You know a video is great when after 84 minutes of runtime, you feel like you spent 5 minutes watching, and you want more. Congrats man for your great work.
I also love theoretical Gadget Dad. He's the kind of geek we nerds wish we had the confidence to be. Unabashedly displaying his love of weird tech in public while making people feel incredibly awkward about things that are given out of enthusiasm for the tech and good will that they know for a fact they will never use, but will feel indescribable guilt for tossing. What a legend.
Out of the blue, my coworker told me today he was looking for a DVD camcorder. I told him modern ones record onto SD cards, but he said he wanted something he could play on his TV as soon as he is done recording. I always thought of DVD camcorders as a kludge, but I guess there really was consumer demand for them after all?
@@mndlessdrwer One of the first memory card based camcorders I bought recorded its video to a proprietary format that couldn't be played on anything, not even on VLC media player. The video files had to be run through a program that came with it to convert them to MP4, or I had to physically connect the camcorder to my TV through the HDMI port and play videos that way. Thankfully I now have a camcorder that records to a universally compatible format.
@@misium TV have USB ports, to which you can connect a card reader. The problem with Smart TV, they use a SoC very similar to those in smartphones, running a version of Android OS. Under Android, the video codec is not executed from the software, but must be embedded into the SoC, which uses a dedicated hardware core (an accelerator) to decode the video stream from the file on the memory card. Cheap TVs with cheap SoC can only execute few video codecs (note: the codec used, is independent from the file extension). Only pricey TVs can decode all video formats. If you have one of those 50 inches $250 TVs, your best bet is to place a laptop with VLC connected to the TV to play ALL video files. The problem as I said - is the cheap TV utilise a $5 SoC, while an 888-style SoC, similar to those installed in flagship phones and able to decode everything, costs $50 at the factory door.
My father didn't quite live the blu-ray camera fantasy, but he did edit footage of my elementary school Christmas concerts with a video toaster, and burn them to DVDs which were then sold by the school.
For some reason I really love the composition in the scene where you’re watching yourself on the TV off the recorded DVD. The hat in the foreground makes the whole scene.
My Grandpa worked for IBM and had a PS/2 system at home. The first CD-ROM with SCSI, all these disc caddies and jewel cases. I remember being so proud when I was allowed to change the discs in the caddy myself. Needed to play F-15 Strike Eagle. I learned to hack on that system, changing random letters in the save files to give myself promoted ranks and new missions. Ah, disc caddies.
Circa 1994 my elementary school computer lab had CDROM drives that used caddies. The CD software we had access to was shared amongst the lab, so using caddies made sense.
There's actually a reason why PFDs has the caddy/cartridge and BluRays doesn't: the coating that allows the bluray disc to even survive at all wasn't invented yet when PFDs was released. For CDs, the layer that holds the data is a coating that is just below the label. that's why early CDs rot so easily; when the label becomes damaged or wasn't a perfect hermetic seal, air gets in and rots things. On DVDs, they sandwiched the data layer in between two half thickness polycarbonate discs. They can't do that on blurays because the disc itself was deemed too optically imperfect to cram 23 gigs of data onto, so they made the bottom layer 0.1mm thick. as opposed to a cool 0.6mm on DVDs. This means that light scratches could penetrate the layer, thus ruining the disc. Thus PFDs came in caddies. And then when TDK figured out a scratch resistant "hard coating" they didn't need a caddy anymore and the hard coating was written into the bluray standard and the rest is history.
that's REMARKABLE. thank you for this info, I wish I'd had it. I actually forgot to include a snip from the blu-ray spec that I'd found that outright stated that the caddy probably would not survive into the released spec, but this clarifies *why*.
@@CathodeRayDude It might be a good idea to pin this comment - it's really relevant to the blu-ray talk at the end and might get buried in the future otherwise.
The PDW camcorder, I remember those, as use to service those when they were beat out on the field. Yep you beat me to explaining the reason for the caddies for the PFD disc's in a nutshell. They actually had quad layer did that could store up to 128gb. Never made it to consumer market as prohibitively expensive at the time as higher quality components and coating was required to eliminate caddy for reason you stated ready. I actually still have the PDW-F30 desktop Recorder. Thank God for SxS cards which replace the Panasonic P2 cards. Hitachi did make a couple Blu-ray consumer camcorders but wasn't successful as SD and HDD camcorders took over by then.
@@CathodeRayDude A little bit offtopic, but it just fun to notice, that trough out the history many improved formats of different media had eventually envolved, but they never had a chance to shine, because there were already another format on the way... And pretty much till recent 10 years, all the media that came out was unfinished in some way, and exacly by the time manufacturers finally figured out how to make some media format reliable - its already been too late so ironical and sad in some sence By the way, do u remember DataPlay? It was just nuts - 500Mb on 32mm disk, for such density it`s like 25Gb for 120mm disk in 2001, not to mention that they were going to launch 7Gb version of this 32mm disk later, that translates to at least 300Gb for 120mm disk, and all this for single layer (but double side)
HD-DVD has the data layer at the same depth as DVD, and takes a hit in capacity as a result. That was the main physical difference between the two formats, the wavelength of the laser was the same.
"They knew what was coming and they didn't want to wait. And who could blame them?" Hidden sci-fi manifesto right there. The last 2 minutes of this video are pure gold.
I can kind of see it too. A bunch of other parents being legit stoked to have the footage, but literally never watching it and eventually throwing the disc away 20 years later.
From what I recall, the reason they tried to make consumer blu-rays use caddy's was because at the time they didn't have the fancy scratch resistant coating that blu-ray would end up with.
Fun fact: The reason Blu-Rays even need the special scratch-resistant coating is because the data is so close to the surface of the disc. HD-DVD has the data at the same depth as DVD, but this comes with a hit on capacity (which is why HD-DVD has less capacity than Blu-Ray despite using the same wavelength laser as Blu-Ray).
Oh! the joys of DVD finalization! At a previous employer, we actually ended up "bundling" our DVD camcorders with a rolling cart containing two DVD-DL burners. The full-size burners could finalize a disc in ~10 seconds, rather than the 20 minutes of the internal mini DVD drive. And of course we needed two burners to allow for continuous operation ;)
Unfortunately, finalization is necessary since formats such as Audio CD and DVD-Video only allow for one table-of-contents (and you can only create that TOC once, and can't add data afterwards). Recorders workaround the TOC problem by writing recording info in a special area of the disc (called the Program Memory Area) and then creating the TOC when you press "finalize". What's infuriating is the spec could've allowed for multisession discs (with multiple TOCs) but doesn't.
I mean, I get why Audio CD doesn't allow it, since it wasn't a thing back then, but multisession was a thing long before DVD-Video existed (first defined in 1990), so there was no reason for the DVD-Video spec to not have it. You could even replace files (such as the DVD menu) with multisession! It was left out because of the bonehead assumption DVD-Video would always be "authored", never recorded.
Yay bluray soccer dad. Living his best life. On VCD: In the early 00s I had a really cheap DVD player that I got because it was hackable to remove region blocking (which I never needed) but incidentally supported VCDs. I burned a ton of anime episodes to CDRs in that format, and they actually looked okay. Oddly, it would only play certain CDRs, and there was never any logic to which ones it could read; I had the most success with some Art Logic white-label rebrands, but even they didn't know what the original disc was or why it worked.
I recognize that footage of recording and editing Internet video in 2001. :-) And Sony attempted to bridge the gap with Cassette Memory, a microchip in MiniDV and MicroMV tapes which would store the times, thumbnails, and titles of each scene on the tape, allowing (somewhat) more rapid access to your footage. And with DV's time code, professional editing workstations could play back clips from the tape in a programmed order, and with frame-accurate timing, considerably easing the burden of editing video in the era before computer-based non-linear editing.
