Former master control operator and engineer from the 1990s here - thanks for taking me back in time! We had Sony BVW-40s (Betacam but not SP) before we expanded to a couple more SP units. They were built to be serviced- they came with service manuals in big binders written in endearing Engrish. We also had extender boards, so one of those circuit boards could be pulled out, slide the extender in its place, then slide the board into it while bench servicing if the procedure called for it. They use special screws called Totsu which is sort of like a flathead but has a little tension finder on it so it could hold the screw without being magnetic. I used to run around with a clipboard to take down the hour meter readings as I cleaned the heads on a weekly basis so we could track our preventative maintenance schedule by replacing the brushes and slip rings on the head, heads, pinch rollers, etc etc…. If you ever wondered how commercials used to work in the 90s, we had a Sony Betacart. It’s a giant refrigerator sized thing, with four side loading Betacam players, and a vertical bank of 40 cassette holders, and (the best part) a robotic elevator that whisked up and down jockeying the tapes. The tapes were barcoded and the whole thing was managed by a central computer terminal with a floppy disk drive that predated HD diskettes, so we had a finite stash of DD disks. OK, you’re bored by now….
So that scene from Hackers was actually accurate? Edit: if that was what you were doing in the 90's you probably weren't in the target audience for that flick, my bad for assuming. The scene itself is basically two people fighting remotely for control of the automated tape changer.
I used to run company backups to a robotic DLT-IV data tape library and watching and controlling the arm was the best part about changing the weekly backup tapes. It was eventually replaced by a 1U LTO library that was completely enclosed and not nearly as much fun (but much faster with fewer tapes).
Former master control and tape room op from 1993-2006 here. I can still hear that Betacart elevator in my sleep sometimes. Mostly it's in nightmares though because it would be the sound the damn thing made when it jammed, followed by the alarm. CHKZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP The Betacart was a huge step up from the old TCR machines, but it was temperamental in its own way.
@@xerothedarkstar Hackers was kind of accurate, first of all in the movie it was U-Matic, and a Betacart machine just used a clamp on the end of the robotic arm to grasp the cassette, not the overly complex but cool looking mechanism used in hackers.
Ugh, the humor is what makes me watch significantly less of this channel. I want to let my attention be drawn towards the subject matter, not the presenter.
I don't know how you do it, but you manage to make me watch a 40 minute video on something I never cared about once in my life, and you do it consistently. Never seen a channel keep up this quality before, its insane. I love your work man.
Man, you said a mouth full; about halfway in I thought, why the hell am I watching this; while I lived through the whole BETA VHS period, and remember the BETA and VHS sides of the video store, the fine points I just learned were never of concern to me; however, I watched every last second, then subbed. I do remember people saying BETA was better, but had both machines at one time or the other, and saw no noticeable difference in picture quality.
He gets me every single time. ‘I don’t care this much about dishwashers’ but then I sit though not one but two long dishwasher videos. I don’t care about this either. I’m gonna watch every minute anyhow.
As a pro video editor since the 90's I worked all the way from Betacam SP, M2, BetaSX and DigiBeta. Watching this was a joy. Nothing beats those buttons, the sounds of the transports and the fast winding. Many thanks for his video and great channel.
I worked for Game Creek Video (mobile television trucking company) until the end of 2008 and even though HD was pretty standard already, I remember the Betacam (or variation of it, I don't remember what was being used at the time as I was just an engineer, not part of the production).
@@AJSHOPE broadcast television was in transition to HD during 2008. Upgrading an entire park of cameras to HD was hell of investment. And keep in mind thousands of tapes in the archive that had to be accessible. Pretty sure a lot of big TV facilities still have dozens of those in operation.
@@electrictroy2010 CNN transitioned to HD in 2007 or so. In late ninetees high-end CRT TV were just too good to switch to HD TVs of that era. So while HD broadcast was possible it was not worth to ugrade yet.
One other *tiiny tiny little* difference between Betamax & Betacam for professional use is that Betacam has a timecode track, which is critical for professional video editing where the ability to reference any specific frame of video is a necessity.
