The 1968 introduction of a record-playback model of the Sony Portapak, which yoked a video camera to a video recorder in a lightweight format, was without a doubt seminal in media history. For various counterculture idealists, the relatively affordable, low-resolution devices had utopian truth-telling potential. “Here Come the Videofreex,” a concise and informative documentary directed by Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin, tells the story of one such collective.

The Portapak early adopters David Cort and Parry Teasdale stumble upon each other at Woodstock, both of them recording “none of the music” and instead capturing possibly incriminating (in retrospect) pronouncements from shaggy baby boomers. (One hippie drawls that “the parents of the past generation have” made a mess of their kids — the hippie actually uses a barnyard epithet to describe what they’ve done — and one has every confidence that this individual has since heard something similar or worse from his own children or grandchildren by now.) With some like-minded friends and lovers Mr. Cort and Mr. Teasdale created the Videofreex collective. An alliance with media giant CBS is pursued, and proves abortive, but not before the Videofreex capture some galvanizing footage, including an interview with Fred Hampton, the Illinois chairman of the Black Panther Party, conducted weeks before Hampton was killed by the police in 1969.

The tools of portable video were such, the members recall, that men and women started at the same learning curve, and women were able to cover the feminist movement in great detail. As financing and transmitting concerns mount, the movie sees the collective mutating from activists to educators and community entertainers. The utopia they envisioned has yet to materialize, to say the least, but seeing their efforts is heartening.

“Here Come the Videofreex” is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes.