I am one of those few people who actually used these. In the early '90s, I worked on desktop publishing. Back in the early days of Aldus PageMaker (back when it was Aldus, pre-Adobe purchase.) Digital cameras existed, but only just, and they were truly obscenely expensive. So nearly all desktop publishing used just "photo mockups" - you'd design your item, with big empty boxes where the photos would go, then print them out, physically paste on the photograph, then send it for photo duplication. We'd do "graphics" (graphs, diagrams, and other "not a photograph" items) on the computer. But photographs would never be digitized. Photo duplication was still done analog from the printed out "final copy". But we got an analog video floppy camera, and played with using it for bits that didn't require high fidelity. Much quicker than developing, printing, and scanning film. (Yes, we had our own photo lab, so we'd do that ourselves, but it still took time and effort, as it was a manual photo lab, not a fancy automated machine.) Other than the quality, it really did work great. We had a Canon camera, and a Sony "disk reader" (really a video capture device, it even had a composite input so you could capture another video source.)
I fancy probably a lot of videogame mags may have used one of these (maybe sharing a single machine between all the different publications in the Future Publishing offices, for example?) to get screengrabs from games and other software they were reviewing... you wouldn't need extra high resolution for those but you would need a clean 1:1 recording of what was going to the TV, then some way to import it to the DTP station. Maybe some incidental photos made with a generic video camera too, for anything that wasn't going to be more than a couple inches in size (therefore still hitting a decent 300dpi in Hi-Band Frame mode)? Might even have been possible to push the envelope a bit and mod it to capture VGA or other double-resolution images in Frame mode, or use an interlacing framebuffer device (such as VGA in particular was designed to work directly with, for video titling purposes), so it could also be used for Mac, hi-rez ST, Windows etc... Though one thing that people maybe don't appreciate when looking back at these things is just how much data even a small image like that used, and why it would have been far more practical to use analogue at the time and to keep the images on the discs or backed up as a series of frames on a high quality videotape. We thought our 486 PC was pretty amazing in 1994 because it had a video card that could actually display a 640x480 truecolour mode, using nearly a full megabyte of video memory (actually a 2MB card but it rarely seemed to use all of it), and PAL resolution would have really tested the limit of that 1MB space. The equivalent of 25MB on a little disc like that would have been astounding in the 80s, and yer typical home computer MIGHT have had enough storage to fit that much data on its entire hard drive, if it had one (our DSDD based machine would have had to use a lower resolution for one image per floppy), as well as either failing or only just managing to fit a single image into RAM. The introduction of JPEG was a massive boon to storing those kinds of images digitally, but they would still need to be decompressed for display, and that entailed a long wait for processing (and way more for compression) along with the memory requirements. The floppy Mavica was one of the first that was able to fit that kind of encoding into a portable device, even, after it had eventually become practical for desktop machines a few years earlier. In comparison, if you didn't need absolute pixel-perfect rendering, and regular photographic quality (at least, the equivalent of microfiche or perhaps 8mm cinefilm) would do the job, analogue recording was quite mature and well suited to this kind of application. Hence fitting 25 full frame images into a little disk like that, or many thousands onto an archival cassette... (nevermind things like the Domesday Book laserdisc) So there definitely would have been applications for it, if you take away the anachronistic idea of there being digital alternatives. And overnight photo processing was still considered pretty fancy at the time, nevermind 1-hour, plus you'd still need to get the film to the lab and the developed prints back out from it to wherever they would have been needed. The telephone transmission may sound slow by modern standards, but it's basically full-colour fax, which is pretty cool - the actual fax machine version of that didn't come along until the 2000s and was pretty rubbish, using heavy JPEG compression and needing a colour MFP or a computer to output it properly, as well as still having to scan a physical print if you didn't have a PC file ready to go. Taking a photo, hooking up to a regular phone line (probably a rather sketchy analogue one, with hugely compromised bandwidth vs broadcast video, or even the kind of line you could manage 56kbit digital transmission on), and having it appear on the other side of the world less than half an hour later must have seemed like magic. And it could probably have been upgraded from there ... even without compression, if it had lasted until the 56k days, that would have only needed about four minutes to send the same image (assuming 33.6k upload speed and digitised at 640x480). It wasn't going to appear in people's homes of course, at least not first (a bit like Minidisc), and any big well established TV studio probably already had equally good or better solutions they could use, but for the pro-am and smaller local cable studio / journo / newsgathering purposes it would have had definite advantages.
The audience for this was not really people in their bedrooms. They were for people who needed to do a physical print of a frame of video. Think people who made games for box cover screenshots or reviewed video games for magazines and many other uses. The hard way was trying to take a 35mm picture of a TV screen for those screen shots. The easy way was using something like this.
Back in 1995 we invaded Bosnia to stop the war and in 1996 we were issued Sony Mavica cameras and a bunch of floppies so that evidence of mass graves could be collected. That's all I remember now when I hear or see a "Sony Mavica". Decaying bodies.
That is something rather powerful to read. It's important that we consider that sometimes devices that we think were fun consumer things or at worst dull industrial devices have been used by the people dealing with some utterly catastrophic and wicked things humanity has done. It'd be wrong of me to say I have any idea what that's like. Thank you for sharing that @NonyaDamnbusiness
That’s really kind of you to say @lowfinger - I can make better videos now I’ve learned a lot. Raided the loft earlier so lots of weird things to show off! Thanks for the cheery comment mate. Andy 👍
Выходит, на диск влезает 1 секунда аналогового чересстрочного видео. Или иначе говоря, на каждой стороне по полсекунды чересстрочного видео (по 25 чересстрочных кадров на каждую сторону). Обе стороны диска дают полсекунды видео с прогрессивной развёрткой, то есть 25 полноценных кадров. * В Wiki так же указывается возможность цифровой записи на 800 КБайт. В аналоговой записи нет никаких пикселей, есть только строка с "бесконечной кривой" (без переходов в цвете, потому что нет цифрового ограничения по разрядности). Но для съёмки (сканирования) аналогового изображения используется матрица, которая использует набор светочувствительных точек (как пиксели). Аналоговая запись является ресурсоёмкой из-за отсутствия квантования (отсутствие деления на порции с чёткими ограниченными параметрами). Иначе говоря для аналоговой записи требуется высокое качество материала хранилища (носитель данных) / высокая плотность "зёрен" и высокая скорость.
Well, you are still limited by the bandwidth of the signal and the recording media. And VGA and DVD resolutions came about because they roughly match the usual kind of horizontal resolution that you could expect from the luma of an analogue video signal (the chroma being less clear, hence the way MPEG compresses, and JPEG does too, probably initially meant as a way of digitally compressing video stills...), just without having quite the same absolute infinite positioning of a particular point on the screen... the point would still smear out to be one or two pixels wide, so it's no huge loss. The vertical resolution being somewhat fixed because of the raster lines... Same as with analogue audio recording, the amplitude of the higher frequencies tails off after a certain point, eventually down into the noise floor. There's still that nyquist limit, it's just not as hard or well defined an edge. Shannon still takes his tax.
2:15 SCREENSHOTS!!! That is one obvious usecase. Security cameras. Imagine being the prosecutor and you get to hold up a printout of the very frame where the murderer fires his gun at the target. There are many, many professional uses for this.
Eh, telecine is a thing. If you were that bothered about a single frame for a court case you could get hardcopy off a video still by other means, probably as convenient as bussing one of these machines in to the scene. It's more of a pain to have to use if you're doing a lot of shots on a short-term basis and probably only eventually using two or three of the full set taken along the way, having to dial the exposure in each time, get it processed into a scannable form, etc. Like videogame reviews or the like. Always wondered how magazines got such clean shots ... it was either that or using some kind of hack to freeze the game and pull data straight out of the video memory, which is more or less of a palaver (or even possible) depending on system.
I would say this was a smaller cousin of the CRV disc that was used mainly in medical equipment but was also used by some TV stations for transmitting idents and repeatedly used programme captions. The CRV disc was a recordable laserdisc which came in a 12" heavy plastic caddy, but the disc itself was about 10" wide. I have a machine of this format at home.
@mbvideoselection - yeah the CRV discs were cool 'as. I have seen them in action but alas I don't own one, more the pity, you need deep pockets to play with that stuff. The BBC used a modified version of it here for playing idents etc. Thanks for the comment mate, I'm going to look in to some medical imaging stuff :)
The statewide network of public TV stations where I am located used to use video floppies and stand-alone VF players/recorders for airing station IDs or other on-air stills back in the 90s. Prior to then, it was actual slides using a flying-spot-scanner telecine film chain camera, which the network donated to a college after they upgraded to video floppy playback.
I don't think the videofloppy would have been useful in all medical imaging fields - something like X-ray for example would need a lot more resolution in most cases, in monochrome, and by the time the disk was developed digital X-ray systems were already into the megapixel range or beyond, and likewise MRI if only because of the sheer number of slices taken in a single run - but there's some where it could have worked, if widely adopted rather than causing headaches when only one department has the machine... Maybe early CT (or PET/CT) for example, possibly some ultrasound, endoscopy (as they would have had regular TV resolution cameras at first), and certainly nuclear medicine if still using equipment that output to a TV-type monitor rather than a more modern computer. All of those often only need one or two pictures, or a few timelapse frames, with sub-TV resolution to get their point across, even when stored wholly digitally (e.g. 256x256 is a common digital NM image size, and you could put the metadata in the spare horizontal space on a single-field PAL recording). Though the dept I worked in during the 2000s seemed to have opted for more fullsize 5.25" MO WORM drives before going over to networked hard disks...
I got to play around with one of these in school! We had an entire rack full of these because we produced broadcasts for the entire district, and I would be one of the kids responsible for pulling stills for localised productions. Either "commercial" breaks (basically stills of kids from the district who wanted a shoutout or did something noteworthy) news shorts, sometimes I'd be pulled in for helping with the PTA meetings. We did all kinds of things with these and they were pretty fun to play around with. I got to keep an entire stack of disks when they started phasing these out and I wish I still had those. They're long gone in a landfill or on someone's "wtf is this ish" retro collection shelf by now. Most memorable event was the time we got a kid suspended because he was caught in a still looking at a... nono site on a classroom computer while some stills were being recorded. He was able to quickly switch to another screen but there were plenty of frames to get a clear picture of what he was looking at. The girl who was cutting the stills started HOWLING with laughter and caught everyone's attention, so our producer, not knowing what she was laughing at because she couldn't speak, put up her deck on our main display for everyone to see. It was blurry but there was enough there that you could clearly see what the two were doing on the monitor.
Ah I'm so cool to hear that it has jogged some memories for you! It's great to fill in another peice of the puzzle as to what these were being used for. Thanks for sharing that @kitbuny! Andy
In elementary school in the early 90s, I got to use a Xapshot camera that used these disks. I don't remember much about the project, aside from my pictures being edited into a video with analog-video editing equipment (beige boxes with lots of buttons and controls). But yah, "still video cameras" that saved pictures to these disks were used in video production. **EDIT:** And after watching more ... that does look like a professional drive; it has the beige color and large, robust buttons that professional video equipment had back then. Most likely it _was_ used for mixing still frames into analog video.
