for broadcast. If the experiment succeeded, more episodes would be done on tape, thus keeping

costs under control. And it goes on to say though that although it had this benefit of lower

cost, tape was still quite in its infancy and there were limitations like you couldn't film outside so there was no exterior

locations and because it couldn't be edited as cleanly as film there would be fewer different

camera setups and fewer complex camera movements now rod sailing wasn't happy about this but with the network being the network he did agree to give it a try.

And in the end the producer Buck Houghton said actually I enjoyed the experience on tape.

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