I always imagine Mrs moan seeing the postman coming up the path with a heavy parcel and letting a deep sigh out as she wonders where you are going to store the next bit of tech
Thank you for the link to my documentary about the EditDroid. I’m glad it finally found a bigger audience and the EditDroid got the credit it deserves.
Great episode! Brought back fond memories. In 1993, I worked for Metrolight Studios in Hollywood where we did the ink and paint for the Beavis and Butthead and Ren And Stimpy animated TV series for MTV. We used the Panasonic version of this machine to proof animation. We did the ink and paint on DOS PCs running our proprietary animation software and would print a frame at a time to the WORM drive which was then played back at normal speed to check for paint flashes and other errors. Final approved animation was output, again one frame at a time to an Abekas digital recorder (a fine English product!) which was then run off to one inch analog video tape synced to sound for final delivery. No film was used in the process which saved lots of money in production. The major drawback with this process is that there will never be film-quality copies available of these shows for posterity.
I always wonder what happened to things like the stockbooks from Hanna Barbara and Filmation. Animation was looked at as disposable entertainment for a very long time. And now that anime has FINALLY gotten large numbers of adults to admit their passion for the medium, it's too late. Much of that history (including what you worked on) has been mismanaged or stored in antique formats that simply will not be usable in 50 years.
I was actually thinking of that scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture when the column-of-light probe took over Spock's computer panel, and a fast flurry of information and pictures starting coming up on the workstation screen, and they had a version of that same conversation Techmoan gave: "Oh no, they've taken over the computer and are trying to download the whole database! Computer off! [no effect] COMPUTER OFF! [no effect]" >>Spock smashes the computer panel and the flurry of info stops...
I storyboarded that Regular Show episode, so cool to see a couple seconds of it on your channel!!! I wish it wouldve worked, but maybe we would not be ready for the consequences of that
@@MinoTheShow I wonder if this recorder has a built in full frame time base corrector? If so then it wouldn't care about macrovision. The nifty thing with DVD and macrovision is the protection isn't on the disc. There's simple a bit set in the VOB files that tells the DVD player to activate its macrovision generating chip and inject the signal into the outgoing video. Back when DVD was the hot thing there were people hacking firmware to completely ignore the state of the macrovision bit while some players had hidden menus to disable copy protection and/or region coding. IIRC New Zealand didn't allow DVD players with region code support.
Thanks very much for this video on a really interesting "transitional" technology. Another use case from the broadcast industry is when Fox Sports in the US obtained the NFL broadcast rights. At the time, they had zero infrastructure which allowed them to build from the ground up. They used a system with "LaserDisc" technology for instant replay systems, which offered a lot of advantages over the tape-based systems from the "legacy networks". I remember reading about this in Broadcast World magazine at the time, back when people mocked and laughed at Fox. This technology helped them leapfrog other broadcasters to become the new standard by which sports broadcasts would be judged. (and here you thought I just made tow truck videos.)
I worked in the laser room at Fox Sports the first few seasons of football. Each game had a logging station with the laser recorder connected to a PC. Every time you push “return” a new clip would be logged. Before a snap we would hit the “return” a few times to try and get the clip to start as close to the snap as possible. We would type while the play was happening. Once the play was over we would wait to hit “return” until all the cutaways were done and the game went to the replays. Hitting ‘return’ was important because the edit station couldn’t pull the highlight until we had hit “return” to end the clip. We’d then log the replays and any good cutaways after the replays. I think there were two profile server edit stations. Whichever edit station was assigned the game would pull whatever clip(s) they wanted to make a highlight. We had to change discs every 30 minutes or so. I think there were two extra logging stations to record a game in case another one had a problem. They were also used to record when a logging station had to switch discs. It had to be coordinated since multiple games need to change record discs at roughly the same time. The computer program used to log during recording could be very buggy. I spent some time in the offseason helping to debug and I crashed it pretty often. I think the discs were erased mid-week once anything important from the previous week weren’t needed from the disc records. When we were done with a disc we stacked them above the machines. Occasionally we would put a disc back in at halftime if an editor was looking for something specific. I think we ended up with 6 discs a game. Cutting edge technology at the time. I don’t know how long they used the system, but they were still using it when Fox Sports got baseball.
@Pete Finlay bro wayyyyy too many words for a TH-cam reply. Very interesting information and very interesting topic but dude. Your dissertation is a bit lengthy even for myself. And I love historical documentation of technical systems honestly....... @GTOger very very interesting information from the early days of the sports broadcasting renaissance.
@@detachedmind god damn thats a lot to keep that going. The freeze frames of LD were epic. I can only imagine how nightmarish that would be on 3/4" or betacam
Those sequences of images flipping through rapidly always remind me of Data on the bridge of the Enterprise searching through the library computer. I wouldn't even be surprised if they used one of these machines to make that exact effect.
You mentioned animation in passing but didn't emphasize how useful this device was in the day for animation and computer visual effects. It was very difficult to playback full resolution uncompressed video to record to tape. So in the early days you'd record each frame individually to something like this then it could play it back at full speed, again well before reasonable computers could do so. An example is that Foundation Imaging had one of these and it was used on Babylon 5 and other shows of that era. The other alternative was printing each frame to film, so this was a lot easier to work with. Eventually, computers (and disk arrays) got fast enough and by the time they were working Star Trek: Voyager this was no longer needed to get D1 quality uncompressed video playback. But before that, it was a godsend. The alternatives would've been hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment or constant trips to the film lab and not being able to see playback 'till the next day.
Unfortunately, no matter whether film is used or laserdisc, an animation would consist out of synchronous pixel images rather than consecutive pixel images. The superiority of TV technology over film would not be in it.
@@Rainer67059 You misunderstand. It's just like how this Techmoan video was created on a computer with a program iMovie or Final Cut Pro. When dealing with fancy visual effects or slow computers, the computer cannot output video at 30 FPS. Back then, it could easily take minutes to hours to render a single frame. Today, we simply save the frames one at a time to a hard disk, but in the '80s and early '90s, hard drives were simply too small and too slow. Instead, they saved the video to optical disc, one frame at a time, as a buffer before being played back to tape or film for distribution.
@@straightpipediesel I complained about the content that goes onto laserdisc. Earlier in this comment section I wrote: "Even with those burners, Laserdiscs will have ended up with pictures on them produced by film cameras, not TV cameras, won't they? I mean film cameras that film with 24fps, not interlaced, and a low-height aspect ratio ("widescreen"), totally imcompatible with NTSC and PAL." It's for this reason I found both the CED and the Laserdisc a bad idea.
@@Rainer67059 No, that is incorrect. Just look at this video. Did Techmoan record something onto the disc from film? Think about it. Laserdisc and CED, being analog formats, are inherently interlaced.
@@straightpipediesel Yes, it's incorrect to claim that this special laserdisc shown in this video was used for capturing film. I corrected it in another comment I wrote earlier, 3 hours ago, under this video. But it is correct that CEDs and consumer Laserdisc were almost exclusively used for publishing film. And the computer generated images TV stations put on the laserdisc shared some of the defects, film images have. Of course, they came in 4:3. That was good.
I used to work with these in the motion simulator industry. The individual frame counts were sent over a serial port to a computer that controlled the movement of a motion base. The earlier machines were based on U-Matic and SMPTE time coding. These were far more reliable...
Yeah, that's one nice thing about CAV laserdisc; one frame per rotation, freeze frame is as simple as just telling the player to not step the laser outwards one track to the next frame, and you can address each frame individually by number. Had this come out sooner it may have done quite well
@@drewgehringer7813 Your mention of "one frame per rotation" just reminded me that I have, somewhere, a video stills camera that I was given years ago and have never tried to use or test. That would have had some similar use cases to the recordable Laserdisc, but at much lower cost, and presumably quality.
Great video as usual, but one remark: Since this is, as you mentioned correctly, a professional device, the option to connect the remote control via a wire to the main unit is likely not (just) for situations where you don't have direct line of sight but instead for environments where you do actually have line of sight but also have multiple units to avoid the wrong one or even all of them responding to button presses.