Wow, what a great quality yt content :) great stuff man. I’m really happy that yt recommended this to me this evening. Anyways, curious to see how it actually saved to disk… won’t be googling this out i’ll wait for part 2. Cheers from Poland.
Thanks so much @bajerle - this video was made about 2 years ago and uploaded to my old channel. I’ll get it again and make part 2 as it’s actually more interesting than I thought. Thanks for the positive comments mate 🙏
Just for clarity, now this may be seen by a more international audience. 00:34 *Susanna Hoffs* 00:35 *Belinda Carlisle* 00:39 *Whitney Houston* They're all pretty self explanatory. 00:42 *Kim Wilde* 01:03 *Belinda* (again) 01:05 *Lizzie Webb* aka. "Mad Lizzie" - that's very much a UK thing, she was a general irritant or pioneering exercise instructor who appeared on the UK's original _Good Morning Britain_ when it was TV-am in the 1980s. Famous for being slightly bonkers and doing some odd interpretative dance exercise routines at 0730 in the bloody morning... Little has been heard of her since, but she's still a household name. th-cam.com/video/Nov2tY1GSzw/w-d-xo.htmlsi=3S_gXO4Gcxl4rCa- 01:09 *Bob Holness* , (late), the fatherly yet kind host of major ratings winner and daily gameshow 'Blockbusters', the saxophone bit will be known by Brits, there's a whole story about an urban legend that Bob Holness played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty's _Baker Street_ which of course he didn't, but it's a rumour that still doesn't die. th-cam.com/video/HcQ63_MD1Zk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=LBiMTCXOm8DYbhQg 01:14 Soo! Yep, general funsponge and foil to Sooty and.... 13:25 *Sweep* legendary puppet dude-dog who communicated through bizarre squeeks. He's been on British TV since 1956 and has played a big part in the life for generations of kids. He was naughty but kind. Soo used to try and spoil his fun as much as possible. th-cam.com/video/MqcinlOYIyc/w-d-xo.htmlsi=I9tANVppxQgysE0f
@@tahrey I think it was Bob Holness, he was also one of the first jocks’ at the fab new sound of Radio 1 if you can imagine that!! He’s in the initial presenting line-up at the launch of Radio 1! Heaven knows what he did on there!
@@robustreviews really looking forward to seeing some of the VTRs in detail. My dad bought a video camera in 1982 (maybe?) it was a tube camera with a long umbilical to a VHS-C deck. I was 10. Hooked. Set up a studio in my bedroom. Curiously I self taught myself things that were production techniques. I would have given my right arm for a genlocked edit deck and vision mixer. Waited a long time to play with the real stuff. I work in high-end TV now (dramas for the streamers mostly). Keep the work going bruv. If you set up a Patreon I will support you.
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Can't get enough of retro A/V equipment, so I'm looking forward to what else pops up on this channel :)
Stick around mate, I have sitting here ready to make videos about: N1500 & N1700 A DigiBeta Editing suite Loads more UMatic Some old Beta and VHS stuff A mystery box to open from 1992 with a brand new machine for a format you’ve never heard of. And lots of odd bits and pieces. Loads of other old tech’ stuff too 👍
Great video as usual. So much I didn't know. I've never heard of the format. Never even heard of those Sony cameras or boxes. Love the '85 big hair on that woman. LOL. I watch all your videos, but if I didn't, a Susanna Hoffs thumbnail would have pulled me in (she was on display at the end).
Aww cheers mate, normal service will resume soon - I’m away again with work this week but the Radtel video will be up shortly. Ha, well she’s still looking rather lovely even in 2024 and she was very, very pretty. But, I’m a Belinda fan boy at heart 👌 thanks as always mate.
We had one of those cameras (point and shoot) in out highschool. It was used bassically the same way a digital camera was used later. Conected it to a computer then read it via bassically a 3.5 mm plug into a "speciall" card that probobly was just a sound card. Then a software worked it into pictures. There was some smart features that could scan the disc and make thumb nails. And you could select and down load them to the computer.
Probably a video capture card and a composite cable, these would have just put out bog standard video signals after all. Early digitisers did take some time to capture a full frame, especially if you wanted it in colour, and it was a pain in the backside if you didn't have a deck with a good clear pause function as you'd need to keep the camera trained dead still on something for a few seconds, and maybe replay the footage over and over to get each field, and in red, green, blue... (or luma, chroma I, chroma Q...) ..... grabbing visuals from a moving subject, you could forget it unless it was small enough to fit between the noise bands. The rest of that sounds rather like my experience with an early digital camera my mum brought home from her teaching job a couple times in the late 90s. With a default 2MB and a whopping 8MB secondard memory card and a supposed 1.3MP resolution (though most commonly used in VGA mode, so direct equivalent of the videofloppies, because the sensor wasn't really that great and space was limited). Held about as many pictures in low rez and scrappy compression on the small card, full rez and better compression on the big one. Took a long time for the transfer software to generate the thumbs and a stupid long time to transfer the actual pictures because it connected over serial and struggled to keep a reliable connection at all of 115.2kbit, often needing to drop back to 57.6... which means like 2.5 minutes per megabyte... But, even with all that, it seemed like magic and was a very useful tool for me putting together some illustrated pages for my geography A-level in Word (or maybe Write? Works?), pushing the limits of what our PC could manage without degrading into a heaving puddle of hard drive thrash and looking like absolute arse when finally spat out of our DJ300 printer (you can use a BW cart or a 3-colour colour one, but not both at the same time... do one pass for the text, swap cart, do the pictures and hope it doesn't make the already muddy photos even more so). Experience that kind of led me to getting my own 2MP digital camera a couple years later when at uni, and needing to take hundreds of photos for my dissertation project ... there was a 35mm SLR plus microscope adaptor set up in the lab, but you had to buy and process your own film (as well as getting good at working out proper exposure and so-on, and if you messed up you were stuffed as the samples had a short shelf life), and then scan it into the computer afterwards, even though the useful part of the images only really needed to be about 240x320 or so as they were tracking fluid movements through the leaves of a tiny plant. Hell with that, I said, and put the money it would have cost towards a Fujifilm with macro lens switch plus a mini tripod (still have the latter). Did a great job, could get the shots lined up and sort the lighting out properly before hitting the shutter and zap / redo any duds straight away, give them a quick crop and level adjust in Paintshop if needed, then drop the result straight into the developing document. Ten years earlier and the videofloppy probably would have made a similar amount of sense for that kind of application, if I'd known about it and could convince the faculty to invest in one... there was a Mac Lab just downstairs after all, so the reader could have plugged right in to one of them.
@@tahrey I don´t think it was a video capture card, it was dog slow. The camera had to have some kind of analog memory (analog ram actually do exist, so it might be that). So the camera took a picture, then saved it, and you got to save the full picture before taking the next one. Here is the point. Saving the picture was way faster than transferring it. That is why i suspected it was a very slow interface, like a audio card. Or at least a card with audio circuitry. I don´t remember exactly but taking a picture took like 2-3 second while transferring them took like 20 seconds. This was basically before digital cameras existed. Of cause this was a standard 480 line camera, so it seams like most of the stuff was just right of the video camera market. There also did exist cameras of the same type that was to to speak in HD, that worked exactly the same. As long as you don´t have a device that is limited to frame speed, you can in theory transfer a video frame how ever slow you like, hence you can also both increase and decrease the resolution (This is actually what VHS do, that is why they look so crappy). Some really early weather and spy satlite operated that way to. At highschool we had a satelite antenna to tune in a weathersatlite that downloaded the picture as one continus HD video image. By the way, that is exactly how a group 1 and 2 fax works. The resolution of a page is about 768x1056 lines for a sheet of paper. So its basically the same horsontal resolution as a PAL TV signal, but its much higher. Actually there is really no length limit. you can feed in a meter of paper and it will still just write it as if its one frame. And color faxes actually did exist. they worked exactly like a color TV.. the quality s absolutely auwfull.
Oh gawd. I remember those. I used a Canon RC-250 camera that used them. I output the frames to a Amiga then convert them to digital pics. Until quite recently some of those pics could still be found online on the Southwark Cathedral website, which I, as part of a very small team, created the first version of. Who knows? maybe some are still hidden there somewhere.
I would love to get hold of an Amiga frame grabber and have a play; a bit before me but I hear that they were very powerful for the time! I hope those pictures are still extant! Thanks for sharing, Andy.
Honoured! Remarks like that truly mean a lot to me, I’m learning and I’ve changed my style and improved a lot since then but I’m flattered by remarks like this. Pleasure to have you on board @WhatALoadOfTosca!
I first encountered this system in around 1988/89. it was the canon one. Then again in 1997. Up until the late 90's/early 2000's, UK Auto Trader used to send an agent out to see your car and take photos for the advert in the magazine. They were using Canon Ion Video Still cameras when i joined. They moved on to Mavica's with 3.5" floppy disks and then to "normal" digital cameras. Once digital cameras became ubiquitous, Auto Trader stopped using agents and the advertisers would send in their own pics. When i first saw it in the 80's it blew me away. it was a company my sister worked for that were on the cutting edge of tech at the time and they used to get all the cool toys in!
Ah that’s cool, I remember the Auto Trader agent photographers; usually mum & dad trying to sell another lump of British Leyland that had unceremoniously split a sill or eaten its engine. I guess that’s an ideal application for them where speed is more important than image quality and the 4:3 aspect wouldn’t have really presented an issue. That’s a great bit of info you’ve given me there! Cheers, Andy
I got one from when i went to army '01 and they were throwing stuff out. the camera was rather packed with components on the inside of it, but fundamentally it just dumped a frame on the disk. cvhs would've been mostly just as good or better really. you'd need to be taking lots of photos and going through a lot or carrying a lot of the the svf's for it to make much sense in comparison.
@@lasskinn474 When you consider the size of the disks and how many pictures they hold, vs a roll of 35mm, or more appropriately slide film or 126 (?) disc cartridge, I think it would have stacked up fairly favourably. Especially with presumably having the option to hook the camera up to a portable TV and review your pics then delete any duff ones to make space. A stack of the disks wouldn't have taken up any more space than a bunch of regular film. The quality wouldn't have been as good, but you'd trade that for convenience, and probably competitive with Polaroid.
@@tahrey yeah I suppose, I just mean in comparison to just filming 20 secs with a cheaper cvhs camera. just having them on an actual floppy is so much better though. the sensor image quality was about same as direct feed off a sony cvhs camera. it just always felt like that you could've done the stills thing as a hack on just cvhs tape if you had a buffer. I suppose in large scale manufacturing the vfd's could've been pretty cheap though. edit: direct feed as in what I used to digitize stuff with with a tv card back then still and use as a webcam. if i remember right you couldn't get the direct live feed off the vfd camera itself.
Seems really rather brave to spin a floppy at 3000 RPM (PAL) while taking little in the way of precautions from protecting the disc and the accompanying r/w head(s) from dust and debris, considering there's just a big ole mechanical shutter there, similar to the one on 3.5 inch floppy disks. How do these discs work anyhow, on a technical level? Regular floppies have their r/w heads in constant contact with the disc surface, similar to a magnetic tape recorder for example. However, that naturally produces friction and wear which eventually will destroy the media itself. Of course, a floppy only spins at 300rpm and not 3000, so media/head wear would be magnitudes higher for the faster spinning floppy if the heads are in full contact. Floating heads are mechanically loads more complex (IE, head sits on an air cushion inbetween disc and the head itself, like with a hard disk drive.) You need to be able to load and unload the heads reliably without scratching up the disc, and you need to protect the drive itself from vibrations and jolts which could cause a head crash (IE a physical impact with the disc surface as it spins at speed, which is BAD.) So, a very curious system. Potentially a fairly short lived one too... Especially considering the innermost tracks are much shorter than the outermost ones, so would have to hold way denser a signal, which also does not help with media longevity.
@lennyvalentin6485 You have raised some *really* important questions, and just to pick a few points out (I really should get it back and make another video as there was some fascinating technical stuff going on in here). Just to pick you a few points. - I don't know if the cameras could reproduce the images, I suspect not, so if they had a field buffer they could record to the disk at a slower velocity than would be needed for reproduction as they would not have to match H-speed. - Yep the disk is constant velocity according to the information I could find, if you do the sums it only really used the outermost portion of the disc surface - track 50 would have been the determing factor for acceptable image quality. With regards to vibration, the image is somewhat 'wobbly' and there was a TBC and framestore for these which I guess on broadcast duty would have been critical. These are great points though, shall I get it back and do a more technical dive? There's some cool stuff going on with the signal too, it's somewhat more like SECAM actually on the PAL discs using a colour line delay and FM modulation. Great comments mate, certainly something for me to think about and find out! ~Andy
I used this when I did portrait photography. Split lens setup. Main camera using film (that was a long time ago) and a video camera to record to the disk. Main camera shot through an angled one way mirror, video camera looked up at the reflective side of the mirror. This janky setup was so customers could look at the pictures right afterwards and ordered what they liked.
That’s a really cool application, did you come up with that or was it a common thing to do!? That’s a seriously clever application. Thanks for letting us know about that. I am still a film photographer by the way 👍
I used that format for a project in school once in the late 90s. I had a Canon camera and a Mac with analog capture capabilities. I could thus do some rudimentary desktop publishing despite lacking a digital camera. I saw another comment hinting at me not being the only one doing something similar. The best thing is that I have a feeling that I may even have the pictures captured archived somewhere (yeah, digital hoarding at its best). I still have the camera somewhere in the parents house. I do wonder if there’s anything readable left on those disks.
I used a Xapshot camera for an elementary school project in the early 90s. I don't remember what the project was about anymore, but I _do_ remember being _extremely_ enthused that the school was trusting little-kid me to be responsible with the camera! 😀 I think a school staff member helped edit my pictures into a video using a similarly-beige editing deck. (**EDIT:** typo 😝)
Video capture cartridges / cards used to be mildly popular on the 16-bit machines and DOS PCs for that kind of reason. You could grab short low-rez monochrome sequences using them if you had a use for that, but they were more useful for digitising stills into the machine using a video camera, particularly shots of something that wouldn't fit on a scanner and you didn't want to go through all the business of taking lots of film photos of, if it was more working material (like for modelling purposes or whatever) that didn't need to be kept forever or be super high quality. I saw a thing in ST Format the one time about a developer who made the sprites for some over-the-shoulder sports game in that way, recording someone running around and then basically rotoscoping it on the computer. Think that's also how the Prince of Persia sprites were made (would have been even more rudimentary given they were being captured into an Apple II ?!), and, slightly more recently and in better quality, the enemy sprites for Doom. The devs made actual clay models of all the baddies, put them on a turntable, pointed a videocamera at them, then spun them round taking a shot from each cardinal direction after moving their limbs into the pose needed for each frame of animation...
Loads of retro people, these days, keep calling FILM cameras "analogue" and it gets my goat! But now I've seen this I can show them this video and, in my imagination at least, say to them "There! Look! THAT's analogue photography you ++++!" So thanks for sharing this peculiar format that I don't think the mighty one from "Techmoan" has ever shown. It's funny how pathetically little a mere 50 frames are with today's digital cameras... but back in those days, 24 or, if you were posh, 32 was the best you could hope from a film camera and 50 sounds kinda impressive. Oooh! RS232! The moment I see any kind of serial port on anything, I thinking about getting some wires hooked up to it so we can eavesdrop on whatever it is it's saying.
Oh I think I’ve got a couple he hasn’t done - most of my stuff is broadcast centric but I do have a box of an opened weird format player I can’t wait to open and take a look at. I agree with the photography, I’m still a film photographer - I think _chemical_ photography is a better term and it also makes me twitch when it gets called “analogue.” Yep, I’m also a tinkerer with things like RS232, I think I should have a deeper look at this machine. Thanks for the comment mate ~Andy
I had the companion TBC unit for this system, the Sony MPU-F100 for use with a Video Toaster (the demo video on my channel actually uses it as a frame sync). All the references to "ProMavica" really threw me for a loop and why would it need a TBC/Framesync? Well silly me, because it was analog.
Hi mate! Yep that makes sense, I don’t have the frame sync’ but it would have been used in conjunction with one as you say on broadcast duty. I’d love to have a play with a VideoToaster system, that’s my kinda nerdy stuff. Thanks buddy!
@@robustreviews Toasters are NTSC only. Just something to keep in mind if one pops up in the UK. There were 3rd party PAL converters (did PAL->NTSC/Toaster->PAL), but they were lousy like any other transcoder from the 90s.
I was thinking the RGB genlock stuff on the back would go just nicely with an Amiga, too. And it wouldn't matter too much if you could only capture about one second of video, taking a second or two over each frame, if the computer needed some time to render each one and then you were going to take the result off to a separate edit station... (or vice versa if it held a bunch of stills that you were going to overlay, and maybe the VT could sample-and-hold each one to cover for the momentary blank during head seeks... something like a top-40 pop chart show countdown showing the record covers would be a prime application, or a weather forecast, etc)
I was curious about these after seeing a VF camera in a photography class, judging from the comments it sounds like it was pretty common for education? Nowadays it’s Canon DSLRs, or phones if you’re in a pinch. They look good enough in a yearbook if you don’t crop too closely or blow them up, occasionally better than DSLR shots because people kept messing up white balance and exposure on those. Thinking about it now, the photography and yearbook classes should really be more integrated, in yearbook you sat through a slideshow about settings and then they sent you out with cameras. In photography we dove much deeper into that.
@ The problem is that the previous users who sorta knew what to do would leave the cameras in manual or some specific program mode and the subsequent users of the camera wouldn’t know any better. We only had I think like 6 cameras to go around or something like that. And of course there’s also people that use Program modes in the wrong context. This one guy used it at a sports event that took place at night, and left Sports mode (high shutter speed) on when taking a group photo. Super noisy photos.
It is lovely, it’s an odd-duck but it’s interesting nether the less. Been filming something else equally “odd” today that you may well have never seen before today too. Thanks for the comment ~Andy
It really reminds me a lot of Minidisc, not just because of the obvious format similarities (excepting that it's purely magnetic, and analogue) but the whole kind of design language of the machines themselves. And funnily enough Sony did make a data version of that with a SCSI box you could hook up to a computer (holding about 140MB), but that also didn't catch on, somewhat sadly. That could have been a natural evolution of this device, even storing 150-ish full-frame video images in uncompressed digitised form... Eventually the 2000s Hi-MD just let you connect to it by USB and use it as a 1GB microdrive type device (and that ofc would have been enough for reasonable quality portable video, before UMD came along), but too little too late... Imagine having an MD slot on your desktop PC, or laptop, or a video/audio player using them sat by the TV. The cooler future we never got, probably due to corporate Sony shenanigans.
Ugh, I kick myself for passing on one of these cameras for cheap at a pawn shop in the early 00's. I also like how this is kinda like laserdisc in a way.
Yeah they’re a bit of an odd one. I’ve got something similar (boxed new) to show in the next week or two that’s an odd duck that doesn’t really fit in any category. Thanks for the comment mate.
I have the Canon Ion Cameras which uses VF Disk and the Digitizer Board for (old) PC. It's interesting what you can get out of these Cameras, but I imagine that even bach than (my Set is from 1992) it was only usable if it must go really fast. With 1 Hour Photo development, or at bigger Companies, with own Darkrooms, 35mm was still the best Option with way better Picture Quality.
I've not used the cameras (expect the later digital Mavica) I would find it fascinating to use one to see what's possible with them. Yep, a field of PAL or NTSC was never going to equal 35mm (it's also in the 'wrong' aspect ratio. Have you got a video about your digitiser? I'd love to see it. Thanks for the comment :)
@@robustreviews Frame mode would probably be acceptable if you could have the capture device average out the reads, or if it was maybe higher quality than the deck you're using so had paired heads or a framebuffer etc to get rid of the noise... that'd at least get you up to VGA rez, which is good enough for upto maybe half the size of a typical 6x4 if the print halftoning isn't super fine.
@@tahrey exactly, there was a TBC/frame buffer available on this system and that machine but have been very high mileage, and the disk was very elderly which wouldn’t have helped one bit. I was a bit surprised it didn’t have at least a field buffer, but no the thing just churns away at the disc and hops tracks for a frame. I think that machine was probably a low spec’ one, or knowing Sony they would have gladly sold all the extra bits to go with it! I need to get this back and do a Part II as I thought it was PAL but it uses a custom FM colour difference solution more like SECAM on the disk, so there’s only .5H colour resolution with line difference. I really need to get it back and get the analyser and scope out!
Ah it doesn’t, it kinda cheats. It is like a quasi-SECAM thing that’s re-heterodyned under the luma. That’s what I need to make part II about but that’ll be a more techie video. It used alternate colour that’s FM modulated so it’s kinda (if you squint) more like SECAM. Good spot though!
@@robustreviews You should definitely do another video on this. You can tell just by looking at it there's a really clever trick being used for it to work.
@@tahreyyep I think the colour-under method would have been quite poor considering how rough a single field of VHS looks. I do need to go back to the patents and tech’ docs and unpack it. I’m pretty conversant with analogue video but I’m still not sure where to pitch the videos whether people want a prod and poke at an unusual device -or- more in-depth stuff?
That does make good sense @jhonwask - I know they did see a bit of use in lowly-broadcast stuff but that could be a brilliant use for them and I suspect that's where they could have ended up. Thanks for the comment :)
Indeed! I don't think I've even seen an _analog_ Betacam machine myself, outside of videos like these. (We did have a Betamax VCR in the 80s, but that's a separate format. Betacam could use the same-size tapes (at least in some machines), but the signal recorded on them was very much incompatible with Betamax.)
Could be useful for a stillstore in a broadcaster/newsroom kind of setup. Possibly with lower thirds pre-rendered too. The fact that it's a video field means it'll slot easily into broadcast setup easily.
well mostly it being a video field was useful for showing them on tv's in home/office/army use. projectors too, no need to develop slides. still it wasn't really that popular for any use really.
Glad I watched to the end before picking up the keyboard... was going to ask about the field/frame and regular/hi-band switches on the front. Does it really just jitter the head(s?) back and forth between tracks? Or maybe swapping sides (though you'd be restricted to recording full-frame images with even-track alignment in that case, though it'd mean it would only need 25 total tracks not 50)... I'd have thought it more efficient to have a pair of heads next to each other so it could read two of them at once and seamlessly flick back and forth electronically. The extra noise in frame mode is quite unexpected... The Hi-band simply being SVHS style is a disappointment too, I thought maybe there would be a lower rez / longplay type mode when you turned that off, so it would be able to fit a full-frame image on a single track (spinning at half speed) at the expense of less horizontal sharpness. Which would be an OK compromise on some screens given how big the dot pitch could sometimes be, or indeed probably make no difference to the horizontal rez at all if you were working in pure monochrome with a B/W screen. Maybe even do 100 field-based images (with the reduced horizontal clarity making it a bit like a VCD, or a longplay NTSC tape) by putting two to a track with a small framebuffer (75 kilopixel would have been a lot more achievable than 300kp at the time... only need like 256KB, less if you accept worse colour depth). Though, maybe the noise is just the deck is a bit worn out and needs some cleaning and servicing?
Hi mate, all good points. Mobile at the moment before I get back on the M1 - I really need to get this back and have another go with it! You have asked very sensible questions and good points! Definitely needs a part 2! ~Andy
I can see a use for it. In retail it could be used to display a slideshow. Also in a theatre, for example. In business you could load it with a PowerPoint.
I’m working on it JonDoe, my jobs means I work away all week though so time is a bit of a premium but I will get round to it before the end of the year!
This thumbnail really confused me. I hadn't seen this video on my feed yet but there was a red stripe at the bottom so I assumed I had already seen it. It was only after being presented with it for the 7th time and not remembering it that I finally clicked on it.
All magnetic disks are analogue, its what you do to the analogue signal that counts. Old dram is analogue too (modern ram has a digital interface built in)
10:45 - You make joke. But... My advice would be... if you do manage to find a lady that is impressed by a stack of old video gear... You damned well make sure to marry her! :D
Most interesting, assuming it actually is analogue on the floppy, then that disk must be spinning something like 3000 RPM, so the wear on it and the heads must be hideous, otherwise they'd have to digitise the pic and store it in a frame buffer. By the looks of the electronics, with an absolute pile of digital, it seems they were actually doing that - so pseudo analogue? Most of the accessories shown (like a phone 'modem') would require the picture to be digital, so braking the analogue idea. I did toy with the idea of trying to do this on a hard disk drive, they normally spin at the right speed, there is no head contact so you could hold an image for ages with no wear & a hard drive usually has hundreds of tracks, so plenty of room. Back in the day I was having a very bad time trying to digitise video, so an intermediate step that could hold a freeze frame for near forever seemed like a good accessory. (some early digitisers required a freeze frame source)
Yep, it's definitely analogue on the disk, of that there is no doubt. This was developed in the early 1980s so they'd be no feasible way to get anything approaching a high resolution colour image on to a tiny disk by digital means. The numbers do calculate to the signal h-period (3000RPM/50RPS = 50 fields-per-second) to use the PAL example. I agree about wear, but I've heard nothing to _say_ it was an issue but I suspect they'd be a lot of mechanical abrasion eventually. In broadcast these would be fed in to a frame-store (although digital frame-stores had supplanted these by the 80s anyway, major broadcasters would be able to punch up frames from a server) which kinda makes them somewhat worthless for the major players I think? There's nothing that says transmitting at voice-frequency has to be digital, us radio hams have been playing with SSTV (slow-scan television) for decades and that can squeeze in to a 3KHz voice channel, it's very slow but it's been done for a long time. That's built on modifications of conventional analogue video. It is very slow though, but doable - which to me ties in with the fact it took so long to transmit pictures 'by wire' on it. Transmitting pictures by baseband telephone circuits goes back to the 1930s I think and was quite established by WWII: it need not have to be digital. I suspect for most users the image would be captured then held either on a computer (or by extension a frame store) rather than continuously read indefinitely? Good comment, stuff to think about! Cheers ~Andy
It amuses me the roll of film probably has a lesser volume than the disk so it's not even smaller and film is MUCH more resolution than 640x480 so in all aspects it is objectively worse than what they currently had o.o
Yep in terms of quality 35mm would have exceeded this, plus it was not in 4:3 aspect ratio! But these at least could be whistled down a telephone line fairly easily rather than using a drum scanner for transmission? These were quickly outmoded though, they're one of those _interim_ technologies I guess? It's a worthy comment though and I'm inclined to agree. Andy.
80s video didn't look anything like that. People today believe, for reasons I do not understand, that the past consisted of really bad video. But it was being viewed in the medium it was meant for. Capturing analog tape digitally is extremely difficult. The video always looks way worse, though some people have it down. vwest-life can capture it correctly.
I know mate, and trust me, I know a thing or two about VT, and I can capture it properly, you’re welcome to come and see my racks of For.As, rare and exotic machines (not many formats I can’t capture) or several years proving digitised broadcast VT for several major broadcasters. But, I do see your point, it’s a cultural shorthand and it gets a bit of interest, and usually I don’t like it. That said it was a throwaway little bit of silliness. But I “know my VT” as you’ll see. I have lots of weird formats to show soon 👍 Thanks for the comment though mate, I do get where you’re coming from, but I don’t need to be told how to capture colour-under video tape in the “real world” 😂 Stick around mate, I do appreciate the comment,
@@robustreviews I wasn't trying to be overcritical of you. It's just that a lot of people believe that NTSC was extremely poor quality. I apologize if it was taken that way. I don't know, given your background why you fail to see its uses back then (I posted this in a different comment). One that jumped right out at me was game companies and game magazines. While Nintendo and Sega probably had something more advanced for doing this, the small production shops probably didn't. One problem CRTs really did have was poor brightness. You cannot even see most CRT TVs outside unless it is well shaded, definitely not in bright sunlight. Given most, especially in the 80s, CRTs were curved, along with poor brightness made them notoriously difficult to take a picture of (suitable for the magazine article or screen shots on the box), not to mention motion blur if it is not a still screen.
It’s cool mate, don’t worry! It was just one of those things, I was in agreement really. I actually did make a video years ago about real VHS capture (proper) vs overused VHS effects. It was just a bit of mirth though, no offence taken at all. Like I said, I find it a bit annoying too but it kinda is a shorthand that communicates the point. I hope you stick around mate, you’ve made some good points and I have lots of odd machines to show off 👍 Andy
@@christo930to be fair, there was a lot of poor quality video back then. Consumer level was awful, but you could tell the difference between something captured on film and something recorded on video. The lenses also seemed to be worse in poor lighting today, likely because the digital cameras today are so bad they have to use complex algorithms to make the output look half way decent. NTSC broadcast tapes might be good, but the end result after it's travelled through the air is not
@@phill6859 "NTSC broadcast tapes might be good, but the end result after it's travelled through the air is not" False. NTSC video broadcast from a TV station was excellent. 525 lines. Color was not quite as good as B&W, but it was still pretty good. They weren't scanned on cheap modern devices and made to look bad by cheap modern devices. Broadcast quality tape was very good. Plus, they were being received by CRT TVs which were built to be lower resolution than a modern 4k screen. As far as light goes, this is mostly to do with film, not tape. Film needs a lot of light. The tape recorders (studio equipment) also tended to need more light. This is a problem that really hasn't gone away. Modern cameras are better than early digital cameras, but they still need a decent amount of light (though probably better than the old broadcast tape recorders)
Haha no way, he’s a Hammer and I’m squarely a Gooner. No relation I’m afraid although I have a feeling he may have lived not ever so far from me at one point. I’ve been a fan of his for years, I’ve not watched any TV since 2011! Good comment!
wow .. never seen one of them before. seems like alot of effort for not much reward .. even back in the 80's .. then again. I got my first computer when I was 5 in 1978 and compared to today it was alot of effort for not much reward aswell .. commodore vic 20. but if not for that I would not be who I am today.. so maybe that machine help get someone into video production or something .. anyway I love old stuff and really love old tech .. so as you can guess I am all ways the life of the party .. lololo love ya brother.
I am one of those few people who actually used these.
In the early '90s, I worked on desktop publishing. Back in the early days of Aldus PageMaker (back when it was Aldus, pre-Adobe purchase.)
Digital cameras existed, but only just, and they were truly obscenely expensive. So nearly all desktop publishing used just "photo mockups" - you'd design your item, with big empty boxes where the photos would go, then print them out, physically paste on the photograph, then send it for photo duplication.
We'd do "graphics" (graphs, diagrams, and other "not a photograph" items) on the computer. But photographs would never be digitized. Photo duplication was still done analog from the printed out "final copy".
But we got an analog video floppy camera, and played with using it for bits that didn't require high fidelity. Much quicker than developing, printing, and scanning film. (Yes, we had our own photo lab, so we'd do that ourselves, but it still took time and effort, as it was a manual photo lab, not a fancy automated machine.)
Other than the quality, it really did work great. We had a Canon camera, and a Sony "disk reader" (really a video capture device, it even had a composite input so you could capture another video source.)
I fancy probably a lot of videogame mags may have used one of these (maybe sharing a single machine between all the different publications in the Future Publishing offices, for example?) to get screengrabs from games and other software they were reviewing... you wouldn't need extra high resolution for those but you would need a clean 1:1 recording of what was going to the TV, then some way to import it to the DTP station. Maybe some incidental photos made with a generic video camera too, for anything that wasn't going to be more than a couple inches in size (therefore still hitting a decent 300dpi in Hi-Band Frame mode)?
Might even have been possible to push the envelope a bit and mod it to capture VGA or other double-resolution images in Frame mode, or use an interlacing framebuffer device (such as VGA in particular was designed to work directly with, for video titling purposes), so it could also be used for Mac, hi-rez ST, Windows etc...
Though one thing that people maybe don't appreciate when looking back at these things is just how much data even a small image like that used, and why it would have been far more practical to use analogue at the time and to keep the images on the discs or backed up as a series of frames on a high quality videotape. We thought our 486 PC was pretty amazing in 1994 because it had a video card that could actually display a 640x480 truecolour mode, using nearly a full megabyte of video memory (actually a 2MB card but it rarely seemed to use all of it), and PAL resolution would have really tested the limit of that 1MB space. The equivalent of 25MB on a little disc like that would have been astounding in the 80s, and yer typical home computer MIGHT have had enough storage to fit that much data on its entire hard drive, if it had one (our DSDD based machine would have had to use a lower resolution for one image per floppy), as well as either failing or only just managing to fit a single image into RAM.
The introduction of JPEG was a massive boon to storing those kinds of images digitally, but they would still need to be decompressed for display, and that entailed a long wait for processing (and way more for compression) along with the memory requirements. The floppy Mavica was one of the first that was able to fit that kind of encoding into a portable device, even, after it had eventually become practical for desktop machines a few years earlier.
In comparison, if you didn't need absolute pixel-perfect rendering, and regular photographic quality (at least, the equivalent of microfiche or perhaps 8mm cinefilm) would do the job, analogue recording was quite mature and well suited to this kind of application. Hence fitting 25 full frame images into a little disk like that, or many thousands onto an archival cassette... (nevermind things like the Domesday Book laserdisc)
So there definitely would have been applications for it, if you take away the anachronistic idea of there being digital alternatives. And overnight photo processing was still considered pretty fancy at the time, nevermind 1-hour, plus you'd still need to get the film to the lab and the developed prints back out from it to wherever they would have been needed. The telephone transmission may sound slow by modern standards, but it's basically full-colour fax, which is pretty cool - the actual fax machine version of that didn't come along until the 2000s and was pretty rubbish, using heavy JPEG compression and needing a colour MFP or a computer to output it properly, as well as still having to scan a physical print if you didn't have a PC file ready to go. Taking a photo, hooking up to a regular phone line (probably a rather sketchy analogue one, with hugely compromised bandwidth vs broadcast video, or even the kind of line you could manage 56kbit digital transmission on), and having it appear on the other side of the world less than half an hour later must have seemed like magic. And it could probably have been upgraded from there ... even without compression, if it had lasted until the 56k days, that would have only needed about four minutes to send the same image (assuming 33.6k upload speed and digitised at 640x480).
It wasn't going to appear in people's homes of course, at least not first (a bit like Minidisc), and any big well established TV studio probably already had equally good or better solutions they could use, but for the pro-am and smaller local cable studio / journo / newsgathering purposes it would have had definite advantages.
The audience for this was not really people in their bedrooms. They were for people who needed to do a physical print of a frame of video. Think people who made games for box cover screenshots or reviewed video games for magazines and many other uses. The hard way was trying to take a 35mm picture of a TV screen for those screen shots. The easy way was using something like this.
Back in 1995 we invaded Bosnia to stop the war and in 1996 we were issued Sony Mavica cameras and a bunch of floppies so that evidence of mass graves could be collected.
That's all I remember now when I hear or see a "Sony Mavica". Decaying bodies.
That is something rather powerful to read. It's important that we consider that sometimes devices that we think were fun consumer things or at worst dull industrial devices have been used by the people dealing with some utterly catastrophic and wicked things humanity has done.
It'd be wrong of me to say I have any idea what that's like.
Thank you for sharing that @NonyaDamnbusiness
The video format you've never heard of. Ha, I worked on designing this technology lol
Wow that is fascinating @David-gr8rh! You didn’t work on the colour encoding did you?
Thanks for the comment sir!
@robustreviews Sorry no just overall designer, format layout and product production
TH-cam missed a trick because why have I not been fed this on your original upload ? super good, enjoyed this a lot.
That’s really kind of you to say @lowfinger - I can make better videos now I’ve learned a lot. Raided the loft earlier so lots of weird things to show off! Thanks for the cheery comment mate. Andy 👍
Выходит, на диск влезает 1 секунда аналогового чересстрочного видео.
Или иначе говоря, на каждой стороне по полсекунды чересстрочного видео (по 25 чересстрочных кадров на каждую сторону).
Обе стороны диска дают полсекунды видео с прогрессивной развёрткой, то есть 25 полноценных кадров.
* В Wiki так же указывается возможность цифровой записи на 800 КБайт.
В аналоговой записи нет никаких пикселей, есть только строка с "бесконечной кривой" (без переходов в цвете, потому что нет цифрового ограничения по разрядности).
Но для съёмки (сканирования) аналогового изображения используется матрица, которая использует набор светочувствительных точек (как пиксели).
Аналоговая запись является ресурсоёмкой из-за отсутствия квантования (отсутствие деления на порции с чёткими ограниченными параметрами).
Иначе говоря для аналоговой записи требуется высокое качество материала хранилища (носитель данных) / высокая плотность "зёрен" и высокая скорость.
Well, you are still limited by the bandwidth of the signal and the recording media. And VGA and DVD resolutions came about because they roughly match the usual kind of horizontal resolution that you could expect from the luma of an analogue video signal (the chroma being less clear, hence the way MPEG compresses, and JPEG does too, probably initially meant as a way of digitally compressing video stills...), just without having quite the same absolute infinite positioning of a particular point on the screen... the point would still smear out to be one or two pixels wide, so it's no huge loss. The vertical resolution being somewhat fixed because of the raster lines...
Same as with analogue audio recording, the amplitude of the higher frequencies tails off after a certain point, eventually down into the noise floor. There's still that nyquist limit, it's just not as hard or well defined an edge. Shannon still takes his tax.
2:15 SCREENSHOTS!!! That is one obvious usecase. Security cameras. Imagine being the prosecutor and you get to hold up a printout of the very frame where the murderer fires his gun at the target. There are many, many professional uses for this.
Eh, telecine is a thing. If you were that bothered about a single frame for a court case you could get hardcopy off a video still by other means, probably as convenient as bussing one of these machines in to the scene. It's more of a pain to have to use if you're doing a lot of shots on a short-term basis and probably only eventually using two or three of the full set taken along the way, having to dial the exposure in each time, get it processed into a scannable form, etc. Like videogame reviews or the like. Always wondered how magazines got such clean shots ... it was either that or using some kind of hack to freeze the game and pull data straight out of the video memory, which is more or less of a palaver (or even possible) depending on system.
I would say this was a smaller cousin of the CRV disc that was used mainly in medical equipment but was also used by some TV stations for transmitting idents and repeatedly used programme captions. The CRV disc was a recordable laserdisc which came in a 12" heavy plastic caddy, but the disc itself was about 10" wide. I have a machine of this format at home.
@mbvideoselection - yeah the CRV discs were cool 'as. I have seen them in action but alas I don't own one, more the pity, you need deep pockets to play with that stuff. The BBC used a modified version of it here for playing idents etc.
Thanks for the comment mate, I'm going to look in to some medical imaging stuff :)
The statewide network of public TV stations where I am located used to use video floppies and stand-alone VF players/recorders for airing station IDs or other on-air stills back in the 90s. Prior to then, it was actual slides using a flying-spot-scanner telecine film chain camera, which the network donated to a college after they upgraded to video floppy playback.
If I understand things correctly, the CRV was also the format used in the old old Edit Droid machines. :)
I don't think the videofloppy would have been useful in all medical imaging fields - something like X-ray for example would need a lot more resolution in most cases, in monochrome, and by the time the disk was developed digital X-ray systems were already into the megapixel range or beyond, and likewise MRI if only because of the sheer number of slices taken in a single run - but there's some where it could have worked, if widely adopted rather than causing headaches when only one department has the machine...
Maybe early CT (or PET/CT) for example, possibly some ultrasound, endoscopy (as they would have had regular TV resolution cameras at first), and certainly nuclear medicine if still using equipment that output to a TV-type monitor rather than a more modern computer. All of those often only need one or two pictures, or a few timelapse frames, with sub-TV resolution to get their point across, even when stored wholly digitally (e.g. 256x256 is a common digital NM image size, and you could put the metadata in the spare horizontal space on a single-field PAL recording). Though the dept I worked in during the 2000s seemed to have opted for more fullsize 5.25" MO WORM drives before going over to networked hard disks...
Nice video and some good information presented in an interesting way. Subscribed to the channel
Comments like this mean a lot mate. Thanks so much, yep. I do try to be a bit different. Thanks @NiceCakeMix
Agreed, @robustreviews you have a knack for storytelling!
I got to play around with one of these in school! We had an entire rack full of these because we produced broadcasts for the entire district, and I would be one of the kids responsible for pulling stills for localised productions. Either "commercial" breaks (basically stills of kids from the district who wanted a shoutout or did something noteworthy) news shorts, sometimes I'd be pulled in for helping with the PTA meetings. We did all kinds of things with these and they were pretty fun to play around with. I got to keep an entire stack of disks when they started phasing these out and I wish I still had those. They're long gone in a landfill or on someone's "wtf is this ish" retro collection shelf by now.
Most memorable event was the time we got a kid suspended because he was caught in a still looking at a... nono site on a classroom computer while some stills were being recorded. He was able to quickly switch to another screen but there were plenty of frames to get a clear picture of what he was looking at. The girl who was cutting the stills started HOWLING with laughter and caught everyone's attention, so our producer, not knowing what she was laughing at because she couldn't speak, put up her deck on our main display for everyone to see. It was blurry but there was enough there that you could clearly see what the two were doing on the monitor.
Ah I'm so cool to hear that it has jogged some memories for you! It's great to fill in another peice of the puzzle as to what these were being used for. Thanks for sharing that @kitbuny! Andy
In elementary school in the early 90s, I got to use a Xapshot camera that used these disks. I don't remember much about the project, aside from my pictures being edited into a video with analog-video editing equipment (beige boxes with lots of buttons and controls).
But yah, "still video cameras" that saved pictures to these disks were used in video production.
**EDIT:** And after watching more ... that does look like a professional drive; it has the beige color and large, robust buttons that professional video equipment had back then. Most likely it _was_ used for mixing still frames into analog video.
Wow, what a great quality yt content :) great stuff man. I’m really happy that yt recommended this to me this evening. Anyways, curious to see how it actually saved to disk… won’t be googling this out i’ll wait for part 2. Cheers from Poland.
Thanks so much @bajerle - this video was made about 2 years ago and uploaded to my old channel. I’ll get it again and make part 2 as it’s actually more interesting than I thought.
Thanks for the positive comments mate 🙏
Just for clarity, now this may be seen by a more international audience.
00:34 *Susanna Hoffs*
00:35 *Belinda Carlisle*
00:39 *Whitney Houston*
They're all pretty self explanatory.
00:42 *Kim Wilde*
01:03 *Belinda* (again)
01:05 *Lizzie Webb* aka. "Mad Lizzie" - that's very much a UK thing, she was a general irritant or pioneering exercise instructor who appeared on the UK's original _Good Morning Britain_ when it was TV-am in the 1980s. Famous for being slightly bonkers and doing some odd interpretative dance exercise routines at 0730 in the bloody morning... Little has been heard of her since, but she's still a household name. th-cam.com/video/Nov2tY1GSzw/w-d-xo.htmlsi=3S_gXO4Gcxl4rCa-
01:09 *Bob Holness* , (late), the fatherly yet kind host of major ratings winner and daily gameshow 'Blockbusters', the saxophone bit will be known by Brits, there's a whole story about an urban legend that Bob Holness played the saxophone solo on Gerry Rafferty's _Baker Street_ which of course he didn't, but it's a rumour that still doesn't die. th-cam.com/video/HcQ63_MD1Zk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=LBiMTCXOm8DYbhQg
01:14 Soo! Yep, general funsponge and foil to Sooty and....
13:25 *Sweep* legendary puppet dude-dog who communicated through bizarre squeeks. He's been on British TV since 1956 and has played a big part in the life for generations of kids. He was naughty but kind. Soo used to try and spoil his fun as much as possible. th-cam.com/video/MqcinlOYIyc/w-d-xo.htmlsi=I9tANVppxQgysE0f
Wasn't Bob also one of the first recorded players of James Bond? Or was that Monkhouse?
@@tahrey I think it was Bob Holness, he was also one of the first jocks’ at the fab new sound of Radio 1 if you can imagine that!!
He’s in the initial presenting line-up at the launch of Radio 1! Heaven knows what he did on there!
Good info, nice patter. Instantly likeable. Subscribed!
Thanks @gavscott - I’m blushing! -Andy
@@robustreviews really looking forward to seeing some of the VTRs in detail. My dad bought a video camera in 1982 (maybe?) it was a tube camera with a long umbilical to a VHS-C deck. I was 10. Hooked. Set up a studio in my bedroom. Curiously I self taught myself things that were production techniques. I would have given my right arm for a genlocked edit deck and vision mixer. Waited a long time to play with the real stuff. I work in high-end TV now (dramas for the streamers mostly).
Keep the work going bruv. If you set up a Patreon I will support you.
Can't get enough of retro A/V equipment, so I'm looking forward to what else pops up on this channel :)
Stick around mate, I have sitting here ready to make videos about:
N1500 & N1700
A DigiBeta Editing suite
Loads more UMatic
Some old Beta and VHS stuff
A mystery box to open from 1992 with a brand new machine for a format you’ve never heard of.
And lots of odd bits and pieces.
Loads of other old tech’ stuff too 👍
Yeah, so it's analog _electronic_ photography.
Ha! Well that phrase could have saved me an awful lot of repetition and lengthy explanation! Thanks @HelloKittyFanMan -Andy
Great video as usual. So much I didn't know. I've never heard of the format. Never even heard of those Sony cameras or boxes. Love the '85 big hair on that woman. LOL. I watch all your videos, but if I didn't, a Susanna Hoffs thumbnail would have pulled me in (she was on display at the end).
Aww cheers mate, normal service will resume soon - I’m away again with work this week but the Radtel video will be up shortly.
Ha, well she’s still looking rather lovely even in 2024 and she was very, very pretty. But, I’m a Belinda fan boy at heart 👌 thanks as always mate.
We had one of those cameras (point and shoot) in out highschool. It was used bassically the same way a digital camera was used later.
Conected it to a computer then read it via bassically a 3.5 mm plug into a "speciall" card that probobly was just a sound card.
Then a software worked it into pictures.
There was some smart features that could scan the disc and make thumb nails. And you could select and down load them to the computer.
Hope that brought back some fond memories @matsv201 ~Andy
Probably a video capture card and a composite cable, these would have just put out bog standard video signals after all. Early digitisers did take some time to capture a full frame, especially if you wanted it in colour, and it was a pain in the backside if you didn't have a deck with a good clear pause function as you'd need to keep the camera trained dead still on something for a few seconds, and maybe replay the footage over and over to get each field, and in red, green, blue... (or luma, chroma I, chroma Q...) ..... grabbing visuals from a moving subject, you could forget it unless it was small enough to fit between the noise bands.
The rest of that sounds rather like my experience with an early digital camera my mum brought home from her teaching job a couple times in the late 90s. With a default 2MB and a whopping 8MB secondard memory card and a supposed 1.3MP resolution (though most commonly used in VGA mode, so direct equivalent of the videofloppies, because the sensor wasn't really that great and space was limited). Held about as many pictures in low rez and scrappy compression on the small card, full rez and better compression on the big one. Took a long time for the transfer software to generate the thumbs and a stupid long time to transfer the actual pictures because it connected over serial and struggled to keep a reliable connection at all of 115.2kbit, often needing to drop back to 57.6... which means like 2.5 minutes per megabyte...
But, even with all that, it seemed like magic and was a very useful tool for me putting together some illustrated pages for my geography A-level in Word (or maybe Write? Works?), pushing the limits of what our PC could manage without degrading into a heaving puddle of hard drive thrash and looking like absolute arse when finally spat out of our DJ300 printer (you can use a BW cart or a 3-colour colour one, but not both at the same time... do one pass for the text, swap cart, do the pictures and hope it doesn't make the already muddy photos even more so).
Experience that kind of led me to getting my own 2MP digital camera a couple years later when at uni, and needing to take hundreds of photos for my dissertation project ... there was a 35mm SLR plus microscope adaptor set up in the lab, but you had to buy and process your own film (as well as getting good at working out proper exposure and so-on, and if you messed up you were stuffed as the samples had a short shelf life), and then scan it into the computer afterwards, even though the useful part of the images only really needed to be about 240x320 or so as they were tracking fluid movements through the leaves of a tiny plant. Hell with that, I said, and put the money it would have cost towards a Fujifilm with macro lens switch plus a mini tripod (still have the latter). Did a great job, could get the shots lined up and sort the lighting out properly before hitting the shutter and zap / redo any duds straight away, give them a quick crop and level adjust in Paintshop if needed, then drop the result straight into the developing document.
Ten years earlier and the videofloppy probably would have made a similar amount of sense for that kind of application, if I'd known about it and could convince the faculty to invest in one... there was a Mac Lab just downstairs after all, so the reader could have plugged right in to one of them.
@@tahrey I don´t think it was a video capture card, it was dog slow.
The camera had to have some kind of analog memory (analog ram actually do exist, so it might be that). So the camera took a picture, then saved it, and you got to save the full picture before taking the next one.
Here is the point. Saving the picture was way faster than transferring it. That is why i suspected it was a very slow interface, like a audio card. Or at least a card with audio circuitry.
I don´t remember exactly but taking a picture took like 2-3 second while transferring them took like 20 seconds.
This was basically before digital cameras existed. Of cause this was a standard 480 line camera, so it seams like most of the stuff was just right of the video camera market.
There also did exist cameras of the same type that was to to speak in HD, that worked exactly the same.
As long as you don´t have a device that is limited to frame speed, you can in theory transfer a video frame how ever slow you like, hence you can also both increase and decrease the resolution (This is actually what VHS do, that is why they look so crappy).
Some really early weather and spy satlite operated that way to. At highschool we had a satelite antenna to tune in a weathersatlite that downloaded the picture as one continus HD video image.
By the way, that is exactly how a group 1 and 2 fax works. The resolution of a page is about 768x1056 lines for a sheet of paper. So its basically the same horsontal resolution as a PAL TV signal, but its much higher. Actually there is really no length limit. you can feed in a meter of paper and it will still just write it as if its one frame.
And color faxes actually did exist. they worked exactly like a color TV.. the quality s absolutely auwfull.
Oh gawd. I remember those. I used a Canon RC-250 camera that used them. I output the frames to a Amiga then convert them to digital pics. Until quite recently some of those pics could still be found online on the Southwark Cathedral website, which I, as part of a very small team, created the first version of. Who knows? maybe some are still hidden there somewhere.
I would love to get hold of an Amiga frame grabber and have a play; a bit before me but I hear that they were very powerful for the time! I hope those pictures are still extant! Thanks for sharing, Andy.
OCS/ECS or AGA? I expect this is one thing that HAM would work quite nicely for...
Oh a pretty new electronics channel! I subscribed! :D
You’re most welcome on board @SuperRandomForum - cheers 👍
That's a sub. Great production values here. Really enjoyed this.
Honoured! Remarks like that truly mean a lot to me, I’m learning and I’ve changed my style and improved a lot since then but I’m flattered by remarks like this. Pleasure to have you on board @WhatALoadOfTosca!
@robustreviews honestly really enjoyed it. Informative, funny, nice graphics and you have a nice way about you. Looking forward to part two.
I first encountered this system in around 1988/89. it was the canon one. Then again in 1997. Up until the late 90's/early 2000's, UK Auto Trader used to send an agent out to see your car and take photos for the advert in the magazine. They were using Canon Ion Video Still cameras when i joined. They moved on to Mavica's with 3.5" floppy disks and then to "normal" digital cameras. Once digital cameras became ubiquitous, Auto Trader stopped using agents and the advertisers would send in their own pics. When i first saw it in the 80's it blew me away. it was a company my sister worked for that were on the cutting edge of tech at the time and they used to get all the cool toys in!
Ah that’s cool, I remember the Auto Trader agent photographers; usually mum & dad trying to sell another lump of British Leyland that had unceremoniously split a sill or eaten its engine.
I guess that’s an ideal application for them where speed is more important than image quality and the 4:3 aspect wouldn’t have really presented an issue. That’s a great bit of info you’ve given me there! Cheers, Andy
I got one from when i went to army '01 and they were throwing stuff out. the camera was rather packed with components on the inside of it, but fundamentally it just dumped a frame on the disk.
cvhs would've been mostly just as good or better really.
you'd need to be taking lots of photos and going through a lot or carrying a lot of the the svf's for it to make much sense in comparison.
@@lasskinn474 When you consider the size of the disks and how many pictures they hold, vs a roll of 35mm, or more appropriately slide film or 126 (?) disc cartridge, I think it would have stacked up fairly favourably. Especially with presumably having the option to hook the camera up to a portable TV and review your pics then delete any duff ones to make space. A stack of the disks wouldn't have taken up any more space than a bunch of regular film. The quality wouldn't have been as good, but you'd trade that for convenience, and probably competitive with Polaroid.
@@tahrey yeah I suppose, I just mean in comparison to just filming 20 secs with a cheaper cvhs camera.
just having them on an actual floppy is so much better though. the sensor image quality was about same as direct feed off a sony cvhs camera.
it just always felt like that you could've done the stills thing as a hack on just cvhs tape if you had a buffer. I suppose in large scale manufacturing the vfd's could've been pretty cheap though.
edit: direct feed as in what I used to digitize stuff with with a tv card back then still and use as a webcam. if i remember right you couldn't get the direct live feed off the vfd camera itself.
Seems really rather brave to spin a floppy at 3000 RPM (PAL) while taking little in the way of precautions from protecting the disc and the accompanying r/w head(s) from dust and debris, considering there's just a big ole mechanical shutter there, similar to the one on 3.5 inch floppy disks.
How do these discs work anyhow, on a technical level? Regular floppies have their r/w heads in constant contact with the disc surface, similar to a magnetic tape recorder for example. However, that naturally produces friction and wear which eventually will destroy the media itself. Of course, a floppy only spins at 300rpm and not 3000, so media/head wear would be magnitudes higher for the faster spinning floppy if the heads are in full contact.
Floating heads are mechanically loads more complex (IE, head sits on an air cushion inbetween disc and the head itself, like with a hard disk drive.) You need to be able to load and unload the heads reliably without scratching up the disc, and you need to protect the drive itself from vibrations and jolts which could cause a head crash (IE a physical impact with the disc surface as it spins at speed, which is BAD.)
So, a very curious system. Potentially a fairly short lived one too... Especially considering the innermost tracks are much shorter than the outermost ones, so would have to hold way denser a signal, which also does not help with media longevity.
@lennyvalentin6485 You have raised some *really* important questions, and just to pick a few points out (I really should get it back and make another video as there was some fascinating technical stuff going on in here). Just to pick you a few points.