It's a shame this wasn't used more often. Chip on MiniDV tapes could have been great like for storing camera profiles for cameras like the Pansonic DVX100/A/B. But at least you could save that as DataDump on a normal Mini DV tape. And as someone who worked with Linear Editing on tape machines (Betacam SP, Digibeta, HD-CAM, HD-CAM SR and DV Cam) i really learned to appreciate the existence of Timecode back then for that :P It's awesome to do insert cuts frame & timecode correct. Something i could only dream of when editing my own videos on a consumer VHS deck. (edit: removed typos)
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 I remember buying the tapes but then realized that they literally didn't do anything in my Panasonic consumer device even though it had the little recording pins for it it. doesn't seem like it actually did anything
@@MickeyMishra Not many cameras used that anyway. It's like Time- & Date stamp on MiniDisc recordings that was saved when you had a MD recorder / walkman who supported that. Most MD decks didn't have it. Same with 20bit or 24bit ATRAC encoding. It was possible but not every MD device could do that. But they all could downsample 20 or 24bit recordings to normal 16bit playback. So the recording was always made sure to be compatible. That goes for normal recordings. Not talking about NetMD.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 wait are you telling me that minidisc did 24-bit recordings? I never knew that! that's something I'm going to have to look into and honestly it's way past minidiscs prime and I've already decided to just go ahead and keep my collection of CDs and of course music on their various hard drives. I literally just use Spotify for just about everything these days and a micro USB for anything that I need to do serious testing or listening.. I remember buying the so-called 20 bit CDs HDCD's for just the reason that my computer would play back the files with the hdcd logo/ unfortunately I really didn't hear very much more Fidelity but again I didn't have the equipment to really do so at the time either even my headphones couldn't tell the difference between the two recordings. it took me I think about another 10 to 15 years to finally get a system that was capable of actually providing that sort of resolution so I could actually hear it. but the noise floor and everything that's required in order to hear at that bit depth and the recording as well is pretty rare for me where I can on every single instance audibly pick out the differences. I used to think there was something wrong with my ears but then I became very thankful that there wasn't. I'll see if I can try to look around for a 24 bit player because that really would be kind of interesting to see how that would work
@@MickeyMishra yes ATRAC wasn't restricted to 16 bit only but also allowed 20 and 24 bit resolution. It was possible but not many manufacturers used that potential. NetMD and HiMD didn't have that anymore i think. So if you recorded HiMD with lossless audio it was PCM 44,1khz 16bit. Just like CD and basically what normal MD could have been since the beginning. If you wanna try MD with higher resolution, you may look for a stationary MD Deck by Sony or a portable Sharp MD walkman.
"I could probably mix this in with my regular footage and you wouldn't notice. In fact, I did." A plot twist worthy of the twilight zone. Or maybe a Saw movie, with that montage.
RE the finalization question... Does the camcorder create and save the table of contents data off disc? I'd be curious to know if it is possible to film 5 mins on a DVD cam, take the disc out w/o finalizing and put it in a different camcorder to play that clip and continue filming on the same disc.
I was a nerd in the TV lab of my high school back in 1994, starting on prosumer equipment on the SVHS format. Once I hit my senior year in 98, we got a mini DV camcorder that had inputs for our editing devices, but they wouldn't allow us to use them because it might damage the mechanism in the camera. I loved the format, though. It was so crisp and clear compared to SVHS. Then, we became the first school in the area to have Avid video editing software and it was amazing! With the use of my titling box, I was able to produce some pretty nice stuff back then. I never got into DVD camcorders, but I definitely used DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and CD-RW disks. I never knew DVD RAM existed until much later. You got me to watch a video about a pretty tame topic for 1½ hours. Well done.
Hello, I am your friendly AVID CSR (Customer Support Representative ) of the time. But why would you have to use a titling box, when you already had theTitle Tool?
The one missing link between here and modern camcorders is hard disk camcorders. I remember really wanting one back in the day, because _woah 80 gigs of standard definition video_
I saw one at the mall and went "80 gigs? Shit! That's half the space of my hard drive in a camcorder!" To be fair, I was using a pretty old laptop at the time.
59:24 Going by the Japanese Wikipedia Entry, Hitachi's "Wooo" branding is supposed to stand for the "Unconscious expression of surprise when seeing something beautiful" (I presume what you more commonly would write as 'Woah' in English); And/or is supposed to stand for the "Wo~" from the English words "Wonder", "World standard" and "Worthwhile" with I guess the three "o"s for the fact that it's three words... Though there unfortunately is no source given for this. It was primarily a brand name for plasma televisions, but also was applied to digital camcorders and DVD recorders. 【Woooに込められた意味は、美に対する無意識的な感嘆の発声としての「ウー」と驚きがある、世界の新しい基準である、高い価値があるという意味の英単語の「Wonder」「World standard」「Worthwhile」の3つの‘Wo～’という2つの意味から成る造語で、2001年8月からスタートした。 】 - ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooo
Dude, I distinctly remember my local news station had cameras with dvd drives with the clear disk tray. I remember seeing the dvd logo on the disk they put in it because it was before my family got a DVD player and I remember my young self finding it really cool. There is no way you made up that memory, I remember the same exact thing.
those video cd things is how like, i watched vast majority of legal media as a teenager in poland, bc like every magazine had like a movie attached with it as a freebie, and like, i haven't been to A Store in a while but I'm absolutely convinced some paper trash aimed at senior demographics still do it, i had to sit down my mom and explain that the format sucks ass and i can just download a bd rip of anything she wants
I remember as a kid we had a camcorder with this format and the tiny RW discs and after we stopped using the camcorder, I used the discs to transfer all sorts of data back and forth between computers and locations and such since at the time, USB sticks were to expensive (and my iMac g3 only had limited USB slots) but DVD burners were fairly common!
I remember that too. Majority of magazines aimed at women had these movies and all of them had these split into 2 or more discs. Titanic was spilt into 3 if memory serves me well I still don't know why. Like, price difference wasn't probably that great and to play VCD you still have to had a DVD player.
Mini CD formats where used for several applications such as CD music singles, CD business cards/bootable business card (these where mini CD’s with semi square format that works in any tray loading CD-rom optical drive), computer Hardware driver software distribution (as a replacement fir floppy driver discs). There was also miniDVD discs which where used for video singles.
As someone who grew up fascinated by video cameras and is still keen to learn about them, thank you for sharing with your incredible passion (& great scriptwriting skills) for this!
The process of finalizing discs does remind me a bit of rewinding film. Including never developing some because "I can't just waste those three pictures"
This whole video was fascinating, I'm so glad I watched the whole thing! I love how you admit to what you don't know, speculate but say that's what you're doing, and correct yourself if you've gotten details wrong in the past. These are very rare, valuable traits!
Finalizing creates a standards compliant index. Before finalization, no doubt the camcorders are using a proprietary index which only the camera supports. The un-finalize must be creating supplemental indexes maybe using some sort of no-op sleds on the DVD menus they create which fill from the back with additional skip pointers. There were a number of 'packet writing' formats that supported modifications without finalizing but they were late to the format and not baked into the original standards I don't believe; they needed proprietary 'drivers' to use but eventually windows supported some of these natively. Finalizing a file index takes a lot less time than building out a DVD thumbnail menu which is probably what it's taking all that time to do. Maybe It's baking in DVD-standards-compliant video headers into what were up until that point were naked mpeg streams plus the proprietary index held elsewhere.
This is exactly what i was thinking. Either that or the camera erases the last X tracks from the RW disc (enough to clobber the final index) and then rewrites the tail end of what was there and a new index.
Loved the simulated Video CD demonstration. I bought a Philips CD-I along with the optional Video CD Decoder Cart. I had the blurriest commercially available copies of Star Trek VI, Forrest Gump, Silence of the Lambs, and Naked Gun. The only thing that would have made your demo even better would have been to add some ABYSMAL macroblocking artifacts. I swear when scenes changed or the action ramped up, it was just a sea of giant blurry blocks floating across the screen. Oh the memories!
This, again. Philips wanted VCD players to be able to use existing "1x" read mechanisms from Audio CD players, so they capped the bitrate to 1376 kbps of constant bitrate (CBR) inclusive of audio (224kbps). This meant that you couldn't give complex scenes more bitrate, every second was capped at 1152kbps bitrate (this also meant the 80min runtime was the runtime you always got, not a theoretical maximum).
I think this channel could make any subject interesting. 90mins on a subject I have little interest but still highly enjoyable. If this channel doesn't end up with half million subscriber eventually then TH-cam truly has lost its way.
I was at a thrift store looking for blank CDs for cheap and they had a case of 100 CDs for 10 dollars and 5 CD-RWs for 10 dollars. I went with the CD-RWs and it turns out my drive couldn't read them. And when I went back, the 100 CDs were gone. Which is why I use cassette tapes
At the end of the video (1:23:42) you show the Rave:MP, a music player that uses clik disks. I bought one of them off of eBay about a year ago. It's a fun little novelty. The biggest flaw with it, IMO, is that it buffers data and spins the drive down just to spin it back up again after 20-30 seconds to buffer some more; this doesn't sound like a big deal, but the drive spins pretty fast which makes a fairly quiet, but somehow also really obnoxious, high pitched whirring sound while spinning. If the drive were always spinning, the your brain would just fade the droning into the background after a while, but since it keeps starting and stopping it's really noticeable. The last time I used it on the bus, the guy next to me was clearly very puzzled by the noise but he couldn't quite tell where it was coming from.
A neat fact I always found interesting is that non-caddy Bluray discs were used in Casino Royale (at least as props) for the security camera backup media. Bluray as a home media format just barely hit the market when the movie came out so for many it would have been their first time seeing them, as it was mine.
Someone else brought this up, I was thinking about it. That legit got me interested in BDs, ah the power of product placement (especially when the studio got it for free from their parent company…)
AVCHD is a pretty neat format. On a full-size DVD, you have enough space for a movie-length HD video. I have a few movies captured off my DVR that way.