I believe BBC used these to play out idents in the early nineties as they are truly broadcast quality devices - would love to see what they look like direct from disc. Thanks for yet another amazingly rare treat that would otherwise never see the light of day! Happy Christmas Matt :)
I actually went to the edge of my seat when the pictures started playing: it WAS just like in the movies! All that was missing was 90s trance playing in the background...
Merry Christmas to you too, Techmoan! Funny enough I for once belong to the group using these devices back in the day: The TV station I worked for used laser disks right to the middle of the 2000's as emergency programme playback devices (ie. in case of some equipment malfunction) because it could play back an endless loop (opposed to tape drives). I've actually seen it in action a few times: The building was new and fire alarms went off for no reason. Everyone was required to evacuate the building however - switching over to laser disk in the process :)
In the nineties, we used both the CRV and the Pioneer VDR-1000 on corporate AV shows. Though the VDR was more expensive initially, being able to rewrite more than made up for that. Quickly, we started phasing out the CRVs. One client would bring two or three hours of video clips for each week's show, and I would spend a bit of load-in time ingesting and being librarian. We had a custom Mac based program that another client had written, and allowed me to use, that would allow for easy and simple playlists. The end client never really used a script for the three day shows, and these often went way over schedule. Being able to follow a speaker who could literally bounce anywhere content wise on stage made for a very random access show. For years, we never had a rehearsal, and also almost never missed a queue. They were amazing machines. Thank you for finding one to show.
Ahhhhhh, I'd love to get an LD with that episode of Regular Show on it. I'm really glad you knew about it. If I had the ability, I would record the format wars onto the various formats represented in the show, LD would be the hardest to do.
I worked for Sony as a freelancer at their studio in New Jersey in the late 90s. Sony used their own CRV gear, in conjunction with some custom PC software, for most of their internal sales meetings, as well as convention displays. The PC would connect to the CRV player via serial port. Artists would create "slides" on desktop computers, then the still images would be captured to frames on the CRV discs. Short videos used at the meeting or event were also saved to the same disk. During the show, the software would "cue up" the next slide or video in order as required by the presentation. Basically, high-end, analog powerpoint.
Merry Christmas! We have to get you loads of these discs so all future episodes can be recorded onto them and re-captured for that authentic 90s feel! :D
Good idea. It would be like some sort of BBC documentary. All we need, apart from the Laserdiscs, is some period appropriate music, maybe smooth jazz...
[ Authentically smooth jazz ] The video quality is amazingly good. You can tell the dynamic range is not up to that of HD, but it’s quite sharp for SD. (A complement to the DVD player and capture hardware as well I guess.)
@@kurttownsend2227 Smooth jazz slows and fades away probably due to leaky cap... But yeah. We need at least one episode of The Moans recorded on laserdisc!!
I won't lie, the outro that machine recorded and then being played back made me feel like emotional, here's a machine from 1993 being used to record something modern, immortalized, no longer able to be rewrote and one of its kind, it made me feel the same emotions as when Neal Armstrong took the first step on the moon.
Back in 2000 I worked at the California Department of Justice and those disks were part of my tasks. On a console one of the messages I had to watch for would be that machine wanting a disk. On all the disk were all of California fingerprint records, the machine could hold a lot but not all the disk. So, when I saw a message saying it wanted disk 435 I had to find it in cabinets and pull out what looked like a pizza box. Of course the machine was full so I had to eject a disk (at random usually the highest number) and then load 435 into the matching. I always wondered how that machine work and now I see, an attached computer had a fingerprint to lookup and would then go frame by frame comparing trying to make a match, when it made a match it would report back to the officer with the frame info. Very enlightening, I really enjoy watching and learning with your videos. Cheers.
Wonderful - a classic Techmoan complete with dismantling and minor repair! I wonder how you would set it to record something where you weren't sure of the exact length, eg an interview or speech. Many thanks for keeping us so well entertained, informed and educated this year, Mat. Have a great Christmas and wonderful 2020.
You'd probably sacrifice more space than you needed, but in the world of TV everything is timed to fit into a window... If the news finishes a minute over time, you simply won't see the last minute of it. So whoever is recording onto these discs probably already knows exactly how much time to allocate.
@@3rdalbum Thanks to the link provided by Techmoan about TV programmes like the news I just read that the playout of Top of the Pops (people dancing to a chart song) was done that way so the station controller could fade out whenever they liked to either lose or fill in time.
@Brad Viviviyal correct The LVM-3AA0 discs were not laser disc standard compliant and qualified as WORM drives. ONLY ODC made RLV discs that were Laserdisc standard compliant I'm assuming Gilbert Pfaff was commenting about CRV Discs (LVM-3AA0) since that' s what the video is about.
A museum in Québec city used to have a LD recorder like the one you've shown and a bunch of players (LVA-7000?) of the same format. They used it to produced a couple of dozens of the same disc, each with small 20 to 60 seconds video excerpts on them. The same couple of dozens disc played on … a couple of dozen LD players linked to monitor installed at various booths on the exhibition hall floor. The player did have a function for repeating of a certain program or were linked to a button on the display that the visitors would press to start the program linked to that specific part of the exhibit. Thanks for showing us all theses equipment for yesteryear.
Thank you, Mr. Moan for a wholly unanticipated Christmas resolution. A television station called Video Jukebox operated on a LPTV in my town in 1992. It was a national service intended for cable where folks would call a 1-900 number, select a three digit code and within 10-15 minutes their song would appear. As a frustrated college student fascinated with all things televisual, I never knew just how that worked with the technology of the day. In fact, it was one of those things I would attempt to Google every few years not knowing for what I was searching. Thank you. Today I know.
More tv ch 32 down in Tampa back in 1980s and early 90s played music videos 24/7.I miss those days. Does anyone remember the Q zoo in the morning,simalcast with Q105 FM every morning so you could listen to your favorite music video on radio while going to work.
I'm a man in the middle and I enjoy your well made videos of tech gone-by. Boy, did gear look much better then - I think the introduction of blue LEDs started the downfall of design... Merry Christmas to you, the missis, the puppets and all your fans!
interesting fact - all LED lightbulbs are actually blue, with a coating that turns the light "white". I can't imagine the sheer quantity of blue LEDs that exist in the world today.
@@circattle And I cannot stand that type of light, so I stockpiled good ol' incandescent lightbulbs to last me a century as soon as the EU made them illegal. Fight the system! ;)
@@circattle I don't think the "hue" type bulbs that have variable color temp are phosphor LEDs. They have R/G/B primary LEDs and vary output from them. The light from them is pretty horrible though.
Agreed about blue LED -- I miss when things had red and amber LED, or even green. Why does nobody who builds consumer electronics these days realize that the rainbow has more colors than just blue?
I've handled one of those red RLV discs. My college had one - it contained an educational programme about how analog video works. No idea where the disc went, but it was played back in a standard LD player they had in a rack.
I used one of these to record animation in the early Nineties: input was a Targa-card and the recorder was controlled via RS-422 serial. I purchased this device to spare the tape drives on my Sony D2 machines. The single-frame recording was less expensive than having the D2 belts tweaked after a lengthy render.
Great memories. Yep I am in the group that actually shot and edited educational video programs that were put onto laser video disc. Sourced on BetaCam SP and edited onto 1" Analog video tape. Tedious editing work because of the menus and single frames you created, but cutting edge at its time and paved the way for CD-ROM and DVD later. We sent our discs off to get created. Thanks for sharing this trip down memory lane for me.
These machines were also used in the production of animations and special effects for the Babalon 5 series. When the series premiered the graphics and animations where produced on Commodore Amiga 2500's with Video Toaster hardware, with some frames taking 4-6 hours to render on the Amiga. At first special "annimation" versions 0f the standard Sony BVH-3000 series VTRS where tried for the recording of the rendered frames but they were too expensive and needed some manual tending during the recording process. The VTR's where replaced by Sony CRV machines which were controlled by custom software in the Amiga through the Amiga's GPIO port and the process became automated, it was also extended to later animation systems under Mac and DEC Alpha computers.
@@subduedreader5627 No, if you pull something out it's called "extracting", if something pushes it out it's an eject. Which conversely would mean there's also an "intract" which is what this machine effectively is doing, but I've never seen that word being used.
14:25 Beautiful.... absolutely beautiful... 😌 That BBC ident, the Virtual Globe, is one of the best idents ever. And this is coming from someone born in 2002.
Regarding the long empty space in the beginning.Word clock and black burst time code generally starts at 1000. My protools hardware won't properly lock to word clock using Smpte unless the start is at least 1000. It gives all the hardware a chance to be in que with the master clock source. This ensure a solid sync among everything.
Outstanding work. At this point I feel like Techmoan can genuinely call himself a historian. So obscure, yet so interesting and absolutely new to most people.
I can say this IS a real christmas gift to me. Not only you can show a machine but also a blank disc and record it before my eyes ! Never thought i would ever see that in my life ! So a BIG THANK YOU for this one !
Who down-votes videos on this channel? Who could possibly be so idiotic to actively dislike such excellent, informative, interesting, well-researched content? A moron, that's who.
Just when I start to think “What else can he possibly come up with???” Then comes another brilliant Techmoan video educating me yet again about another electronic wonder I had no idea existed! Your channel is by far my favorite on TH-cam! Merry Christmas and many thanks for providing us with continued awesome interesting content. All the best to you and your family this holiday season! Cheers!
I have used this in TV Broadcast Graphics department back in 1993. We used to record frame by frame 3D Renders using this recorder and a Targa Video Card from a 486 PC. The card could remotely control the recorder via a serial cable. This was useful because we could avoid the wear of Betacams while recording sequences frame by frame.
I believe Thames played their station ident out from laserdisc in the 1980s, and I'd imagine they were not alone - it freed up a VTR (or the earlier telecine) from being effectively dedicated to playout of such content. I'm not sure, but I think Tyne Tees had something similar to this in the early '90s as well (they were certainly playing out idents from some sort of disc-based system). And wasn't this technology used by some TV centres as a means of showing optics/'slides' for a while?
Makes me wonder how many of those discs are stashed away in the BBC archives gathering dust, filled with all kinds of footage that maybe was one-off and never seen again... :)
Knowing the BBC, they probably decided the discs were taking up too much space and had them all burned years ago. Probably half of them were the only copies of whatever was on the disc, as well.
if they'd make a public offer for anyone to come pick up their trash for free they'd probably find that it'd all be collected by someone. problem solved.
I really like the CRV version of the credits images. Gives an awesome retro soft / slightly interlaced look. Nice that you got something out of it that you could keep!
Thank you so much! I was looking for a video of a working CRV machine for many years now, I knew they did exist and what they were used for, but I have never have seen one in operation. I wish you merry christmas too, thank you for many hours of entertainment this year.
I’m 16 and it’s always great to watch your videos. Always learning new stuff from you about older interesting stuff. Glad I found your channel a year or months ago.
I have a friend who actually has some kind of laserdisc burner he was telling me how one time he spent time learning to use it. He still has all the equipment. I am hopeful to one day see this in action.
I created 3D computer graphics back in the mid-90's with a guy who used one of these (or a close successor) and iirc we rendered individual frames from a PC to the CRV for 'broadcast quality' (sic) results. The price of the unit and discs were astronomical though, things have certainly come a long way... thanks for another fascinating video Matt and merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
I've been following your channel for a long time now. But as a broadcast technician, a fan of vintage gear and a huge fan of Regular Show, i must say this episode is ma favorite! Awesome job and very informative as always. Cheers from Switzerland
I've been a LaserDisc for decades and had never heard of this. I love your episodes, but this one in particular was full of great info about something I had zero knowledge. Thanks so much! Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to you and yours!
I have actually seen and used these. When I was younger a friend worked at a motion ride. It was space shuttle looking box that could hold maybe a dozen people. It was on hydraulic rams to move it around in sync with the video. So it felt like you were moving. It had 3 different videos you would watch as you bounced around inside. The code for the movement was on a standard 3.5 floppy. The video ran on one of these. I only knew a little about computers then but I was fascinated at the huge floppy. Thanks for mentally bringing me back there and now I finally know what the giant floppy was
That was apparently an LV-ROM player, which was a special laserdisc format developed for use with the BBC Advanced Interactive Video computer, according to this site: www.beebmaster.co.uk/Domesday/VP415.html Also IMDb states that it couldn't write on CD, so that was a small technical mistake in the movie ( www.imdb.com/title/tt0097742/goofs )
MetalTrabant I helped contribute a page to that project. It was a single “Mode 7” page (in BBC Computer terminology) about the village of Wickenby in Lincolnshire. A lifetime ago.
@@MetalTrabant I dunno, at what point do fiction and "mistake" intersect here? It's supposed to be super fancy doesn't-actually-exist secret agent tech. You just need a prop that looks sufficiently sciencey and that very few people will be intimately familiar with. One of those newfangled Laserdisc players, but with the implication that it's able not only to record, but to record onto a more pocketable, equally shiny, and equally cutting edge Compact Disc? That'll do the trick. And it doesn't need to actually do anything, thanks to the Magic Of Cinema, so long as the player is designed to also be CD compatible so it won't explode or jam when you insert the disc. Just point a camera at the thing, have Moore insert the CD in the tray as if he knows what he's doing, key a few seconds of some suitable flash-frame "it's got into the database!" computery / microfilmy stuff onto the attached monitor in post, then have him eject and pocket the disc again. Done. I mean ... there's no way even the craziest dragstrip car could successfully chase down a pair of 750cc scrambler bikes around the hills of the LA suburbs. But The Fast And The Furious made it happen. It wasn't so much as mistake as a deliberately fanciful piece of dramatic fiction. And Omega don't actually make watches with built-in high powered laser cutters, electromagnets strong enough to hold a man off the ground, or steel filament grappling wires...
I witnessed a seller show at a university, where the video outfitter brought in just such a machine. They took screenshots of finite element simulations which visualized stresses in materials under load. Took around a minute to render one 2d image. The magic happened, when someone suggested to do a sequence of different loads and record every frame into disc. The scientists were completely floored when they saw their output animated for the first time. They could SCRUB AROUND in the sequence. Mind you, this was around 92… I think even QuickTime wasn’t a thing by then. Those were the days.
It was the original though ... kinda what Minidisc's name was referring to, almost (as well as being a further step down from the "Compact" disc, again referring to 7 thru 12 inch media of various kinds). Though there could have been some retroactive renaming...
Thank you for finding this. Something I had never seen before. I like the comparison that the media was effectively a giant mind-disc! mind blowing when you consider we almost all have an HD recorder/editor in our pockets.
I've always had an unhealthy obsession with optical discs of any format, and this is the sort of stuff I would have obsessed about back in the day. I thoroughly enjoyed that! Thanks, and Merry Christmas! :)
Depending on application, re-recordable magneto-optical was not necessarily better than WORM (Write Once, Read Many). If you were recording something that might some day need to be a legal record, WORM was necessary because its contents could not be altered. My company sold x-ray scanning systems which would archive breast x-rays or NDT (non-destructive testing) scans of airplane wings and the like. We used Pioneer WORM recorders which were a single box, not the dual-box layout you have from Sony. Another advantage of WORM was that the platters were stable, not effected by external forces such as magnetic fields. The data was stored as tiny pits melted into the plastic. I believe the platters were rated at being able to hold their data for over 100 years.
Due to rewritable media, so much of the BBC archives are lost forever. To save money, they started reusing media that had television shows on them that were no longer being run, losing them forever.
Love the classic design language of Sonys broadcast equipment of that time, it evokes memories of my editing room at a TV-station back then! A relaxing and fun christmas to the Mrs. and you!
Greetings from Portugal (um grande abraço de Portugal ;)) I love all your videos, you have a passion about mechanics that i see as fascinating (sorry for my bad English, but schools here arent so good :D) Continue with the fantastic work!!
"Sir, one of the alien craft has tried to access our data repository." "Which one?" "The main data bank holding all of human history." "No, I mean which one of the ships?" "Oh, I see... Erm... 14."
Or in other words: "Sir... we have a problem. It appears the alien visitors have managed to connect to the internet via one of Google's wifi satellites" "Summarise it for me ... How bad is it?" "Well ... they've discovered Wikipedia" [ dramatic pause ] "... may God help us all"
My dad had two big cases of these laser discs, he had the recorder with it and everything and they were revolutionary. I've never seen one in my life and he showed me how they work.
Reminds me of the Olivetti Filenet optical discs. I worked as an entry operator for quite a few years. The discs were much thicker and made of glass. They were stored in two boxes known as OSARs (Optical Storage And Retrieval”. Each OSAR had two racks of discs and two drives, a robot arm shuffled the discs and moved them in and out of the drives. We usually referred to them as jukeboxes.
It was a good many years ago now, pretty sure they were 12 inches diameter and an inch thick. Heavy too at 5 pounds. It was impressive to watch how quickly the arms could move them around. We once had one shatter, thankfully there was a backup but it did mean a delay while a new disc was burned from tape. The shutter looks similar. I believe Olivetti were the agent in Australia, Filenet Corporation was the actual manufacturer, bought by IBM in 2006. The hardware was originally MC68000 based, the fastest was the cluster workstation with its 68020. The discs were Maxell OC321-2 type. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileNet
Dear Techmoan When I was in college during the earlier 1990's worked as a DJ and one of the different DJ gigs I had was running a Very high end karaoke system that utilize "Laser Platters" which were about 50cm across by 1.5cm in thickness and double sided, I was very impressed by it's level of what it could do as a karaoke machine and I have never seen equalled. Can you find or tell us something about this system that I should have paid more attention to when I was using it?
About time I see these in action! Working in broadcast, I have only heard of these devices. Thanks Matt for all your quality show and Tell videos! Keeps others and myself from consuming precious storage space I'm sure!
I was familiar with laserdisc already but did not know a recordable variant existed. Now that I remember the EditDroid, of course there had to be some recordable version out there! I fall precisely in that "middle" group and found this absolutely fascinating. Thank you once again for a wonderfully entertaining and informative video!
Wow! That’s massive! Disk and machine look at the heat sink fins on the back! Never knew laserdiscs existed as a recordable form. Great work getting one of them😳
Once again I learn about one of the things I didn't pay attention to in "my own time"😉 A big thank you for making 2022 very interesting and a happy and healthy new year!
@@_Piers_ I recall that one of the reasons they scrapped the system was that they realised that off the shelf software like Final Cut Pro could do what they needed. PC $4000 was a bargain. At work they were buying HP Apollo workstations that cost much more than that and which became obsolete in a year when Mentor Graphics switched to Sun Workstations.
Hopefully our new government, along with finally extricating the UK from the EU next month, will decriminalise TV licence "evasion". If you want to watch the BBC then pay for it. But it's immoral to force people to fund one company when they want to use another.
Loved the Regular Show reference! That was such a good cartoon! Merry Christmas, Mat, and a Happy New Year! Thanks for the hours of entertainment you provided!
Well, Lord Matt of Techmoan, as always - an amazing piece of educational video. Thank you for letting me be part of your little universe of tech- nutters. Merry Christmas from Poland.
It`s basically the same thing only bigger, it`s not opposite at all. The opposite would perhaps be something like a VHS cassette, rectangular shape, different materials, different tech.. Just saying. Words.. They mean stuff :p
"Look Mum, there's a tiny man holding a floppy disk!"
🤣 🤣
Oh really, I thought the man was normal sized but someone shrunk the world around him XD
You mean: "Look Mum, there's a tiny man holding a 3D-printed save icon!"
@@ItsRickysChannelSHORTS shot a growth ray at a floppy disk
I always imagine Mrs moan seeing the postman coming up the path with a heavy parcel and letting a deep sigh out as she wonders where you are going to store the next bit of tech
Tech Mona
@@lutello3012 tech monette
"Uncle techmoan, tell us the story of the laserdisc again please!"
"Well it all started back in 1969 with DISCOVISION...."
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 I'll let this slide cuz its Christmas bub.
Actually, no, it started with movies being printed on Vinyl.
Thank you for the link to my documentary about the EditDroid. I’m glad it finally found a bigger audience and the EditDroid got the credit it deserves.
Great episode! Brought back fond memories. In 1993, I worked for Metrolight Studios in Hollywood where we did the ink and paint for the Beavis and Butthead and Ren And Stimpy animated TV series for MTV. We used the Panasonic version of this machine to proof animation. We did the ink and paint on DOS PCs running our proprietary animation software and would print a frame at a time to the WORM drive which was then played back at normal speed to check for paint flashes and other errors. Final approved animation was output, again one frame at a time to an Abekas digital recorder (a fine English product!) which was then run off to one inch analog video tape synced to sound for final delivery. No film was used in the process which saved lots of money in production. The major drawback with this process is that there will never be film-quality copies available of these shows for posterity.
Cell shaded animation should work well with an ai based upscaler though.
Worm drive. Oh those tech nerds and their product naming
Sure the recorder is not from the tiny village Abbekås in the south of Sweden? :-)
@@Rainaman-
Write
Once
Read
Many
I always wonder what happened to things like the stockbooks from Hanna Barbara and Filmation. Animation was looked at as disposable entertainment for a very long time. And now that anime has FINALLY gotten large numbers of adults to admit their passion for the medium, it's too late. Much of that history (including what you worked on) has been mismanaged or stored in antique formats that simply will not be usable in 50 years.
Yeah the flashing images kinda reminded me of Fifth Element when she searches “war”, except a lot less traumatic :p
I was actually thinking of that scene from Star Trek: The Motion Picture when the column-of-light probe took over Spock's computer panel, and a fast flurry of information and pictures starting coming up on the workstation screen, and they had a version of that same conversation Techmoan gave: "Oh no, they've taken over the computer and are trying to download the whole database! Computer off! [no effect] COMPUTER OFF! [no effect]" >>Spock smashes the computer panel and the flurry of info stops...
Leeloo multipass.
Auto-wash
@@NomadOfNorad - Vgers electric beam probe attacked Spock. And took navigator Ilia with it.
Or, for something a bit more recent and derivative, Chuck.
I storyboarded that Regular Show episode, so cool to see a couple seconds of it on your channel!!! I wish it wouldve worked, but maybe we would not be ready for the consequences of that
This is why VHS is VH-Best! (so long as you use a “video stabilizer” powered by a 9 volt to defeat the Macrovision 😂)
@@MinoTheShow I wonder if this recorder has a built in full frame time base corrector? If so then it wouldn't care about macrovision. The nifty thing with DVD and macrovision is the protection isn't on the disc. There's simple a bit set in the VOB files that tells the DVD player to activate its macrovision generating chip and inject the signal into the outgoing video. Back when DVD was the hot thing there were people hacking firmware to completely ignore the state of the macrovision bit while some players had hidden menus to disable copy protection and/or region coding. IIRC New Zealand didn't allow DVD players with region code support.
could''ve played it on a pc or something
See the bit where I mention about *auto content match would prevent me from showing whether or not it worked on youtube* for more info.
Omg i loooooove regular show and we would love to have you on our show sometime please email us if you would come on lotuspodcast@yahoo.com
Thanks very much for this video on a really interesting "transitional" technology. Another use case from the broadcast industry is when Fox Sports in the US obtained the NFL broadcast rights. At the time, they had zero infrastructure which allowed them to build from the ground up. They used a system with "LaserDisc" technology for instant replay systems, which offered a lot of advantages over the tape-based systems from the "legacy networks". I remember reading about this in Broadcast World magazine at the time, back when people mocked and laughed at Fox. This technology helped them leapfrog other broadcasters to become the new standard by which sports broadcasts would be judged. (and here you thought I just made tow truck videos.)