- I don't know if the cameras could reproduce the images, I suspect not, so if they had a field buffer they could record to the disk at a slower velocity than would be needed for reproduction as they would not have to match H-speed.
- Yep the disk is constant velocity according to the information I could find, if you do the sums it only really used the outermost portion of the disc surface - track 50 would have been the determing factor for acceptable image quality.
With regards to vibration, the image is somewhat 'wobbly' and there was a TBC and framestore for these which I guess on broadcast duty would have been critical.
These are great points though, shall I get it back and do a more technical dive? There's some cool stuff going on with the signal too, it's somewhat more like SECAM actually on the PAL discs using a colour line delay and FM modulation.
Great comments mate, certainly something for me to think about and find out! ~Andy
I used this when I did portrait photography. Split lens setup. Main camera using film (that was a long time ago) and a video camera to record to the disk. Main camera shot through an angled one way mirror, video camera looked up at the reflective side of the mirror. This janky setup was so customers could look at the pictures right afterwards and ordered what they liked.
That’s a really cool application, did you come up with that or was it a common thing to do!? That’s a seriously clever application. Thanks for letting us know about that. I am still a film photographer by the way 👍
@@robustreviews oh no, I didn't come up with it. It was part of the kit for the company I worked for.
@@robustreviews I did not come up with it. That setup was what the company I worked for used.
I used that format for a project in school once in the late 90s. I had a Canon camera and a Mac with analog capture capabilities. I could thus do some rudimentary desktop publishing despite lacking a digital camera.
I saw another comment hinting at me not being the only one doing something similar.
The best thing is that I have a feeling that I may even have the pictures captured archived somewhere (yeah, digital hoarding at its best). I still have the camera somewhere in the parents house. I do wonder if there’s anything readable left on those disks.
That is fascinating @DrBovdin - thanks for filling in a few details there! I hope you find your discs and get them read! Cheers for the comment.
I used a Xapshot camera for an elementary school project in the early 90s. I don't remember what the project was about anymore, but I _do_ remember being _extremely_ enthused that the school was trusting little-kid me to be responsible with the camera! 😀 I think a school staff member helped edit my pictures into a video using a similarly-beige editing deck.
(**EDIT:** typo 😝)
Video capture cartridges / cards used to be mildly popular on the 16-bit machines and DOS PCs for that kind of reason. You could grab short low-rez monochrome sequences using them if you had a use for that, but they were more useful for digitising stills into the machine using a video camera, particularly shots of something that wouldn't fit on a scanner and you didn't want to go through all the business of taking lots of film photos of, if it was more working material (like for modelling purposes or whatever) that didn't need to be kept forever or be super high quality.
I saw a thing in ST Format the one time about a developer who made the sprites for some over-the-shoulder sports game in that way, recording someone running around and then basically rotoscoping it on the computer. Think that's also how the Prince of Persia sprites were made (would have been even more rudimentary given they were being captured into an Apple II ?!), and, slightly more recently and in better quality, the enemy sprites for Doom. The devs made actual clay models of all the baddies, put them on a turntable, pointed a videocamera at them, then spun them round taking a shot from each cardinal direction after moving their limbs into the pose needed for each frame of animation...
Loads of retro people, these days, keep calling FILM cameras "analogue" and it gets my goat! But now I've seen this I can show them this video and, in my imagination at least, say to them "There! Look! THAT's analogue photography you ++++!" So thanks for sharing this peculiar format that I don't think the mighty one from "Techmoan" has ever shown.
It's funny how pathetically little a mere 50 frames are with today's digital cameras... but back in those days, 24 or, if you were posh, 32 was the best you could hope from a film camera and 50 sounds kinda impressive.
Oooh! RS232! The moment I see any kind of serial port on anything, I thinking about getting some wires hooked up to it so we can eavesdrop on whatever it is it's saying.
Oh I think I’ve got a couple he hasn’t done - most of my stuff is broadcast centric but I do have a box of an opened weird format player I can’t wait to open and take a look at.
I agree with the photography, I’m still a film photographer - I think _chemical_ photography is a better term and it also makes me twitch when it gets called “analogue.”
Yep, I’m also a tinkerer with things like RS232, I think I should have a deeper look at this machine.
Thanks for the comment mate ~Andy
@@robustreviews Yeah "Chem-i-cal" is good.
Well, that's why Sony / Canon were very careful to say "electronic" photography...
I had the companion TBC unit for this system, the Sony MPU-F100 for use with a Video Toaster (the demo video on my channel actually uses it as a frame sync). All the references to "ProMavica" really threw me for a loop and why would it need a TBC/Framesync? Well silly me, because it was analog.
Hi mate! Yep that makes sense, I don’t have the frame sync’ but it would have been used in conjunction with one as you say on broadcast duty.
I’d love to have a play with a VideoToaster system, that’s my kinda nerdy stuff.
Thanks buddy!
@@robustreviews Toasters are NTSC only. Just something to keep in mind if one pops up in the UK. There were 3rd party PAL converters (did PAL->NTSC/Toaster->PAL), but they were lousy like any other transcoder from the 90s.
I was thinking the RGB genlock stuff on the back would go just nicely with an Amiga, too. And it wouldn't matter too much if you could only capture about one second of video, taking a second or two over each frame, if the computer needed some time to render each one and then you were going to take the result off to a separate edit station... (or vice versa if it held a bunch of stills that you were going to overlay, and maybe the VT could sample-and-hold each one to cover for the momentary blank during head seeks... something like a top-40 pop chart show countdown showing the record covers would be a prime application, or a weather forecast, etc)
I was curious about these after seeing a VF camera in a photography class, judging from the comments it sounds like it was pretty common for education?
Nowadays it’s Canon DSLRs, or phones if you’re in a pinch. They look good enough in a yearbook if you don’t crop too closely or blow them up, occasionally better than DSLR shots because people kept messing up white balance and exposure on those. Thinking about it now, the photography and yearbook classes should really be more integrated, in yearbook you sat through a slideshow about settings and then they sent you out with cameras. In photography we dove much deeper into that.
Program mode and automatic DRO is a lifesaver...
@ The problem is that the previous users who sorta knew what to do would leave the cameras in manual or some specific program mode and the subsequent users of the camera wouldn’t know any better. We only had I think like 6 cameras to go around or something like that.
And of course there’s also people that use Program modes in the wrong context. This one guy used it at a sports event that took place at night, and left Sports mode (high shutter speed) on when taking a group photo. Super noisy photos.
Radio stuff and retro tech you say? That's a fun bus I'd like to jump on. New sub!!
Jump on @59withqsb12 - you’re very very welcome here! Cheers, Andy 👍
10:50 this is true
source: am girl
Woo! Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it! ~Andy
What a lovely device. I got quite a few VCRs and other devices but I´ve never seen this thing. They must be incredibly rare nowadays.
It is lovely, it’s an odd-duck but it’s interesting nether the less. Been filming something else equally “odd” today that you may well have never seen before today too. Thanks for the comment ~Andy
It really reminds me a lot of Minidisc, not just because of the obvious format similarities (excepting that it's purely magnetic, and analogue) but the whole kind of design language of the machines themselves. And funnily enough Sony did make a data version of that with a SCSI box you could hook up to a computer (holding about 140MB), but that also didn't catch on, somewhat sadly. That could have been a natural evolution of this device, even storing 150-ish full-frame video images in uncompressed digitised form... Eventually the 2000s Hi-MD just let you connect to it by USB and use it as a 1GB microdrive type device (and that ofc would have been enough for reasonable quality portable video, before UMD came along), but too little too late... Imagine having an MD slot on your desktop PC, or laptop, or a video/audio player using them sat by the TV. The cooler future we never got, probably due to corporate Sony shenanigans.
Ugh, I kick myself for passing on one of these cameras for cheap at a pawn shop in the early 00's. I also like how this is kinda like laserdisc in a way.
Yeah they’re a bit of an odd one. I’ve got something similar (boxed new) to show in the next week or two that’s an odd duck that doesn’t really fit in any category. Thanks for the comment mate.
I have the Canon Ion Cameras which uses VF Disk and the Digitizer Board for (old) PC. It's interesting what you can get out of these Cameras, but I imagine that even bach than (my Set is from 1992) it was only usable if it must go really fast. With 1 Hour Photo development, or at bigger Companies, with own Darkrooms, 35mm was still the best Option with way better Picture Quality.
I've not used the cameras (expect the later digital Mavica) I would find it fascinating to use one to see what's possible with them.
Yep, a field of PAL or NTSC was never going to equal 35mm (it's also in the 'wrong' aspect ratio. Have you got a video about your digitiser? I'd love to see it. Thanks for the comment :)
@@robustreviews No Video Sorry, But the Cameras itself are, besides the Floppys, nothing to write Home about.
I'm pretty sure I still have mine somewhere.
@@robustreviews Frame mode would probably be acceptable if you could have the capture device average out the reads, or if it was maybe higher quality than the deck you're using so had paired heads or a framebuffer etc to get rid of the noise... that'd at least get you up to VGA rez, which is good enough for upto maybe half the size of a typical 6x4 if the print halftoning isn't super fine.
@@tahrey exactly, there was a TBC/frame buffer available on this system and that machine but have been very high mileage, and the disk was very elderly which wouldn’t have helped one bit.
I was a bit surprised it didn’t have at least a field buffer, but no the thing just churns away at the disc and hops tracks for a frame.
I think that machine was probably a low spec’ one, or knowing Sony they would have gladly sold all the extra bits to go with it!
I need to get this back and do a Part II as I thought it was PAL but it uses a custom FM colour difference solution more like SECAM on the disk, so there’s only .5H colour resolution with line difference.
I really need to get it back and get the analyser and scope out!
The recording method must be really advanced to get ~6Mhz PAL bandwidth out of one track on floppy disk.
Ah it doesn’t, it kinda cheats. It is like a quasi-SECAM thing that’s re-heterodyned under the luma. That’s what I need to make part II about but that’ll be a more techie video.
It used alternate colour that’s FM modulated so it’s kinda (if you squint) more like SECAM.
Good spot though!
@@robustreviews You should definitely do another video on this. You can tell just by looking at it there's a really clever trick being used for it to work.
@@robustreviews Wow, that's a lot of fiddling, vs the relatively basic approach VHS took. No wonder it seems so clear even with halved vertical rez.
@@tahreyyep I think the colour-under method would have been quite poor considering how rough a single field of VHS looks. I do need to go back to the patents and tech’ docs and unpack it.
I’m pretty conversant with analogue video but I’m still not sure where to pitch the videos whether people want a prod and poke at an unusual device -or- more in-depth stuff?
I think this device and format were for in-store advertisement or part of a Muzak system, again used for in-store ads.
That does make good sense @jhonwask - I know they did see a bit of use in lowly-broadcast stuff but that could be a brilliant use for them and I suspect that's where they could have ended up. Thanks for the comment :)
I've seen these used in the medical industry. Usually in conjunction with the video printer (posh B/W fax)
That’s really interesting - for medical imaging I guess?