Your content is brilliant! Nobody else makes as thorough in depth explorations of such niche and specific camcorder tech topics like DVD camcorders or P2 media. Love it!
oh my god i absolutely did NOT intend to release it with that name but i guess this is how the cookie crumbled. it's locked in now. i'm riding that name to eternity
Thank you for doing so much awesome research, and I definitely didn’t notice when you swapped out the footage - though mobile TH-cam compression likely hides a lot of the flaws when you aren’t actively looking for them.
SD? It's small enough to fit on your finger nail. Easily compatible with multiple devices. From smart phones to PCs. It's read write speed is faster than DVD-ROM. It can also be used as a SSD with the right adapter & know-how.
This is the second time I've watched this and man... the dedication you put into your videos. Not just the obvious script work and time you put into structuring the entire thing, or all the footage and editing, or post-edit comments in the video itself. But straight up the followup work. Timestamps, hearting comments, responding to comments... you put a lot of work into this stuff and holy crap I respect you for it. I hope you make enough from this to make it worth it, because I love you.
go figure that the channel with random broadcast video production hardware would have some of the highest production quality on youtube (but seriously these are awesome thank you!!!)
BBC's Top Gear shot on XDCam Disk from 2006 to 2011 I believe, starting with the Polar Special. They still used it even before they made the full leap to HD in around 2008/2009.
To be fair, Dazzles (and in a more contemporary setting, El Gatos) are still useful for live capture of composite video! I've organized enough Melee tournaments to be familiar with em :P
I feel like DVD-RAM could’ve been way more acceptable if they treated it slightly differently. Instead of “Take the fragile disc out of the flimsy caddy and place it into your disc drive to rip the files”, they should’ve designed so you plug the camera in over FireWire or USB and it would appear as an external DVD drive. Then you could move the files off and empty the disc, then reuse it. That way you’d have like 4 discs in sealed caddies, and swap between them while filming, then go home and copy the data off, emptying the discs for next time. That’s how a lot of hard drive and tape cameras worked, and that’s how we always used our SD Cameras since we never had SD card readers in our PCs, and I know a lot of people did the same. That could’ve made DVD-RAM away more usable, even if it would always be slower than SD and HDD storage it would also be a whole lot cheaper, and you could carry as many discs with you as you needed.
Hey, you tell "tape has been gone a long time by now" to my mini-DV camcorder and dual G4 mirrored drive door! (Yeah I did the dual deck thing in middle school, for condensing news for school announcements.) May actually still have the kiddo use that... My parents had an 8mm tape camcorder that was like that view cam kinda: big screen, a few inches thick, with the actual lens and sensor off to the side on a pivot. Very strange ergonomics best summarizes as "use a tripod". Galaxy brain: an SD card adapter is just a caddy for a micro SD card. But at least it helps you not lose it...
What you said about the professional market was pretty true for the prosumer market, too. I used to work at a local public access studio recording local government meetings onto DVD decks (before we got a video server) in the studio but not for school events and other field work. We transitioned straight from DV cameras (Canon GL2) to HDD and flash based cameras with no disc based cameras at all.
And BOOM you finally covered XDCAM! I launched XDCAM for Sony in Australia. It's still widely used in news and production here in Aus. I produced some environmental testing videos about the toughness of the format. I'll find it and share it with you.
haha, yeah! it took me a while to find one I could afford! I would be very interested in those, if you want to email me when you find them, it's cathode ray dude at gmail.
I was hoping you would cover XDCAM (especially the HD version) and I am glad you did. I almost got myself a professional video camera that shot on XDCAM but realized, it wouldn't be logistical. Ended up getting a Sony HVR Z7, which had a memory recorder attachment you could put on it (to record to CF since it only records on HDV tapes). Kind of happy I went that route instead, but I do miss the "thumbnail" feature, which the XDCAM could do and my particular camera couldn't (due to limitations of the recording attachment unit itself). But then again, my camera seems to be the halfway point between recording on flash media and still tape formats. But now I am just rambling on. Great video!
excellent video - i'd say "as always", but this one especially so! i have a hard time paying attention for too long but this one had me all the way through. i still remember getting my first CD burner and struggling to figure out how the hell to "finalize" a disc to make it play in a CD player - nevermind that burned discs were such a crapshoot with so many of the players on the market when they first showed up. ... nice Tokimeki box!
IIRC some computer drives could indeed read unfinalized discs! Usually it was only drives that natively support DVD+/-RW. And there's also the whole concept of "sessions", where you could write the same file onto the disc multiple times. :) (Edit: I see you did eventually mention sessions.
I seem to remember that premiere had the ability to not only read miniDV footage off firewire, but also control the camcorder itself? Like rewinding, stopping etc. Sometimes i just think about that. Like the experience of clicking buttons in premiere which would put a tape mechanism in motion. Hitting "render" upon which the tape rewinds to the point in the footage where your proxies point to and starts playing back and fast forwards thru the cuts, as if driven by some black magic. Anyway, great video my man
Great video! Thanks! Holy CRAP it was long though. If I may request/suggest: I think a multi-part series would have worked better. Information fatigue kicked in at about the 30--40 minute mark, and I think the info would have been much more digestible as a 4-5 part series. Either way, thanks for putting so much time and effort into this. If the final product was 90 minutes, I can only imagine how many hours and hours of work went into this.
Thank you for watching! it took me a few weeks to write, shoot (two days plus several more hours of pickups), and edit this, and frankly by the time I was done I simply didn't know how long it was going to be - I don't really have the forethought to know how to break things up cleanly; but also, a number of people have specifically requested longer videos, so I'm experimenting.
@@CathodeRayDude Yeah, I can imagine! I've done some video work myself, and I know how much more work it takes to do something like this for just the footage alone, not counting the script writing, background work, research, etc... It's a massive job, and the finished product is really good and really shows the time and effort you put into it. Maybe if it was a two part series? Even if there was a somewhat un-natural hard cut with a quick recap at the end of pt 1 and what will get covered next? IDK. I'm just thinking from an audience consumption prespective, because it would be a shame for people to get fatigued and miss some of the good info if their attention doesn't last. Anyways. You've made good content, so I'm sure you'll figure out the best way. 😉🙂
You need to read both Red and Orange book to understand the philosophy behind the closing of a multisession disk. Closing a disk - finalising it - ends access to the TOC and made it permanent, so the disk player sees it. Somebody thought of unfinalising the disk by declaring the area of the TOC unreadable, and writing a new copy which wasn't closed. Such a disk couldn't be a single session anymore. Not all reader were able to read an unfinalised disk. Remember, CD suffered from the fact that the Red Book was written in the '80s with audio tracks in mind, and was written in a spiral and not in concentrical sectors.
I have no idea why I watched this as Ive never owned or wanted a camcorder but it was still interesting. Honestly I have no interest in owning most of the stuff you do videos about and if I ever came across any of it I would probably just offer to send it to you for a video. Ive watched most of your videos at this point and they all make me nostalgic for stuff I never had or wanted at the time.
Great and informative video! For growing up with MiniDV and going straight to H.264 on SD cards (now shooting to CFast in ProRes on cinema cameras) and even writing DVD-Video discs back in the day, the DVD camcorder era is quite interesting to me. Perhaps you would be interested in making a dedicated video on the weirdness/difficulties of dealing with interlaced video on PC? I'm a big fan of 60fps playback but quality deinterlacing gets overlooked a lot when consumers deal with legacy formats.
Man I remember wanting one of those DVD camcorders so much. I remember not even knowing what I'd record, but it would've been big thing to nerd out and fiddle with them. But they were so expensive here that I passed the idea completely.
As a kid I remember seeing the mini dv cams in Fred Meyer or Walmart and lusting after them and being amazed how you could just plug a tape into the computer and transfer files when my school got a few for the brand new video production class years later, having a mini vhs someone gave me that audibly creaked every time you touched it and could hear it on video…So when the mini dvd came out I was blown away. Fast forward 15 years and I find that same Sony mini dvd that I had wanted for so many years at a thrift store for $15 and bought around 30 brand new discs from eBay for $20 after doing the whole -R +R compatibility research project. It’s amazing how happy I was finally getting one. Thanks for the video. Holy cow that dvd ram thing I’ve gotta get on eBay! Those are awesome.
In my experience, during the early 2000s, dvd ram was just too expensive, i could get 100 dvd-r for price of 10 DVD-ram disc's and since had already spent several years burning cds that would fail 1/5 of the time during the burning process, i just assumed same thing would happen if i tried dvd-ram.
Nope, bought a DVD Ram recorder (Video Recorder for the TV), bought 3 ram disks, and never had even one failure. That was around the time I considered buying more at the R200 per pop disk, but realized there was absolutely no need, as they were so rock solid, so, just landed up with the 3 disks to record the TV shows for the week on to. 🤔🤷♂️ Ps. 1/5 seems like you may have had better quality disks than what was available to me, I had a 3/5 failure rate at some point. It got so bad, that I was going through a spindle of 50 a week and landing up with 10 or 15 usable copies 😂
Pure genius!!! Jaw dropping presentation!!! Your command on this subject is second to none!! I watched it without even taking a breath ! Bravo👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
With regards to DVD RAM, I actually had a consumer HP desktop that included a standard DVD+/-R recorder that would accommodate a DVD RAM disc. In fact, the computer even came with a DVD RAM disc. So it may have been more accessible and available than indicated in the video.