I worked in the laser room at Fox Sports the first few seasons of football. Each game had a logging station with the laser recorder connected to a PC. Every time you push “return” a new clip would be logged. Before a snap we would hit the “return” a few times to try and get the clip to start as close to the snap as possible. We would type while the play was happening. Once the play was over we would wait to hit “return” until all the cutaways were done and the game went to the replays. Hitting ‘return’ was important because the edit station couldn’t pull the highlight until we had hit “return” to end the clip. We’d then log the replays and any good cutaways after the replays. I think there were two profile server edit stations. Whichever edit station was assigned the game would pull whatever clip(s) they wanted to make a highlight. We had to change discs every 30 minutes or so. I think there were two extra logging stations to record a game in case another one had a problem. They were also used to record when a logging station had to switch discs. It had to be coordinated since multiple games need to change record discs at roughly the same time. The computer program used to log during recording could be very buggy. I spent some time in the offseason helping to debug and I crashed it pretty often. I think the discs were erased mid-week once anything important from the previous week weren’t needed from the disc records. When we were done with a disc we stacked them above the machines. Occasionally we would put a disc back in at halftime if an editor was looking for something specific. I think we ended up with 6 discs a game. Cutting edge technology at the time. I don’t know how long they used the system, but they were still using it when Fox Sports got baseball.
@Pete Finlay bro wayyyyy too many words for a TH-cam reply. Very interesting information and very interesting topic but dude. Your dissertation is a bit lengthy even for myself. And I love historical documentation of technical systems honestly.......
@GTOger very very interesting information from the early days of the sports broadcasting renaissance.
@@TungstenCarbideProjectile you "love" historical documentation and can't be assed to read 2 paragraphs? lol
@@VandalHaven yes that is precisely what my reply was trying to communicate
@@detachedmind god damn thats a lot to keep that going. The freeze frames of LD were epic.
I can only imagine how nightmarish that would be on 3/4" or betacam
Techmoan's house is 10% living space and 90% attic. Great stuff, though.
Those sequences of images flipping through rapidly always remind me of Data on the bridge of the Enterprise searching through the library computer. I wouldn't even be surprised if they used one of these machines to make that exact effect.
I had the same thought! Data was always my favorite.
Exactly!
my same thought, Im sure that they used that technique in some way or another
As always there’s a bit more information in the *Video Description Text Box*
Techmoan thank you, and merry Christmas
As always this would be a better video if it was twice as long, worried you might run out of formats soon..
You should know by now we never read that thing before we send comments.
As instructed by the puppet. ⛄
Jolly good mate.
Now it's time for a DVD-r recorder videoe... lol.
You mentioned animation in passing but didn't emphasize how useful this device was in the day for animation and computer visual effects. It was very difficult to playback full resolution uncompressed video to record to tape. So in the early days you'd record each frame individually to something like this then it could play it back at full speed, again well before reasonable computers could do so. An example is that Foundation Imaging had one of these and it was used on Babylon 5 and other shows of that era. The other alternative was printing each frame to film, so this was a lot easier to work with.
Eventually, computers (and disk arrays) got fast enough and by the time they were working Star Trek: Voyager this was no longer needed to get D1 quality uncompressed video playback. But before that, it was a godsend. The alternatives would've been hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment or constant trips to the film lab and not being able to see playback 'till the next day.
Unfortunately, no matter whether film is used or laserdisc, an animation would consist out of synchronous pixel images rather than consecutive pixel images. The superiority of TV technology over film would not be in it.
@@Rainer67059 You misunderstand. It's just like how this Techmoan video was created on a computer with a program iMovie or Final Cut Pro. When dealing with fancy visual effects or slow computers, the computer cannot output video at 30 FPS. Back then, it could easily take minutes to hours to render a single frame. Today, we simply save the frames one at a time to a hard disk, but in the '80s and early '90s, hard drives were simply too small and too slow. Instead, they saved the video to optical disc, one frame at a time, as a buffer before being played back to tape or film for distribution.
@@straightpipediesel I complained about the content that goes onto laserdisc. Earlier in this comment section I wrote:
"Even with those burners, Laserdiscs will have ended up with pictures on them produced by film cameras, not TV cameras, won't they? I mean film cameras that film with 24fps, not interlaced, and a low-height aspect ratio ("widescreen"), totally imcompatible with NTSC and PAL."
It's for this reason I found both the CED and the Laserdisc a bad idea.
@@Rainer67059 No, that is incorrect. Just look at this video. Did Techmoan record something onto the disc from film? Think about it. Laserdisc and CED, being analog formats, are inherently interlaced.
@@straightpipediesel Yes, it's incorrect to claim that this special laserdisc shown in this video was used for capturing film. I corrected it in another comment I wrote earlier, 3 hours ago, under this video. But it is correct that CEDs and consumer Laserdisc were almost exclusively used for publishing film.
And the computer generated images TV stations put on the laserdisc shared some of the defects, film images have. Of course, they came in 4:3. That was good.
I used to work with these in the motion simulator industry. The individual frame counts were sent over a serial port to a computer that controlled the movement of a motion base. The earlier machines were based on U-Matic and SMPTE time coding. These were far more reliable...
Yeah, that's one nice thing about CAV laserdisc; one frame per rotation, freeze frame is as simple as just telling the player to not step the laser outwards one track to the next frame, and you can address each frame individually by number.
Had this come out sooner it may have done quite well
@@drewgehringer7813 Your mention of "one frame per rotation" just reminded me that I have, somewhere, a video stills camera that I was given years ago and have never tried to use or test. That would have had some similar use cases to the recordable Laserdisc, but at much lower cost, and presumably quality.
I always wondered how they made those things work
Great video as usual, but one remark: Since this is, as you mentioned correctly, a professional device, the option to connect the remote control via a wire to the main unit is likely not (just) for situations where you don't have direct line of sight but instead for environments where you do actually have line of sight but also have multiple units to avoid the wrong one or even all of them responding to button presses.
Probably means you don't have to bother with the batteries either.
I believe BBC used these to play out idents in the early nineties as they are truly broadcast quality devices - would love to see what they look like direct from disc.
Thanks for yet another amazingly rare treat that would otherwise never see the light of day! Happy Christmas Matt :)
… and this is why you don't comment before you finish watching the video!
How about saying instead...."Merry Christmas, Matt."
@@dwho19951 nah I'm good.
I actually went to the edge of my seat when the pictures started playing: it WAS just like in the movies! All that was missing was 90s trance playing in the background...
Merry Christmas to you too, Techmoan! Funny enough I for once belong to the group using these devices back in the day:
The TV station I worked for used laser disks right to the middle of the 2000's as emergency programme playback devices (ie. in case of some equipment malfunction) because it could play back an endless loop (opposed to tape drives).
I've actually seen it in action a few times: The building was new and fire alarms went off for no reason. Everyone was required to evacuate the building however - switching over to laser disk in the process :)
In the nineties, we used both the CRV and the Pioneer VDR-1000 on corporate AV shows. Though the VDR was more expensive initially, being able to rewrite more than made up for that. Quickly, we started phasing out the CRVs. One client would bring two or three hours of video clips for each week's show, and I would spend a bit of load-in time ingesting and being librarian. We had a custom Mac based program that another client had written, and allowed me to use, that would allow for easy and simple playlists. The end client never really used a script for the three day shows, and these often went way over schedule. Being able to follow a speaker who could literally bounce anywhere content wise on stage made for a very random access show. For years, we never had a rehearsal, and also almost never missed a queue. They were amazing machines. Thank you for finding one to show.
Ahhhhhh, I'd love to get an LD with that episode of Regular Show on it. I'm really glad you knew about it.
If I had the ability, I would record the format wars onto the various formats represented in the show, LD would be the hardest to do.
I worked for Sony as a freelancer at their studio in New Jersey in the late 90s. Sony used their own CRV gear, in conjunction with some custom PC software, for most of their internal sales meetings, as well as convention displays. The PC would connect to the CRV player via serial port. Artists would create "slides" on desktop computers, then the still images would be captured to frames on the CRV discs. Short videos used at the meeting or event were also saved to the same disk. During the show, the software would "cue up" the next slide or video in order as required by the presentation. Basically, high-end, analog powerpoint.