Cool
Cheers mate 👍
I just learned digital beta was thing. I’m guessing it is because it was more of a professional video production type of media.
Yes it was @AmazedStoner - definitely not a home format those machines were $20,000+ new!
Indeed! I don't think I've even seen an _analog_ Betacam machine myself, outside of videos like these.
(We did have a Betamax VCR in the 80s, but that's a separate format. Betacam could use the same-size tapes (at least in some machines), but the signal recorded on them was very much incompatible with Betamax.)
Yeah I have many of both (and SX, the lesser spotted variety) and the VHS equivalent MII too.
All in good time eh? Keep watching 😂
Could be useful for a stillstore in a broadcaster/newsroom kind of setup. Possibly with lower thirds pre-rendered too. The fact that it's a video field means it'll slot easily into broadcast setup easily.
Absolutely, and as you say it’s a field so it’ll play nicely in a mix. Certainly sound like plausible ideas! Cheers for the comment - Andy
well mostly it being a video field was useful for showing them on tv's in home/office/army use. projectors too, no need to develop slides. still it wasn't really that popular for any use really.
Glad I watched to the end before picking up the keyboard... was going to ask about the field/frame and regular/hi-band switches on the front. Does it really just jitter the head(s?) back and forth between tracks? Or maybe swapping sides (though you'd be restricted to recording full-frame images with even-track alignment in that case, though it'd mean it would only need 25 total tracks not 50)... I'd have thought it more efficient to have a pair of heads next to each other so it could read two of them at once and seamlessly flick back and forth electronically. The extra noise in frame mode is quite unexpected...
The Hi-band simply being SVHS style is a disappointment too, I thought maybe there would be a lower rez / longplay type mode when you turned that off, so it would be able to fit a full-frame image on a single track (spinning at half speed) at the expense of less horizontal sharpness. Which would be an OK compromise on some screens given how big the dot pitch could sometimes be, or indeed probably make no difference to the horizontal rez at all if you were working in pure monochrome with a B/W screen. Maybe even do 100 field-based images (with the reduced horizontal clarity making it a bit like a VCD, or a longplay NTSC tape) by putting two to a track with a small framebuffer (75 kilopixel would have been a lot more achievable than 300kp at the time... only need like 256KB, less if you accept worse colour depth).
Though, maybe the noise is just the deck is a bit worn out and needs some cleaning and servicing?
Hi mate, all good points.
Mobile at the moment before I get back on the M1 - I really need to get this back and have another go with it! You have asked very sensible questions and good points! Definitely needs a part 2! ~Andy
If it helps you narrow it down, I didn't use one of these either. Glad I could help!
Cheers dude! That’s narrowed it down a touch! 😂
I can see a use for it. In retail it could be used to display a slideshow. Also in a theatre, for example. In business you could load it with a PowerPoint.
Yep, makes perfect sense to me 👍
Would be nice to know how the disc works in a part 2.
I’m working on it JonDoe, my jobs means I work away all week though so time is a bit of a premium but I will get round to it before the end of the year!
Looking forward to it whenever you're able to do it. :)
Did I spot a BSB promo vid cassette in the background?
Ha that’s a good eye! I’ve got a bit of BSB stuff to show off in time! Andy
This thumbnail really confused me. I hadn't seen this video on my feed yet but there was a red stripe at the bottom so I assumed I had already seen it. It was only after being presented with it for the 7th time and not remembering it that I finally clicked on it.
Ha well I hope it didn’t disappoint after all of that 😂 thanks for the comment @RT-qd8yl ~Andy
Yep, it's basically a tiny LaserDisc only magnetic instead of optical, that only holds 2 seconds of video. :-P
Actually; not a bad shout! ~Andy
All magnetic disks are analogue, its what you do to the analogue signal that counts. Old dram is analogue too (modern ram has a digital interface built in)
Of course; that’s entirely right. Doesn’t make an interesting thumbnail though 😝 But I agree @phil6859 - it’s a point with remembering. Cheers, Andy
still shots of a football game to overlay a replay or somethin
MOMT sounds familiar but I thought it was a lot older than 2 years...
I assume this could have been useful for magazines, maybe about movies or videogames. A quick way to get stills from a video source.
Sounds like a brilliant application for it! ~Andy
10:45 - You make joke. But... My advice would be... if you do manage to find a lady that is impressed by a stack of old video gear... You damned well make sure to marry her! :D
Most interesting, assuming it actually is analogue on the floppy, then that disk must be spinning something like 3000 RPM, so the wear on it and the heads must be hideous, otherwise they'd have to digitise the pic and store it in a frame buffer. By the looks of the electronics, with an absolute pile of digital, it seems they were actually doing that - so pseudo analogue?
Most of the accessories shown (like a phone 'modem') would require the picture to be digital, so braking the analogue idea.
I did toy with the idea of trying to do this on a hard disk drive, they normally spin at the right speed, there is no head contact so you could hold an image for ages with no wear & a hard drive usually has hundreds of tracks, so plenty of room.
Back in the day I was having a very bad time trying to digitise video, so an intermediate step that could hold a freeze frame for near forever seemed like a good accessory. (some early digitisers required a freeze frame source)
Yep, it's definitely analogue on the disk, of that there is no doubt. This was developed in the early 1980s so they'd be no feasible way to get anything approaching a high resolution colour image on to a tiny disk by digital means. The numbers do calculate to the signal h-period (3000RPM/50RPS = 50 fields-per-second) to use the PAL example.
I agree about wear, but I've heard nothing to _say_ it was an issue but I suspect they'd be a lot of mechanical abrasion eventually. In broadcast these would be fed in to a frame-store (although digital frame-stores had supplanted these by the 80s anyway, major broadcasters would be able to punch up frames from a server) which kinda makes them somewhat worthless for the major players I think?
There's nothing that says transmitting at voice-frequency has to be digital, us radio hams have been playing with SSTV (slow-scan television) for decades and that can squeeze in to a 3KHz voice channel, it's very slow but it's been done for a long time. That's built on modifications of conventional analogue video. It is very slow though, but doable - which to me ties in with the fact it took so long to transmit pictures 'by wire' on it. Transmitting pictures by baseband telephone circuits goes back to the 1930s I think and was quite established by WWII: it need not have to be digital.
I suspect for most users the image would be captured then held either on a computer (or by extension a frame store) rather than continuously read indefinitely?
Good comment, stuff to think about! Cheers ~Andy
They were mostly used by cosmetic surgeons.
I still have my Canon camera, the flat point and shoot
Brilliant, when did you last get it out and use it?! 😂
@@robustreviews long time ago
It amuses me the roll of film probably has a lesser volume than the disk so it's not even smaller and film is MUCH more resolution than 640x480 so in all aspects it is objectively worse than what they currently had o.o
Yep in terms of quality 35mm would have exceeded this, plus it was not in 4:3 aspect ratio! But these at least could be whistled down a telephone line fairly easily rather than using a drum scanner for transmission? These were quickly outmoded though, they're one of those _interim_ technologies I guess? It's a worthy comment though and I'm inclined to agree. Andy.
how does this channel have less than 1k subs
Hopefully, not for long! Thanks for the positive comments 🙏 ~Andy
Please make sure to preserve all your videos that you decide to remove from the closing channel.
I only made two of any quality (!) I'd like to share, I have just put the other one up. Hope you enjoy it. Andy :)
80s video didn't look anything like that. People today believe, for reasons I do not understand, that the past consisted of really bad video.
But it was being viewed in the medium it was meant for. Capturing analog tape digitally is extremely difficult. The video always looks way worse, though some people have it down. vwest-life can capture it correctly.
I know mate, and trust me, I know a thing or two about VT, and I can capture it properly, you’re welcome to come and see my racks of For.As, rare and exotic machines (not many formats I can’t capture) or several years proving digitised broadcast VT for several major broadcasters.
But, I do see your point, it’s a cultural shorthand and it gets a bit of interest, and usually I don’t like it. That said it was a throwaway little bit of silliness.
But I “know my VT” as you’ll see. I have lots of weird formats to show soon 👍
Thanks for the comment though mate, I do get where you’re coming from, but I don’t need to be told how to capture colour-under video tape in the “real world” 😂
Stick around mate, I do appreciate the comment,
@@robustreviews I wasn't trying to be overcritical of you. It's just that a lot of people believe that NTSC was extremely poor quality. I apologize if it was taken that way.
I don't know, given your background why you fail to see its uses back then (I posted this in a different comment).
One that jumped right out at me was game companies and game magazines. While Nintendo and Sega probably had something more advanced for doing this, the small production shops probably didn't.
One problem CRTs really did have was poor brightness. You cannot even see most CRT TVs outside unless it is well shaded, definitely not in bright sunlight. Given most, especially in the 80s, CRTs were curved, along with poor brightness made them notoriously difficult to take a picture of (suitable for the magazine article or screen shots on the box), not to mention motion blur if it is not a still screen.
It’s cool mate, don’t worry! It was just one of those things, I was in agreement really. I actually did make a video years ago about real VHS capture (proper) vs overused VHS effects.
It was just a bit of mirth though, no offence taken at all. Like I said, I find it a bit annoying too but it kinda is a shorthand that communicates the point.
I hope you stick around mate, you’ve made some good points and I have lots of odd machines to show off 👍 Andy
@@christo930to be fair, there was a lot of poor quality video back then. Consumer level was awful, but you could tell the difference between something captured on film and something recorded on video. The lenses also seemed to be worse in poor lighting today, likely because the digital cameras today are so bad they have to use complex algorithms to make the output look half way decent.
NTSC broadcast tapes might be good, but the end result after it's travelled through the air is not
@@phill6859 "NTSC broadcast tapes might be good, but the end result after it's travelled through the air is not"
False. NTSC video broadcast from a TV station was excellent. 525 lines. Color was not quite as good as B&W, but it was still pretty good. They weren't scanned on cheap modern devices and made to look bad by cheap modern devices. Broadcast quality tape was very good.
Plus, they were being received by CRT TVs which were built to be lower resolution than a modern 4k screen.
As far as light goes, this is mostly to do with film, not tape. Film needs a lot of light. The tape recorders (studio equipment) also tended to need more light. This is a problem that really hasn't gone away. Modern cameras are better than early digital cameras, but they still need a decent amount of light (though probably better than the old broadcast tape recorders)
You must be chillijoncarnes brother surely
Haha no way, he’s a Hammer and I’m squarely a Gooner. No relation I’m afraid although I have a feeling he may have lived not ever so far from me at one point.
I’ve been a fan of his for years, I’ve not watched any TV since 2011!
Good comment!
so, it's a digital photography system?
meh
wow .. never seen one of them before. seems like alot of effort for not much reward .. even back in the 80's .. then again. I got my first computer when I was 5 in 1978 and compared to today it was alot of effort for not much reward aswell .. commodore vic 20. but if not for that I would not be who I am today.. so maybe that machine help get someone into video production or something .. anyway I love old stuff and really love old tech .. so as you can guess I am all ways the life of the party .. lololo love ya brother.
Nothing wrong with loving a bit of retro tech sir! That was seriously early to have a computer!
Thanks for the comment mate.