Really enjoyed the video, it’s right up my alley! Two technical points.. it’s important to remember the DVD codec (MPEG-2) uses temporal compression. So while the lower quality 3mbps setting looked fine in that test footage, there was very little motion for it to encode. The camera was fixed on a tripod and the background didn’t change at all. The difference between 3mbps and 8mbps would be far more substantial when shooting anything handheld and especially content with a lot of motion like sports. Also, That 704X480 resolution is actually the true “image” resolution of SD broadcast video. For technical reasons I won’t get into (unless someone wants me to lol) there are 8 “blank” horizontal pixels on both right and left sides of the SD broadcast spec. They function as a buffer and are black. Where this gets tricky/confusing is that 720X480 and 704X480 were used interchangeably. Most computer software detects and automatically removes those 16 black pixels. So it’s very common for video software to say something is 720X480 when effectively it’s actually only displaying or encoding 704X480. This confusion is further compounded by the fact that those aren’t square pixels. The spec is for 4:3 which means a computer monitor is squishing the 704X480 image down to 640X480. All this messiness is where the analog standards of old met digital
Yes-with-knobs-on to long-form content like this! Ten minute videos are great and all, but sometimes I really want to get my teeth into a subject. Love this!
We had that exact Round Holder Hitachi. I was pretty good at swapping those dang caddies when I was a kid. I used it at multiple parties, shoutout to my dad for trusting me with it lol. The thing ran out of charge before space on the disc.
Why does this guy sound like 8-Bit-Guy and Technology Connections mixed together? I love videos like these. Thanks for an awesome historical retrospective!
I think we had mini VHS camcorder, it used a full size adapter so you could watch your video in a VCR, kinda like a mini SD to SD adapter... Or it could have just been a fever dream. Edit: Apparently it wasn't a fever dream, I just didn't wait to finish the VOD before posting.
I think that the discussion of disc caddies is incomplete without mentioning the granddaddy of them all...CED. The analogue disc, the size of a record, held in a giant caddy which released the disc into the machine when played, then the machine reinserts the disc into the caddy when you dock the caddy and eject the disc. The CED story is an amazing and whimsical tale of horrible mismanagement, giant egos, extreme technical innovation, and devastating failure.
I recognized the sony camcorder even with the tape on it, but I had an advantage - I sold them. Having worked in a big box store in the late aughts AVCHD DVD recorders were moderately popular due to their lower cost (both unit, and media) than BD camcorders. The problem was that they were competing against both legacy systems (DVD, MiniDV, ect), True Blue Ray (which they were distinctly winning against), Hard drive based units (spinning platters), and SD card units (which, so much as any format ended up winning, won). In the end, for a lot of people, the winning format was.... The phone in your pocket. Just as with point and shoot cameras, for the vast majority of people the best camcorder you could have is the one that you have with you at all times, even if the ergonomics are terrible.
Amazing hour long informative video about camcorders, thank you for all the effort and heart you put into making these videos. I know it must be quite time consuming, especially when it's over an hour long.
My mother had the Sony dvd camcorder. I found the discs 10 years later unfinalized. She only had two full discs, I think she stopped using the camcorder back in the day because she didn't know she needed to finalize them. Thank gosh I found the camcorder in storage to finalize them.
I can't say I've come across one of these disc camcorders in the wild when they were new. Nobody I knew had one. Just about everyone I knew went from tape direct to hard drive based camcorders (with those funky VOD/TOD files) or AVC-HD units with SD cards.
yeah I suspect these were almost entirely constrained to the "idk lol i bought whatever the guy at best buy recommended" set, or people who specifically wanted this *particular* feature of doing direct disc export.
Back in 2013 my high schools video lab still had a bunch of Mac Pros (The ones that look like the Power Mac G5) and a bunch of mini DV tape decks that if I remember correctly could copy footage at 2x speed. If this was the case I would have been super stoked because I’ve been through the horror that is transferring DV footage since 2004. We also had a Panasonic HD P2 based camera, and 3 canon DV cameras connected to a newtek tricaster for all your SD live video needs. Oh also DVD ram was heavily used in the professional audio industry. Before ProTools workstations were actually affordable, there was a standalone nonlinear audio workstation called a radar 24 that used DVD RAMdisks.
My fav disc format has always been the PSP UMD. The perma caddy made so much sense. I wasn't gonna be buying movies on the format but I always thought it was cool that they tried that too.
Throughly enjoyed this! Disc-based camcorders are utterly bizarre things and this was a great look at them. I only ever used a relatives DVD camcorder once and found it utterly infuriating, going back to my MiniDV one was a dream, some of the things noted here definitely have that make sense!
I love it. It's a very good documentary about consumer video cameras. Thanks. I think this one could have bloated out into several hours of demonstration footage with a detailed explanation of each media specification.
![A CD-R, that's only partly a CD-R [Ricoh Encryptease]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_5ucImqdKbY/mqdefault.jpg)
39:00 "You have to finalize it, mom. Like I told you last time..." I felt this in my soul.
You know a video is great when after 84 minutes of runtime, you feel like you spent 5 minutes watching, and you want more. Congrats man for your great work.
awesome! that's exactly what I'm aiming for, haha. thank you so much!
@@CathodeRayDude Wow, I did not realize that I'm an hour in. How the hell did you do this Ray? It's some kind of dark magic.
hey. im mad/j you stole my reply idea.
This is why you watch the whole way through, people. If you don’t get to the 1-hour mark, you miss out on Theoretical Blu-Ray Dad™.
This is my new favorite made up guy™
I come back and watch this video just for that segment
I've got to admit, it is a pretty cool scenario.
I also love theoretical Gadget Dad. He's the kind of geek we nerds wish we had the confidence to be. Unabashedly displaying his love of weird tech in public while making people feel incredibly awkward about things that are given out of enthusiasm for the tech and good will that they know for a fact they will never use, but will feel indescribable guilt for tossing. What a legend.
Godspeed to Blu-Ray Dad o7
Out of the blue, my coworker told me today he was looking for a DVD camcorder. I told him modern ones record onto SD cards, but he said he wanted something he could play on his TV as soon as he is done recording. I always thought of DVD camcorders as a kludge, but I guess there really was consumer demand for them after all?
Most televisions have USB ports and built-in media players. Tell him to just get a SD card to USB adapter. It's just so much easier.
@@mndlessdrwer One of the first memory card based camcorders I bought recorded its video to a proprietary format that couldn't be played on anything, not even on VLC media player. The video files had to be run through a program that came with it to convert them to MP4, or I had to physically connect the camcorder to my TV through the HDMI port and play videos that way.
Thankfully I now have a camcorder that records to a universally compatible format.
why don't tv have card readers - stupid
@@AdhamOhm what was that?
@@misium TV have USB ports, to which you can connect a card reader.
The problem with Smart TV, they use a SoC very similar to those in smartphones, running a version of Android OS.
Under Android, the video codec is not executed from the software, but must be embedded into the SoC, which uses a dedicated hardware core (an accelerator) to decode the video stream from the file on the memory card.
Cheap TVs with cheap SoC can only execute few video codecs (note: the codec used, is independent from the file extension).
Only pricey TVs can decode all video formats. If you have one of those 50 inches $250 TVs, your best bet is to place a laptop with VLC connected to the TV to play ALL video files.
The problem as I said - is the cheap TV utilise a $5 SoC, while an 888-style SoC, similar to those installed in flagship phones and able to decode everything, costs $50 at the factory door.
My father didn't quite live the blu-ray camera fantasy, but he did edit footage of my elementary school Christmas concerts with a video toaster, and burn them to DVDs which were then sold by the school.
Endless cool points at no cost to you
@@sn1000kagreed. Amiga and DVD aesthetic are champion
For some reason I really love the composition in the scene where you’re watching yourself on the TV off the recorded DVD. The hat in the foreground makes the whole scene.
thank you, i am so proud of that shot
It was sort of like watching a "Cam" copy..... 🤔
Just glad he didn't get up to get more popcorn a quarter of the way through 🤣🤣🤣
I’ve waited my whole life to hear those five special words: Let’s talk about disc caddies.
My Grandpa worked for IBM and had a PS/2 system at home. The first CD-ROM with SCSI, all these disc caddies and jewel cases. I remember being so proud when I was allowed to change the discs in the caddy myself. Needed to play F-15 Strike Eagle. I learned to hack on that system, changing random letters in the save files to give myself promoted ranks and new missions.
Ah, disc caddies.
I know they’re so bad, but yet I’m still drawn to them…
It was all fault of Plextor, caddies were their idea of professional.
Creative Labs broke the ice.