Merry Christmas! We have to get you loads of these discs so all future episodes can be recorded onto them and re-captured for that authentic 90s feel! :D
Good idea. It would be like some sort of BBC documentary. All we need, apart from the Laserdiscs, is some period appropriate music, maybe smooth jazz...
@@cleverhardy5230Commencing the smooth jazz in 3, 2, 1.
[ Authentically smooth jazz ]
The video quality is amazingly good. You can tell the dynamic range is not up to that of HD, but it’s quite sharp for SD. (A complement to the DVD player and capture hardware as well I guess.)
@@kurttownsend2227 Smooth jazz slows and fades away probably due to leaky cap... But yeah. We need at least one episode of The Moans recorded on laserdisc!!
It would be like a lost episode from the second series of _The Secret Life of Machines._
I absolutely love seeing such obscure tech. I fall in the middle group of your audience who knew of laser disc, but not the recordable varients.
I won't lie, the outro that machine recorded and then being played back made me feel like emotional, here's a machine from 1993 being used to record something modern, immortalized, no longer able to be rewrote and one of its kind, it made me feel the same emotions as when Neal Armstrong took the first step on the moon.
The recording of the outro really gives a very strong 90's feel to it. I really like it.
Merry Christmas. Thank you for a great year of videos.
Back in 2000 I worked at the California Department of Justice and those disks were part of my tasks. On a console one of the messages I had to watch for would be that machine wanting a disk. On all the disk were all of California fingerprint records, the machine could hold a lot but not all the disk. So, when I saw a message saying it wanted disk 435 I had to find it in cabinets and pull out what looked like a pizza box. Of course the machine was full so I had to eject a disk (at random usually the highest number) and then load 435 into the matching. I always wondered how that machine work and now I see, an attached computer had a fingerprint to lookup and would then go frame by frame comparing trying to make a match, when it made a match it would report back to the officer with the frame info. Very enlightening, I really enjoy watching and learning with your videos. Cheers.
Wonderful - a classic Techmoan complete with dismantling and minor repair! I wonder how you would set it to record something where you weren't sure of the exact length, eg an interview or speech.
Many thanks for keeping us so well entertained, informed and educated this year, Mat. Have a great Christmas and wonderful 2020.
It's more than likely I'm using it wrong - If I knew what I was doing I could probably skip the start and end frame step.
You'd probably sacrifice more space than you needed, but in the world of TV everything is timed to fit into a window... If the news finishes a minute over time, you simply won't see the last minute of it. So whoever is recording onto these discs probably already knows exactly how much time to allocate.
At 10:12 it looks like there's a leaky cap.
@@3rdalbum Thanks to the link provided by Techmoan about TV programmes like the news I just read that the playout of Top of the Pops (people dancing to a chart song) was done that way so the station controller could fade out whenever they liked to either lose or fill in time.
@@Techmoan
The credits are amazing in quality.
Laserdisc didn't ruin the quality.
_(I understand that the text was added afterwards. Just kidding.)_
It’s a crime that DiscoVision isn’t a household name today. It’s such a fantastic name!
I have a couple of the disks new, a few still have the shrink wrap. I heard they used them a lot in the medical industry for imaging.
Yes I’ve seen more than a few medical pages referencing their use - things like cancer screening etc.
@@Techmoan medical records archiving as well
@@SusanPDavisWhat is your purpose?
@Brad Viviviyal correct The LVM-3AA0 discs were not laser disc standard compliant and qualified as WORM drives. ONLY ODC made RLV discs that were Laserdisc standard compliant I'm assuming Gilbert Pfaff was commenting about CRV Discs (LVM-3AA0) since that' s what the video is about.
A museum in Québec city used to have a LD recorder like the one you've shown and a bunch of players (LVA-7000?) of the same format. They used it to produced a couple of dozens of the same disc, each with small 20 to 60 seconds video excerpts on them. The same couple of dozens disc played on … a couple of dozen LD players linked to monitor installed at various booths on the exhibition hall floor. The player did have a function for repeating of a certain program or were linked to a button on the display that the visitors would press to start the program linked to that specific part of the exhibit.
Thanks for showing us all theses equipment for yesteryear.
Thank you, Mr. Moan for a wholly unanticipated Christmas resolution. A television station called Video Jukebox operated on a LPTV in my town in 1992. It was a national service intended for cable where folks would call a 1-900 number, select a three digit code and within 10-15 minutes their song would appear. As a frustrated college student fascinated with all things televisual, I never knew just how that worked with the technology of the day. In fact, it was one of those things I would attempt to Google every few years not knowing for what I was searching.
Thank you. Today I know.
The channel is also called "The Box", I have that channel locally back in the 90's as well.
More tv ch 32 down in Tampa back in 1980s and early 90s played music videos 24/7.I miss those days. Does anyone remember the Q zoo in the morning,simalcast with Q105 FM every morning so you could listen to your favorite music video on radio while going to work.
Reminded I have a whole playlist of "The Box" to check out!
th-cam.com/play/PLTnbwiCw-mMREsjS6pn_5kXGehIc_VlSz.html
@TC Fenstermaker I always assumed the discs got dirty pretty easily in those machines and they never clean them too much.
@@ChristopherSobieniak Indianapolis used to broadcast the box over the air back in the 90's. I visited a friend and that's all he ever had on his TV
There's a very retro charm to the "downgraded" outro, I like it a lot!
I was honestly expecting the BBC ident at the end.
I'm a man in the middle and I enjoy your well made videos of tech gone-by. Boy, did gear look much better then - I think the introduction of blue LEDs started the downfall of design... Merry Christmas to you, the missis, the puppets and all your fans!
interesting fact - all LED lightbulbs are actually blue, with a coating that turns the light "white". I can't imagine the sheer quantity of blue LEDs that exist in the world today.
@@circattle And I cannot stand that type of light, so I stockpiled good ol' incandescent lightbulbs to last me a century as soon as the EU made them illegal. Fight the system! ;)
@@dagobertkrikelin1587 The EU has even started to phase out the halogen capsule bulbs now which is ridiculous for those of us with dimmer switches.
@@circattle I don't think the "hue" type bulbs that have variable color temp are phosphor LEDs. They have R/G/B primary LEDs and vary output from them. The light from them is pretty horrible though.
Agreed about blue LED -- I miss when things had red and amber LED, or even green. Why does nobody who builds consumer electronics these days realize that the rainbow has more colors than just blue?
I've handled one of those red RLV discs. My college had one - it contained an educational programme about how analog video works. No idea where the disc went, but it was played back in a standard LD player they had in a rack.
One has to wonder if your recording in the last to ever be made on this format. Wonderful to see this sort of equipment documented and operating.
Quite the opposite. Every format presented by techmoan always leads to an explosion in buys and uses :D
@@gayusschwulius8490everyone is rushing to buy crvdisc
I used one of these to record animation in the early Nineties: input was a Targa-card and the recorder was controlled via RS-422 serial. I purchased this device to spare the tape drives on my Sony D2 machines. The single-frame recording was less expensive than having the D2 belts tweaked after a lengthy render.
Great memories. Yep I am in the group that actually shot and edited educational video programs that were put onto laser video disc. Sourced on BetaCam SP and edited onto 1" Analog video tape. Tedious editing work because of the menus and single frames you created, but cutting edge at its time and paved the way for CD-ROM and DVD later. We sent our discs off to get created. Thanks for sharing this trip down memory lane for me.
These machines were also used in the production of animations and special effects for the Babalon 5 series. When the series premiered the graphics and animations where produced on Commodore Amiga 2500's with Video Toaster hardware, with some frames taking 4-6 hours to render on the Amiga. At first special "annimation" versions 0f the standard Sony BVH-3000 series VTRS where tried for the recording of the rendered frames but they were too expensive and needed some manual tending during the recording process. The VTR's where replaced by Sony CRV machines which were controlled by custom software in the Amiga through the Amiga's GPIO port and the process became automated, it was also extended to later animation systems under Mac and DEC Alpha computers.
“Darling, find our copy of Muppet Christmas Carol and inject the disc, please.” - me, later.