I adore disk caddies. They look so futuristic.
Circa 1994 my elementary school computer lab had CDROM drives that used caddies. The CD software we had access to was shared amongst the lab, so using caddies made sense.
There's actually a reason why PFDs has the caddy/cartridge and BluRays doesn't: the coating that allows the bluray disc to even survive at all wasn't invented yet when PFDs was released.
For CDs, the layer that holds the data is a coating that is just below the label. that's why early CDs rot so easily; when the label becomes damaged or wasn't a perfect hermetic seal, air gets in and rots things. On DVDs, they sandwiched the data layer in between two half thickness polycarbonate discs.
They can't do that on blurays because the disc itself was deemed too optically imperfect to cram 23 gigs of data onto, so they made the bottom layer 0.1mm thick. as opposed to a cool 0.6mm on DVDs.
This means that light scratches could penetrate the layer, thus ruining the disc. Thus PFDs came in caddies. And then when TDK figured out a scratch resistant "hard coating" they didn't need a caddy anymore and the hard coating was written into the bluray standard and the rest is history.
that's REMARKABLE. thank you for this info, I wish I'd had it. I actually forgot to include a snip from the blu-ray spec that I'd found that outright stated that the caddy probably would not survive into the released spec, but this clarifies *why*.
@@CathodeRayDude It might be a good idea to pin this comment - it's really relevant to the blu-ray talk at the end and might get buried in the future otherwise.
The PDW camcorder, I remember those, as use to service those when they were beat out on the field. Yep you beat me to explaining the reason for the caddies for the PFD disc's in a nutshell.
They actually had quad layer did that could store up to 128gb. Never made it to consumer market as prohibitively expensive at the time as higher quality components and coating was required to eliminate caddy for reason you stated ready.
I actually still have the PDW-F30 desktop Recorder. Thank God for SxS cards which replace the Panasonic P2 cards.
Hitachi did make a couple Blu-ray consumer camcorders but wasn't successful as SD and HDD camcorders took over by then.
@@CathodeRayDude A little bit offtopic, but it just fun to notice, that trough out the history many improved formats of different media had eventually envolved, but they never had a chance to shine, because there were already another format on the way...
And pretty much till recent 10 years, all the media that came out was unfinished in some way, and exacly by the time manufacturers finally figured out how to make some media format reliable - its already been too late
so ironical and sad in some sence
By the way, do u remember DataPlay? It was just nuts - 500Mb on 32mm disk, for such density it`s like 25Gb for 120mm disk in 2001, not to mention that they were going to launch 7Gb version of this 32mm disk later, that translates to at least 300Gb for 120mm disk, and all this for single layer (but double side)
HD-DVD has the data layer at the same depth as DVD, and takes a hit in capacity as a result. That was the main physical difference between the two formats, the wavelength of the laser was the same.
"They knew what was coming and they didn't want to wait. And who could blame them?"
Hidden sci-fi manifesto right there. The last 2 minutes of this video are pure gold.
I hope Blu-ray dad exists. I hope he’s doing well.
I can kind of see it too. A bunch of other parents being legit stoked to have the footage, but literally never watching it and eventually throwing the disc away 20 years later.
He has now uploaded 312 hours of soccer practice from 2006 to 2012 to his TH-cam channel. He has 3 subscribers and 81 views. Life is good.
From what I recall, the reason they tried to make consumer blu-rays use caddy's was because at the time they didn't have the fancy scratch resistant coating that blu-ray would end up with.
which still sucks and gets damaged way more easily
@@Mister_Brown ok
Fun fact: The reason Blu-Rays even need the special scratch-resistant coating is because the data is so close to the surface of the disc. HD-DVD has the data at the same depth as DVD, but this comes with a hit on capacity (which is why HD-DVD has less capacity than Blu-Ray despite using the same wavelength laser as Blu-Ray).
"You know like how people will just leave their dishes dirty for like a whole -" 😎 he's gonna say week
" -day, " 😰
week? I left a dirty rolling pin out from christmas until easter since I didnt need it in between.
Oh! the joys of DVD finalization! At a previous employer, we actually ended up "bundling" our DVD camcorders with a rolling cart containing two DVD-DL burners. The full-size burners could finalize a disc in ~10 seconds, rather than the 20 minutes of the internal mini DVD drive. And of course we needed two burners to allow for continuous operation ;)
Unfortunately, finalization is necessary since formats such as Audio CD and DVD-Video only allow for one table-of-contents (and you can only create that TOC once, and can't add data afterwards). Recorders workaround the TOC problem by writing recording info in a special area of the disc (called the Program Memory Area) and then creating the TOC when you press "finalize". What's infuriating is the spec could've allowed for multisession discs (with multiple TOCs) but doesn't.
I mean, I get why Audio CD doesn't allow it, since it wasn't a thing back then, but multisession was a thing long before DVD-Video existed (first defined in 1990), so there was no reason for the DVD-Video spec to not have it. You could even replace files (such as the DVD menu) with multisession! It was left out because of the bonehead assumption DVD-Video would always be "authored", never recorded.
Yay bluray soccer dad. Living his best life.
On VCD: In the early 00s I had a really cheap DVD player that I got because it was hackable to remove region blocking (which I never needed) but incidentally supported VCDs. I burned a ton of anime episodes to CDRs in that format, and they actually looked okay. Oddly, it would only play certain CDRs, and there was never any logic to which ones it could read; I had the most success with some Art Logic white-label rebrands, but even they didn't know what the original disc was or why it worked.
I recognize that footage of recording and editing Internet video in 2001. :-) And Sony attempted to bridge the gap with Cassette Memory, a microchip in MiniDV and MicroMV tapes which would store the times, thumbnails, and titles of each scene on the tape, allowing (somewhat) more rapid access to your footage. And with DV's time code, professional editing workstations could play back clips from the tape in a programmed order, and with frame-accurate timing, considerably easing the burden of editing video in the era before computer-based non-linear editing.
It's a shame this wasn't used more often. Chip on MiniDV tapes could have been great like for storing camera profiles for cameras like the Pansonic DVX100/A/B. But at least you could save that as DataDump on a normal Mini DV tape. And as someone who worked with Linear Editing on tape machines (Betacam SP, Digibeta, HD-CAM, HD-CAM SR and DV Cam) i really learned to appreciate the existence of Timecode back then for that :P It's awesome to do insert cuts frame & timecode correct. Something i could only dream of when editing my own videos on a consumer VHS deck. (edit: removed typos)
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 I remember buying the tapes but then realized that they literally didn't do anything in my Panasonic consumer device even though it had the little recording pins for it it. doesn't seem like it actually did anything
@@MickeyMishra Not many cameras used that anyway. It's like Time- & Date stamp on MiniDisc recordings that was saved when you had a MD recorder / walkman who supported that. Most MD decks didn't have it. Same with 20bit or 24bit ATRAC encoding. It was possible but not every MD device could do that. But they all could downsample 20 or 24bit recordings to normal 16bit playback. So the recording was always made sure to be compatible. That goes for normal recordings. Not talking about NetMD.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 wait are you telling me that minidisc did 24-bit recordings?
I never knew that! that's something I'm going to have to look into and honestly it's way past minidiscs prime and I've already decided to just go ahead and keep my collection of CDs and of course music on their various hard drives.
I literally just use Spotify for just about everything these days and a micro USB for anything that I need to do serious testing or listening..
I remember buying the so-called 20 bit CDs HDCD's for just the reason that my computer would play back the files with the hdcd logo/
unfortunately I really didn't hear very much more Fidelity but again I didn't have the equipment to really do so at the time either even my headphones couldn't tell the difference between the two recordings.
it took me I think about another 10 to 15 years to finally get a system that was capable of actually providing that sort of resolution so I could actually hear it.
but the noise floor and everything that's required in order to hear at that bit depth and the recording as well is pretty rare for me where I can on every single instance audibly pick out the differences.
I used to think there was something wrong with my ears but then I became very thankful that there wasn't.
I'll see if I can try to look around for a 24 bit player because that really would be kind of interesting to see how that would work
@@MickeyMishra yes ATRAC wasn't restricted to 16 bit only but also allowed 20 and 24 bit resolution. It was possible but not many manufacturers used that potential. NetMD and HiMD didn't have that anymore i think. So if you recorded HiMD with lossless audio it was PCM 44,1khz 16bit. Just like CD and basically what normal MD could have been since the beginning. If you wanna try MD with higher resolution, you may look for a stationary MD Deck by Sony or a portable Sharp MD walkman.
your sense of humor in these videos is just perfect. writing, delivery, graphics, it's amazing and I love it.
thank you so much!
Over an hour of camcorder talk? This got me to be a patron.
whoop whoop! glad you dig it!
Hey, @@CathodeRayDude, we need more videos of you going nuts about stuff!
yeah I hope this longer-form content doesn't end up being shoved onto a second channel
"I could probably mix this in with my regular footage and you wouldn't notice. In fact, I did."