Does this mean we eject blood at blood draws?
Spooky! I was watching AMCC when the notification for this vid came up....
subdued reader Yes, and when we eat we injeculate! English is fun, kids! ;)
Surely if you've already injected it before, then you are really rejecting it.
@@subduedreader5627 No, if you pull something out it's called "extracting", if something pushes it out it's an eject. Which conversely would mean there's also an "intract" which is what this machine effectively is doing, but I've never seen that word being used.
14:25 Beautiful.... absolutely beautiful... 😌
That BBC ident, the Virtual Globe, is one of the best idents ever. And this is coming from someone born in 2002.
You looked so small holding that disc caddy! 🤣😂
“Honey, I Shrunk The Techmoan!”
Regarding the long empty space in the beginning.Word clock and black burst time code generally starts at 1000. My protools hardware won't properly lock to word clock using Smpte unless the start is at least 1000. It gives all the hardware a chance to be in que with the master clock source. This ensure a solid sync among everything.
Outstanding work. At this point I feel like Techmoan can genuinely call himself a historian. So obscure, yet so interesting and absolutely new to most people.
I can say this IS a real christmas gift to me. Not only you can show a machine but also a blank disc and record it before my eyes !
Never thought i would ever see that in my life !
So a BIG THANK YOU for this one !
Some of those museum photos are quite interesting - those old firearms that flashed by briefly especially.
Who down-votes videos on this channel? Who could possibly be so idiotic to actively dislike such excellent, informative, interesting, well-researched content? A moron, that's who.
None of your business, they aren’t bothering you 😀 👍
Who complain about down-votes videos on this channel. A Moran that's who.
If only TH-cam displayed the length of a video before watching it. 🤔
Just when I start to think “What else can he possibly come up with???” Then comes another brilliant Techmoan video educating me yet again about another electronic wonder I had no idea existed! Your channel is by far my favorite on TH-cam! Merry Christmas and many thanks for providing us with continued awesome interesting content. All the best to you and your family this holiday season! Cheers!
I have used this in TV Broadcast Graphics department back in 1993. We used to record frame by frame 3D Renders using this recorder and a Targa Video Card from a 486 PC. The card could remotely control the recorder via a serial cable. This was useful because we could avoid the wear of Betacams while recording sequences frame by frame.
I believe Thames played their station ident out from laserdisc in the 1980s, and I'd imagine they were not alone - it freed up a VTR (or the earlier telecine) from being effectively dedicated to playout of such content. I'm not sure, but I think Tyne Tees had something similar to this in the early '90s as well (they were certainly playing out idents from some sort of disc-based system).
And wasn't this technology used by some TV centres as a means of showing optics/'slides' for a while?
The flashing images remind me of Leeloo learning of human history in the 5th element
Makes me wonder how many of those discs are stashed away in the BBC archives gathering dust, filled with all kinds of footage that maybe was one-off and never seen again... :)
Knowing the BBC, they probably decided the discs were taking up too much space and had them all burned years ago. Probably half of them were the only copies of whatever was on the disc, as well.
if they'd make a public offer for anyone to come pick up their trash for free they'd probably find that it'd all be collected by someone. problem solved.
@@SamuliTuomola_stt the problem with that is they would not want to have their footage in the hands of just anyone maybe due to copyright reasons.
I found a ton of disc containing factual information and stories. What should I do, Guv?
BBC: *BURN THEM!!!!*
@@LatitudeSky That's what probably happened to Doctor Who.
I really like the CRV version of the credits images. Gives an awesome retro soft / slightly interlaced look. Nice that you got something out of it that you could keep!
Thank you so much! I was looking for a video of a working CRV machine for many years now, I knew they did exist and what they were used for, but I have never have seen one in operation. I wish you merry christmas too, thank you for many hours of entertainment this year.
I’m 16 and it’s always great to watch your videos. Always learning new stuff from you about older interesting stuff. Glad I found your channel a year or months ago.
Get off the internet kid.
Space_Cadet why
I have a friend who actually has some kind of laserdisc burner he was telling me how one time he spent time learning to use it. He still has all the equipment. I am hopeful to one day see this in action.
I created 3D computer graphics back in the mid-90's with a guy who used one of these (or a close successor) and iirc we rendered individual frames from a PC to the CRV for 'broadcast quality' (sic) results. The price of the unit and discs were astronomical though, things have certainly come a long way... thanks for another fascinating video Matt and merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
HE DID IT! He actually did it! He mentioned a recordeable LaserDisc before but now he made a full video about it in action!
I've been following your channel for a long time now. But as a broadcast technician, a fan of vintage gear and a huge fan of Regular Show, i must say this episode is ma favorite! Awesome job and very informative as always. Cheers from Switzerland
Interesting as heck. I love the look of old Sony professional gear.
I've been a LaserDisc for decades and had never heard of this. I love your episodes, but this one in particular was full of great info about something I had zero knowledge. Thanks so much! Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to you and yours!
If this isn't a Christmas special, I don't know what is.
I have actually seen and used these. When I was younger a friend worked at a motion ride. It was space shuttle looking box that could hold maybe a dozen people. It was on hydraulic rams to move it around in sync with the video. So it felt like you were moving. It had 3 different videos you would watch as you bounced around inside. The code for the movement was on a standard 3.5 floppy. The video ran on one of these. I only knew a little about computers then but I was fascinated at the huge floppy. Thanks for mentally bringing me back there and now I finally know what the giant floppy was
a ld rom or recorder is featured in James bond - licence to Kill. Curiosly James puts a CD sized disc in it.
klaus killski - Oh I wondered what that thing in the film was! Thank you.
That was simply a CD burner of the time. Same problem. WORM.
That was apparently an LV-ROM player, which was a special laserdisc format developed for use with the BBC Advanced Interactive Video computer, according to this site:
www.beebmaster.co.uk/Domesday/VP415.html
Also IMDb states that it couldn't write on CD, so that was a small technical mistake in the movie ( www.imdb.com/title/tt0097742/goofs )
MetalTrabant I helped contribute a page to that project. It was a single “Mode 7” page (in BBC Computer terminology) about the village of Wickenby in Lincolnshire. A lifetime ago.
@@MetalTrabant I dunno, at what point do fiction and "mistake" intersect here? It's supposed to be super fancy doesn't-actually-exist secret agent tech. You just need a prop that looks sufficiently sciencey and that very few people will be intimately familiar with. One of those newfangled Laserdisc players, but with the implication that it's able not only to record, but to record onto a more pocketable, equally shiny, and equally cutting edge Compact Disc? That'll do the trick. And it doesn't need to actually do anything, thanks to the Magic Of Cinema, so long as the player is designed to also be CD compatible so it won't explode or jam when you insert the disc. Just point a camera at the thing, have Moore insert the CD in the tray as if he knows what he's doing, key a few seconds of some suitable flash-frame "it's got into the database!" computery / microfilmy stuff onto the attached monitor in post, then have him eject and pocket the disc again. Done.
I mean ... there's no way even the craziest dragstrip car could successfully chase down a pair of 750cc scrambler bikes around the hills of the LA suburbs. But The Fast And The Furious made it happen. It wasn't so much as mistake as a deliberately fanciful piece of dramatic fiction. And Omega don't actually make watches with built-in high powered laser cutters, electromagnets strong enough to hold a man off the ground, or steel filament grappling wires...
I witnessed a seller show at a university, where the video outfitter brought in just such a machine. They took screenshots of finite element simulations which visualized stresses in materials under load. Took around a minute to render one 2d image. The magic happened, when someone suggested to do a sequence of different loads and record every frame into disc. The scientists were completely floored when they saw their output animated for the first time. They could SCRUB AROUND in the sequence. Mind you, this was around 92… I think even QuickTime wasn’t a thing by then. Those were the days.
Looks like a giant Minidisc, they could have called it Megadisc :P
looks like a giant CD caddy
Megadeth on Megadisc.
It was the original though ... kinda what Minidisc's name was referring to, almost (as well as being a further step down from the "Compact" disc, again referring to 7 thru 12 inch media of various kinds). Though there could have been some retroactive renaming...