A plot twist worthy of the twilight zone. Or maybe a Saw movie, with that montage.
I thought there was something off about the colours of the close ups, but I never would’ve guessed it was analog component.
I am one of those hyper nerds. My camcorder had audio dubbing capabilities:)
yo!!!!!
Hyper Nerds Unite!
Lon!
RE the finalization question... Does the camcorder create and save the table of contents data off disc?
I'd be curious to know if it is possible to film 5 mins on a DVD cam, take the disc out w/o finalizing and put it in a different camcorder to play that clip and continue filming on the same disc.
I have a Quasar VM-22 with audio dubbing capabilities, but I haven't figured out how yet
I was a nerd in the TV lab of my high school back in 1994, starting on prosumer equipment on the SVHS format. Once I hit my senior year in 98, we got a mini DV camcorder that had inputs for our editing devices, but they wouldn't allow us to use them because it might damage the mechanism in the camera. I loved the format, though. It was so crisp and clear compared to SVHS. Then, we became the first school in the area to have Avid video editing software and it was amazing! With the use of my titling box, I was able to produce some pretty nice stuff back then.
I never got into DVD camcorders, but I definitely used DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and CD-RW disks. I never knew DVD RAM existed until much later.
You got me to watch a video about a pretty tame topic for 1½ hours. Well done.
I also graduated HS in '98. However, we barely had air conditioning at my high school, let alone prosumer recording equipment. Ah, the South™
Hello, I am your friendly AVID CSR (Customer Support Representative ) of the time. But why would you have to use a titling box, when you already had theTitle Tool?
@@kostis2849, because I wanted more sophisticated titles than I could get from Avid. I also used then for sports productions.
I like the prominently placed tokimeki memorial box and densha de go(?) controllers next to the TV. Gotta show off when you've got good taste.
As a camcorder collector, a video like this is a dream, not thought to ever be found... Thank you so much for the amazing A/V videos!
glad to hear it! i'm making this stuff for The Rest Of Us as it were, hahaha
The one missing link between here and modern camcorders is hard disk camcorders. I remember really wanting one back in the day, because _woah 80 gigs of standard definition video_
I saw one at the mall and went "80 gigs? Shit! That's half the space of my hard drive in a camcorder!"
To be fair, I was using a pretty old laptop at the time.
@@xureality 160 gb isint that bad lol
@UnluckyFridays are they using 2.5" laptop drives or 1.8" iPod drives? I wonder if anyone's ever bothered flashmodding one of them.
@@zacksstuff seems like 1.8" going off the size
@UnluckyFridays I have plenty of 120 and 160 GB 2.5" sata mechanical hard drives
59:24
Going by the Japanese Wikipedia Entry, Hitachi's "Wooo" branding is supposed to stand for the "Unconscious expression of surprise when seeing something beautiful" (I presume what you more commonly would write as 'Woah' in English); And/or is supposed to stand for the "Wo~" from the English words "Wonder", "World standard" and "Worthwhile" with I guess the three "o"s for the fact that it's three words...
Though there unfortunately is no source given for this.
It was primarily a brand name for plasma televisions, but also was applied to digital camcorders and DVD recorders.
【Woooに込められた意味は、美に対する無意識的な感嘆の発声としての「ウー」と驚きがある、世界の新しい基準である、高い価値があるという意味の英単語の「Wonder」「World standard」「Worthwhile」の3つの‘Wo～’という2つの意味から成る造語で、2001年8月からスタートした。 】
- ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooo
that would honestly make sense. I also found Wooo applied to at least one feature phone!
Dude, I distinctly remember my local news station had cameras with dvd drives with the clear disk tray. I remember seeing the dvd logo on the disk they put in it because it was before my family got a DVD player and I remember my young self finding it really cool. There is no way you made up that memory, I remember the same exact thing.
oh man now I gotta find one, aaaaghh
I remember seeing a Hollywood blockbuster with something like that; Die Hard or something - it was red, I think? Maybe that was a prop...
those video cd things is how like, i watched vast majority of legal media as a teenager in poland, bc like every magazine had like a movie attached with it as a freebie, and like, i haven't been to A Store in a while but I'm absolutely convinced some paper trash aimed at senior demographics still do it, i had to sit down my mom and explain that the format sucks ass and i can just download a bd rip of anything she wants
that's absolutely amazing
I remember as a kid we had a camcorder with this format and the tiny RW discs and after we stopped using the camcorder, I used the discs to transfer all sorts of data back and forth between computers and locations and such since at the time, USB sticks were to expensive (and my iMac g3 only had limited USB slots) but DVD burners were fairly common!
I remember that too. Majority of magazines aimed at women had these movies and all of them had these split into 2 or more discs. Titanic was spilt into 3 if memory serves me well
I still don't know why. Like, price difference wasn't probably that great and to play VCD you still have to had a DVD player.
Yup, VCD was THE format for some time back in Poland. It was everywhere. But mostly ‘freebies’ in magazines.
Easiest way to describe the 8mm disks is GameCube size. They’re the only thing beyond the camcorders that really used the format
Actually no there was a Mini CD for like CD singles
Mini CD formats where used for several applications such as CD music singles, CD business cards/bootable business card (these where mini CD’s with semi square format that works in any tray loading CD-rom optical drive), computer Hardware driver software distribution (as a replacement fir floppy driver discs). There was also miniDVD discs which where used for video singles.
You missed a zero. It's 80mm. 8mm would be smaller than a MicroSD card (which are 10*15mm).
Wow, I just watched almost an hour and a half of this, and didn't even realise! Great episode!
As someone who grew up fascinated by video cameras and is still keen to learn about them, thank you for sharing with your incredible passion (& great scriptwriting skills) for this!
The process of finalizing discs does remind me a bit of rewinding film. Including never developing some because "I can't just waste those three pictures"
This whole video was fascinating, I'm so glad I watched the whole thing!
I love how you admit to what you don't know, speculate but say that's what you're doing, and correct yourself if you've gotten details wrong in the past. These are very rare, valuable traits!
Thank you so much, I'm trying my best to do this right!
I pity the engineer from Sony's storage department. Every day the engineers from the sensor department be like "Bigger! Faster!"
it's a fate they deserve for enabling the continuation of memory stick
Finalizing creates a standards compliant index. Before finalization, no doubt the camcorders are using a proprietary index which only the camera supports. The un-finalize must be creating supplemental indexes maybe using some sort of no-op sleds on the DVD menus they create which fill from the back with additional skip pointers. There were a number of 'packet writing' formats that supported modifications without finalizing but they were late to the format and not baked into the original standards I don't believe; they needed proprietary 'drivers' to use but eventually windows supported some of these natively. Finalizing a file index takes a lot less time than building out a DVD thumbnail menu which is probably what it's taking all that time to do. Maybe It's baking in DVD-standards-compliant video headers into what were up until that point were naked mpeg streams plus the proprietary index held elsewhere.
Yes, I too remember Mount Rainier
This is exactly what i was thinking. Either that or the camera erases the last X tracks from the RW disc (enough to clobber the final index) and then rewrites the tail end of what was there and a new index.
Fantastic comment! Thanks for taking the time to share!
Ty
Loved the simulated Video CD demonstration. I bought a Philips CD-I along with the optional Video CD Decoder Cart. I had the blurriest commercially available copies of Star Trek VI, Forrest Gump, Silence of the Lambs, and Naked Gun. The only thing that would have made your demo even better would have been to add some ABYSMAL macroblocking artifacts. I swear when scenes changed or the action ramped up, it was just a sea of giant blurry blocks floating across the screen. Oh the memories!
Low quality digital video sucks. I prefer watching vhs than a low res digital video with artifacts.
This, again. Philips wanted VCD players to be able to use existing "1x" read mechanisms from Audio CD players, so they capped the bitrate to 1376 kbps of constant bitrate (CBR) inclusive of audio (224kbps). This meant that you couldn't give complex scenes more bitrate, every second was capped at 1152kbps bitrate (this also meant the 80min runtime was the runtime you always got, not a theoretical maximum).
My man made an hour and a half long documentary about camcorders with movie-level production quality for youtube... mad respect
I think this channel could make any subject interesting.
90mins on a subject I have little interest but still highly enjoyable.
If this channel doesn't end up with half million subscriber eventually then TH-cam truly has lost its way.
I was at a thrift store looking for blank CDs for cheap and they had a case of 100 CDs for 10 dollars and 5 CD-RWs for 10 dollars. I went with the CD-RWs and it turns out my drive couldn't read them. And when I went back, the 100 CDs were gone.
Which is why I use cassette tapes
At the end of the video (1:23:42) you show the Rave:MP, a music player that uses clik disks. I bought one of them off of eBay about a year ago. It's a fun little novelty. The biggest flaw with it, IMO, is that it buffers data and spins the drive down just to spin it back up again after 20-30 seconds to buffer some more; this doesn't sound like a big deal, but the drive spins pretty fast which makes a fairly quiet, but somehow also really obnoxious, high pitched whirring sound while spinning. If the drive were always spinning, the your brain would just fade the droning into the background after a while, but since it keeps starting and stopping it's really noticeable. The last time I used it on the bus, the guy next to me was clearly very puzzled by the noise but he couldn't quite tell where it was coming from.
that's absolutely delightful. thank you so much for this
A neat fact I always found interesting is that non-caddy Bluray discs were used in Casino Royale (at least as props) for the security camera backup media. Bluray as a home media format just barely hit the market when the movie came out so for many it would have been their first time seeing them, as it was mine.
Someone else brought this up, I was thinking about it. That legit got me interested in BDs, ah the power of product placement (especially when the studio got it for free from their parent company…)
AVCHD is a pretty neat format. On a full-size DVD, you have enough space for a movie-length HD video. I have a few movies captured off my DVR that way.
Your content is brilliant!
Nobody else makes as thorough in depth explorations of such niche and specific camcorder tech topics like DVD camcorders or P2 media. Love it!
thank you so much! i made it for The Rest Of Us lol
Take my premature Thumbs Up solely for that video title!
oh my god i absolutely did NOT intend to release it with that name but i guess this is how the cookie crumbled. it's locked in now. i'm riding that name to eternity
I hope you never DISContinue using such titles ;)
Thank you for doing so much awesome research, and I definitely didn’t notice when you swapped out the footage - though mobile TH-cam compression likely hides a lot of the flaws when you aren’t actively looking for them.
DVD RAM is the perfect format, can't change my mind
fellow technology connections viewer?
SD? It's small enough to fit on your finger nail. Easily compatible with multiple devices. From smart phones to PCs. It's read write speed is faster than DVD-ROM. It can also be used as a SSD with the right adapter & know-how.
@@Rudofaux But hear me out, DVD RAM can also fit on your finger nail if you are good at balancing things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@maxwellcrafter Touché.
@@maxwellcrafter lol
This is the second time I've watched this and man... the dedication you put into your videos. Not just the obvious script work and time you put into structuring the entire thing, or all the footage and editing, or post-edit comments in the video itself. But straight up the followup work. Timestamps, hearting comments, responding to comments... you put a lot of work into this stuff and holy crap I respect you for it.
I hope you make enough from this to make it worth it, because I love you.
go figure that the channel with random broadcast video production hardware would have some of the highest production quality on youtube (but seriously these are awesome thank you!!!)
BBC's Top Gear shot on XDCam Disk from 2006 to 2011 I believe, starting with the Polar Special. They still used it even before they made the full leap to HD in around 2008/2009.
To be fair, Dazzles (and in a more contemporary setting, El Gatos) are still useful for live capture of composite video! I've organized enough Melee tournaments to be familiar with em :P
I still can't believe I actually sat through and watched the premiere live.
God that was fun.
I feel like DVD-RAM could’ve been way more acceptable if they treated it slightly differently. Instead of “Take the fragile disc out of the flimsy caddy and place it into your disc drive to rip the files”, they should’ve designed so you plug the camera in over FireWire or USB and it would appear as an external DVD drive. Then you could move the files off and empty the disc, then reuse it. That way you’d have like 4 discs in sealed caddies, and swap between them while filming, then go home and copy the data off, emptying the discs for next time.
That’s how a lot of hard drive and tape cameras worked, and that’s how we always used our SD Cameras since we never had SD card readers in our PCs, and I know a lot of people did the same. That could’ve made DVD-RAM away more usable, even if it would always be slower than SD and HDD storage it would also be a whole lot cheaper, and you could carry as many discs with you as you needed.
Hey, you tell "tape has been gone a long time by now" to my mini-DV camcorder and dual G4 mirrored drive door! (Yeah I did the dual deck thing in middle school, for condensing news for school announcements.) May actually still have the kiddo use that...
My parents had an 8mm tape camcorder that was like that view cam kinda: big screen, a few inches thick, with the actual lens and sensor off to the side on a pivot. Very strange ergonomics best summarizes as "use a tripod".
Galaxy brain: an SD card adapter is just a caddy for a micro SD card. But at least it helps you not lose it...
What you said about the professional market was pretty true for the prosumer market, too. I used to work at a local public access studio recording local government meetings onto DVD decks (before we got a video server) in the studio but not for school events and other field work. We transitioned straight from DV cameras (Canon GL2) to HDD and flash based cameras with no disc based cameras at all.
And BOOM you finally covered XDCAM! I launched XDCAM for Sony in Australia. It's still widely used in news and production here in Aus. I produced some environmental testing videos about the toughness of the format. I'll find it and share it with you.
haha, yeah! it took me a while to find one I could afford! I would be very interested in those, if you want to email me when you find them, it's cathode ray dude at gmail.
@@CathodeRayDude hey did you get my email?
84 minute video and it has the fastest wrap-up I’ve ever seen 😂
I was hoping you would cover XDCAM (especially the HD version) and I am glad you did. I almost got myself a professional video camera that shot on XDCAM but realized, it wouldn't be logistical. Ended up getting a Sony HVR Z7, which had a memory recorder attachment you could put on it (to record to CF since it only records on HDV tapes). Kind of happy I went that route instead, but I do miss the "thumbnail" feature, which the XDCAM could do and my particular camera couldn't (due to limitations of the recording attachment unit itself). But then again, my camera seems to be the halfway point between recording on flash media and still tape formats. But now I am just rambling on. Great video!
excellent video - i'd say "as always", but this one especially so! i have a hard time paying attention for too long but this one had me all the way through. i still remember getting my first CD burner and struggling to figure out how the hell to "finalize" a disc to make it play in a CD player - nevermind that burned discs were such a crapshoot with so many of the players on the market when they first showed up.
...
nice Tokimeki box!
IIRC some computer drives could indeed read unfinalized discs! Usually it was only drives that natively support DVD+/-RW. And there's also the whole concept of "sessions", where you could write the same file onto the disc multiple times. :) (Edit: I see you did eventually mention sessions.
i'm so glad youtube suggested this channel to me. CRD, your videos started off a bit rough around the edges, but this latest "season" is pure quality.
I seem to remember that premiere had the ability to not only read miniDV footage off firewire, but also control the camcorder itself? Like rewinding, stopping etc. Sometimes i just think about that. Like the experience of clicking buttons in premiere which would put a tape mechanism in motion. Hitting "render" upon which the tape rewinds to the point in the footage where your proxies point to and starts playing back and fast forwards thru the cuts, as if driven by some black magic. Anyway, great video my man
This is correct.
Yep, 1394 AV/C does full remote control, it's upsetting to see "software" working so slowly. thanks for watching!!
I have absolutely no reason to learn all of this knowledge, but I’m glad I did. Great video dude.
Great video! Thanks! Holy CRAP it was long though. If I may request/suggest: I think a multi-part series would have worked better. Information fatigue kicked in at about the 30--40 minute mark, and I think the info would have been much more digestible as a 4-5 part series.
Either way, thanks for putting so much time and effort into this. If the final product was 90 minutes, I can only imagine how many hours and hours of work went into this.
Thank you for watching! it took me a few weeks to write, shoot (two days plus several more hours of pickups), and edit this, and frankly by the time I was done I simply didn't know how long it was going to be - I don't really have the forethought to know how to break things up cleanly; but also, a number of people have specifically requested longer videos, so I'm experimenting.
@@CathodeRayDude Yeah, I can imagine! I've done some video work myself, and I know how much more work it takes to do something like this for just the footage alone, not counting the script writing, background work, research, etc... It's a massive job, and the finished product is really good and really shows the time and effort you put into it. Maybe if it was a two part series? Even if there was a somewhat un-natural hard cut with a quick recap at the end of pt 1 and what will get covered next? IDK. I'm just thinking from an audience consumption prespective, because it would be a shame for people to get fatigued and miss some of the good info if their attention doesn't last. Anyways. You've made good content, so I'm sure you'll figure out the best way. 😉🙂
You need to read both Red and Orange book to understand the philosophy behind the closing of a multisession disk.
Closing a disk - finalising it - ends access to the TOC and made it permanent, so the disk player sees it.
Somebody thought of unfinalising the disk by declaring the area of the TOC unreadable, and writing a new copy which wasn't closed. Such a disk couldn't be a single session anymore. Not all reader were able to read an unfinalised disk.
Remember, CD suffered from the fact that the Red Book was written in the '80s with audio tracks in mind, and was written in a spiral and not in concentrical sectors.
I have no idea why I watched this as Ive never owned or wanted a camcorder but it was still interesting. Honestly I have no interest in owning most of the stuff you do videos about and if I ever came across any of it I would probably just offer to send it to you for a video. Ive watched most of your videos at this point and they all make me nostalgic for stuff I never had or wanted at the time.