@@markpenrice6253 The original floppy disc was 8". Then the 5.25" mini floppy disc was followed by the 3.5" micro floppy.
they should have called it disc
As someone who works on TV, loves old tech and is a huge fan of the channel, thank you! Best video I've seen this year :)
Thank you for finding this. Something I had never seen before. I like the comparison that the media was effectively a giant mind-disc! mind blowing when you consider we almost all have an HD recorder/editor in our pockets.
I've always had an unhealthy obsession with optical discs of any format, and this is the sort of stuff I would have obsessed about back in the day. I thoroughly enjoyed that! Thanks, and Merry Christmas! :)
Depending on application, re-recordable magneto-optical was not necessarily better than WORM (Write Once, Read Many). If you were recording something that might some day need to be a legal record, WORM was necessary because its contents could not be altered. My company sold x-ray scanning systems which would archive breast x-rays or NDT (non-destructive testing) scans of airplane wings and the like. We used Pioneer WORM recorders which were a single box, not the dual-box layout you have from Sony.
Another advantage of WORM was that the platters were stable, not effected by external forces such as magnetic fields. The data was stored as tiny pits melted into the plastic. I believe the platters were rated at being able to hold their data for over 100 years.
Due to rewritable media, so much of the BBC archives are lost forever. To save money, they started reusing media that had television shows on them that were no longer being run, losing them forever.
The rewritable ones were magneto-optical however, which is also very stable since you need to heat them up a lot to have them lose charge.
Love the classic design language of Sonys broadcast equipment of that time, it evokes memories of my editing room at a TV-station back then! A relaxing and fun christmas to the Mrs. and you!
They look like a bigger Magneto optical disk Sony EDM-1300 I have lying around. Nice catch. Happy holidays!
lemn8 Exactly, like the 5 1/4 MOD we used to have as a backup disk in our telephone exchange.
Greetings from Portugal (um grande abraço de Portugal ;))
I love all your videos, you have a passion about mechanics that i see as fascinating (sorry for my bad English, but schools here arent so good :D)
Continue with the fantastic work!!
I just want one of those cassettes to hang on my wall. I have no clue why I've never wanted to do something like this before.
Wow! Very impressive, how much hard work you put into the making of this video!! Well done. Thank you, and Happy Christmas.
"Sir, one of the alien craft has tried to access our data repository."
"Which one?"
"The main data bank holding all of human history."
"No, I mean which one of the ships?"
"Oh, I see... Erm... 14."
Or in other words: "Sir... we have a problem. It appears the alien visitors have managed to connect to the internet via one of Google's wifi satellites"
"Summarise it for me ... How bad is it?"
"Well ... they've discovered Wikipedia"
[ dramatic pause ]
"... may God help us all"
My dad had two big cases of these laser discs, he had the recorder with it and everything and they were revolutionary. I've never seen one in my life and he showed me how they work.
I'm in 'this' group:
Ohhhhh, I didn't know there was a Laser Disc recorder.
Me too :-)
I’d heard of it, but never thought I’d see one.
Reminds me of the Olivetti Filenet optical discs. I worked as an entry operator for quite a few years. The discs were much thicker and made of glass. They were stored in two boxes known as OSARs (Optical Storage And Retrieval”. Each OSAR had two racks of discs and two drives, a robot arm shuffled the discs and moved them in and out of the drives. We usually referred to them as jukeboxes.
Were they the same size? That'd be quite a sight to see.
It was a good many years ago now, pretty sure they were 12 inches diameter and an inch thick. Heavy too at 5 pounds. It was impressive to watch how quickly the arms could move them around. We once had one shatter, thankfully there was a backup but it did mean a delay while a new disc was burned from tape. The shutter looks similar. I believe Olivetti were the agent in Australia, Filenet Corporation was the actual manufacturer, bought by IBM in 2006. The hardware was originally MC68000 based, the fastest was the cluster workstation with its 68020. The discs were Maxell OC321-2 type. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FileNet
Dear Techmoan
When I was in college during the earlier 1990's worked as a DJ and one of the different DJ gigs I had was running a Very high end karaoke system that utilize "Laser Platters" which were about 50cm across by 1.5cm in thickness and double sided, I was very impressed by it's level of what it could do as a karaoke machine and I have never seen equalled. Can you find or tell us something about this system that I should have paid more attention to when I was using it?
About time I see these in action! Working in broadcast, I have only heard of these devices. Thanks Matt for all your quality show and Tell videos! Keeps others and myself from consuming precious storage space I'm sure!
Ah the 3.5" floppy, my wife knows all too well about this.
/s
My 5 1/4 doesnt fare much better :-)
ha ha ha never heard that one before how creative
Yall are funny.
I was familiar with laserdisc already but did not know a recordable variant existed. Now that I remember the EditDroid, of course there had to be some recordable version out there! I fall precisely in that "middle" group and found this absolutely fascinating. Thank you once again for a wonderfully entertaining and informative video!
I think the museum just gave away an exhibit!
One of your best videos ever. You truly are an amazing storyteller. Thank you for this magical present.
Looks like a giant DVD-RAM disc
Wow! That’s massive! Disk and machine look at the heat sink fins on the back! Never knew laserdiscs existed as a recordable form. Great work getting one of them😳
"...yes that's the opposite of 'eject'." Just one of those things I'm glad I now know, and my wife will soon wish I did not know.
Once again I learn about one of the things I didn't pay attention to in "my own time"😉 A big thank you for making 2022 very interesting and a happy and healthy new year!
The cost is bloody phenomenal. When you consider how fast things advanced between 1990 and now. No wonder the bbc costs a fortune to fund 😬
Very cheap compared to what they wasted trying to develop a replacement for Video Tape www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-26963723
Like early X86 perso computers being not so cheap. My 486 in '90 was 4000$. Crazy.
@@_Piers_ I recall that one of the reasons they scrapped the system was that they realised that off the shelf software like Final Cut Pro could do what they needed.
PC $4000 was a bargain. At work they were buying HP Apollo workstations that cost much more than that and which became obsolete in a year when Mentor Graphics switched to Sun Workstations.
Hopefully our new government, along with finally extricating the UK from the EU next month, will decriminalise TV licence "evasion". If you want to watch the BBC then pay for it. But it's immoral to force people to fund one company when they want to use another.
James Smith nice idea but at least they’re regulated on bias to a point. When all we have is ITV and FOX then we’re all effed.
Loved the Regular Show reference! That was such a good cartoon! Merry Christmas, Mat, and a Happy New Year! Thanks for the hours of entertainment you provided!
Cheapest one I can find is now $500. Damn the Techmoan effect!
As always you have found the right level of coverage for people like myself. Merry Christmas and Happy New year!
4:40 this is not a disk...
THIS is a disk!
It's a knife.
Well, Lord Matt of Techmoan, as always - an amazing piece of educational video. Thank you for letting me be part of your little universe of tech- nutters. Merry Christmas from Poland.
The youtuber of 2019
I love this channel. No matter the subject/content it's always fascinating and entertaining. Keep up the fantastic work!!!
part of the sci-fi reference is the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project. very good movie, btw.
I downloaded it a few years ago based on recommendations and it is indeed awesome!
Going to look for this right now..ta:)
you sir, are a genius! thank you!
@Shank Adams , I looked on TH-cam... Can only see a poor quality one..any clues my friend?;)
@Shank Adams pirate bay saved the day ;)
Been here sincerely since 39k
Push for 1 million so proud of you so glad your channel exist
Your contend is my absolute favorite. 🤘🤘🤘🤘
We’ve found the answer to the question “what is the opposite of a minidisc?”.
Sony Maxidisc!
@@dashcamandy2242 LazyDisc!
MegaDisc!
A wumbo disc
It`s basically the same thing only bigger, it`s not opposite at all.
The opposite would perhaps be something like a VHS cassette, rectangular shape, different materials, different tech..
Just saying.
Words.. They mean stuff :p
This video answered questions I never knew I'd asked! The best sort of TH-cam content.