Dude I love your "random finger scrabbling to show the caddy is caddying" shots. :D
I had intended to include two or three of those but only found out I'd forgotten the others after release, hahaha
Great and informative video! For growing up with MiniDV and going straight to H.264 on SD cards (now shooting to CFast in ProRes on cinema cameras) and even writing DVD-Video discs back in the day, the DVD camcorder era is quite interesting to me.
Perhaps you would be interested in making a dedicated video on the weirdness/difficulties of dealing with interlaced video on PC? I'm a big fan of 60fps playback but quality deinterlacing gets overlooked a lot when consumers deal with legacy formats.
Man I remember wanting one of those DVD camcorders so much. I remember not even knowing what I'd record, but it would've been big thing to nerd out and fiddle with them. But they were so expensive here that I passed the idea completely.
This video is like a Christmas gift I didn't know I wanted. Thank you.
I've been letting this play for a month now to sleep, for some reason it soothes me.
CRD malding over DVD camcorders soothes me.
Love your camcorder-type content of your channel man! Ever thought about doing a retrospective of 3-D camcorders of the early '10s?
I have, yeah! Haven't put much thought into it (I missed that entire era really) but it's definitely something I'd like to do
As a kid I remember seeing the mini dv cams in Fred Meyer or Walmart and lusting after them and being amazed how you could just plug a tape into the computer and transfer files when my school got a few for the brand new video production class years later, having a mini vhs someone gave me that audibly creaked every time you touched it and could hear it on video…So when the mini dvd came out I was blown away. Fast forward 15 years and I find that same Sony mini dvd that I had wanted for so many years at a thrift store for $15 and bought around 30 brand new discs from eBay for $20 after doing the whole -R +R compatibility research project. It’s amazing how happy I was finally getting one. Thanks for the video.
Holy cow that dvd ram thing I’ve gotta get on eBay! Those are awesome.
In my experience, during the early 2000s, dvd ram was just too expensive, i could get 100 dvd-r for price of 10 DVD-ram disc's and since had already spent several years burning cds that would fail 1/5 of the time during the burning process, i just assumed same thing would happen if i tried dvd-ram.
Nope, bought a DVD Ram recorder (Video Recorder for the TV), bought 3 ram disks, and never had even one failure.
That was around the time I considered buying more at the R200 per pop disk, but realized there was absolutely no need, as they were so rock solid, so, just landed up with the 3 disks to record the TV shows for the week on to. 🤔🤷♂️
Ps. 1/5 seems like you may have had better quality disks than what was available to me, I had a 3/5 failure rate at some point. It got so bad, that I was going through a spindle of 50 a week and landing up with 10 or 15 usable copies 😂
Pure genius!!!
Jaw dropping presentation!!!
Your command on this subject is second to none!!
I watched it without even taking a breath !
Bravo👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
Look at captain nostalgia opening the floodgates with a fairly straight forward history lesson.
With regards to DVD RAM, I actually had a consumer HP desktop that included a standard DVD+/-R recorder that would accommodate a DVD RAM disc. In fact, the computer even came with a DVD RAM disc. So it may have been more accessible and available than indicated in the video.
Really enjoyed the video, it’s right up my alley! Two technical points.. it’s important to remember the DVD codec (MPEG-2) uses temporal compression. So while the lower quality 3mbps setting looked fine in that test footage, there was very little motion for it to encode. The camera was fixed on a tripod and the background didn’t change at all. The difference between 3mbps and 8mbps would be far more substantial when shooting anything handheld and especially content with a lot of motion like sports.
Also,
That 704X480 resolution is actually the true “image” resolution of SD broadcast video. For technical reasons I won’t get into (unless someone wants me to lol) there are 8 “blank” horizontal pixels on both right and left sides of the SD broadcast spec. They function as a buffer and are black. Where this gets tricky/confusing is that 720X480 and 704X480 were used interchangeably. Most computer software detects and automatically removes those 16 black pixels. So it’s very common for video software to say something is 720X480 when effectively it’s actually only displaying or encoding 704X480. This confusion is further compounded by the fact that those aren’t square pixels. The spec is for 4:3 which means a computer monitor is squishing the 704X480 image down to 640X480. All this messiness is where the analog standards of old met digital
Yes-with-knobs-on to long-form content like this! Ten minute videos are great and all, but sometimes I really want to get my teeth into a subject. Love this!
Video? On the internet? Huge if true.
great vid. its very rare i sit through an hour and a half youtube, and i went through this all the way and enjoyed
Well, I'll pour one out for that Mavica CD500... rest in peace.
We had that exact Round Holder Hitachi. I was pretty good at swapping those dang caddies when I was a kid. I used it at multiple parties, shoutout to my dad for trusting me with it lol. The thing ran out of charge before space on the disc.
Your channel deserves wayy more subscribers, I love the content.
workin on it!
Why does this guy sound like 8-Bit-Guy and Technology Connections mixed together?
I love videos like these. Thanks for an awesome historical retrospective!
I think we had mini VHS camcorder, it used a full size adapter so you could watch your video in a VCR, kinda like a mini SD to SD adapter... Or it could have just been a fever dream.
Edit: Apparently it wasn't a fever dream, I just didn't wait to finish the VOD before posting.
I swear that early 2000's Jeff goldblum commercial is brilliant! 2:12 ❤️
YES new upload! been in dire need of a new CRD vid to binge. then i saw this one is FEATURE LENGTH! yes pls
I think that the discussion of disc caddies is incomplete without mentioning the granddaddy of them all...CED. The analogue disc, the size of a record, held in a giant caddy which released the disc into the machine when played, then the machine reinserts the disc into the caddy when you dock the caddy and eject the disc. The CED story is an amazing and whimsical tale of horrible mismanagement, giant egos, extreme technical innovation, and devastating failure.
I recognized the sony camcorder even with the tape on it, but I had an advantage - I sold them. Having worked in a big box store in the late aughts AVCHD DVD recorders were moderately popular due to their lower cost (both unit, and media) than BD camcorders. The problem was that they were competing against both legacy systems (DVD, MiniDV, ect), True Blue Ray (which they were distinctly winning against), Hard drive based units (spinning platters), and SD card units (which, so much as any format ended up winning, won). In the end, for a lot of people, the winning format was....
The phone in your pocket. Just as with point and shoot cameras, for the vast majority of people the best camcorder you could have is the one that you have with you at all times, even if the ergonomics are terrible.
Amazing hour long informative video about camcorders, thank you for all the effort and heart you put into making these videos. I know it must be quite time consuming, especially when it's over an hour long.
Finalize is because that makes the disc standard.
Dvd drives in pc can via software read unfinilized discs. It's just software that limits this.
love the way you come of on your videos.
I've noticed those funny ass things you leave in the video, caught me off guard with the yawzuhhh!.
Great video! The weird 352 pixel wide resolutions are holdovers from VCD and SVCD. VCD was 352x240 and SVCD was 352x480.
AHHH.... VCD such fond memories of watching bootlegged Asian horror movies back then, which, most can be found on BR today.
My mother had the Sony dvd camcorder. I found the discs 10 years later unfinalized. She only had two full discs, I think she stopped using the camcorder back in the day because she didn't know she needed to finalize them.
Thank gosh I found the camcorder in storage to finalize them.
I can't say I've come across one of these disc camcorders in the wild when they were new. Nobody I knew had one. Just about everyone I knew went from tape direct to hard drive based camcorders (with those funky VOD/TOD files) or AVC-HD units with SD cards.
yeah I suspect these were almost entirely constrained to the "idk lol i bought whatever the guy at best buy recommended" set, or people who specifically wanted this *particular* feature of doing direct disc export.
@@CathodeRayDude Or Circuit City
Back in 2013 my high schools video lab still had a bunch of Mac Pros (The ones that look like the Power Mac G5) and a bunch of mini DV tape decks that if I remember correctly could copy footage at 2x speed. If this was the case I would have been super stoked because I’ve been through the horror that is transferring DV footage since 2004. We also had a Panasonic HD P2 based camera, and 3 canon DV cameras connected to a newtek tricaster for all your SD live video needs. Oh also DVD ram was heavily used in the professional audio industry. Before ProTools workstations were actually affordable, there was a standalone nonlinear audio workstation called a radar 24 that used DVD RAMdisks.
That peel was worth waiting an hour for :D
it didn't quite click that i set up a reveal and then performed it an *hour later*. god i'm killing it at this game
My fav disc format has always been the PSP UMD. The perma caddy made so much sense. I wasn't gonna be buying movies on the format but I always thought it was cool that they tried that too.
CRD: "15 minute record times are unusable"
16mm camera: "Hold my beer"
2:32 That ad, just stunning. Crying indeed.
Throughly enjoyed this! Disc-based camcorders are utterly bizarre things and this was a great look at them. I only ever used a relatives DVD camcorder once and found it utterly infuriating, going back to my MiniDV one was a dream, some of the things noted here definitely have that make sense!
I love it. It's a very good documentary about consumer video cameras. Thanks. I think this one could have bloated out into several hours of demonstration footage with a detailed explanation of each media specification.