(I mean other than audio replacement, video filtering, non-destructive trimming & clipping, and a full suit of closed captioning tools that TH-cam offers. ... But no TeleText support.)
@@TechnologyConnections Plus your edit deck has a provision for at least 2 players, and a recorder, with jog shuttle wheels for precise setting of edit points, which, in conjunction with the frame store on a lot of them, also allowed near seamless switching between different players, allowing you to have near zero blank frames between cuts. For the stand alone player you also got a wired remote, plugged in the back (and common across almost the entire range in connection and function, ignoring advanced features on older players without locking them up), and which gave you full control, including slow frame, jog, and also, on the later players with frame store on board, full variable speed slow motion, and reverse slow motion as well. Did horrid things with drive motor timing, in that it would have to play a frame, reverse to the previous frame, and drive forward to the next frame, all in the interval between frames. But you got that magic slow mo so beloved of sports commentators, allowing you to scrub forward and back for instant replay. Destroyed the tape fast though with it sitting there rubbing on a single spot though if you did it for long, so sports recordings they would have 2, overlapping the time in record for a minute or so, so you could rewind the one while the other recorded, so you always had at least the last 20 minutes of video to use for a blow by blow play. Then you need to speak about the digital recorders, exact same tape, exact same play mechanism, and with analogue playback ability on them, but recording could be fully digital, including full multichannel audio, with the audio tracks only there as guard band, so they got the audio 2 channel downmix if wanted.
I'm guessing that the timecode track was also a necessity for accurately cutting and splicing together the two-components-multiplexed-on-a-single-head video track that was mentioned.
The delightful light-up buttons have another purpose: When the deck is being controlled from outside (via the "Remote" DB9 connector on the back), such as during editing operations, the lights would indicate what the deck was being told to do. (I spent a summer working in a video studio at the tail end of the linear editing era, and we had Panasonic M-II and S-VHS editing decks being controlled from editing software on a Windows desktop; the array of blinkenlights on the decks during an edit run was mesmerizing).
There was a company in Oxford that used MII. I'd never seen it before. When they were sent BetaSP tapes from their clients, some runner was sent to me to dub every tape from BetaSP to their portable MII deck.
As one of my mentors said, after I'd half-apologised for spending some time and effort adding LED indicators to a simple split power supply: more indicators is never a mistake.
Ahh M-II. I did a co-op in school at a studio that had m2 machines and an Amiga with a video toaster. It could control the m2 machine and record individual frames (was neat to watch it rewind, play and briefly blink the record led to record the frame) from lightwave 3D. Had lots of fun setting up overnight renders with that!
I worked at the phone company research arm (Bellcore) during the early MPEG days (as in, back when it took hours per minute to compress mpeg). We had a whole rack of these recorders so we could have the original input and compare it to the compressed levels. That's when I learned how to use the color bars.
@@Wtfinc probably masked by low quality TV's. captured digitally it's obvious to see the differences, but i would imagine on a 15-20in CRT set, you probably would have a harder time picking out all the differences
This was cool. I actually didn't know anything about how betacam worked. Funny story, when I was a kid, I used to record my Commodore 64 onto VHS and I could never understand why the quality looked so bad on playback. Because with regular TV recordings, which usually don't display small text and fine pixel arrangements, I simply couldn't tell that the quality was lower.
Totally part of what keeps my attention actually eyes on watching his videos, instead of putting them on and fiddling with a project at my desk, gotta pay attention to catch those quick snarky quips one liners puns and straight up trolls he slips in both where they fit perfectly and when you least expect them 🤣
I was a cameraman during the mid 80s. We were using the Betacam cameras that cost $70000 each. When shooting outdoor, we had to carry the cameras along during lunchtime. We were forbidden to leave the cameras in the vehicle. The Betacam PAL tape ran for 20 minutes only. So at 19 minutes recording point, I had to alert my other partner to focus on the subject. Because I need to replace it with fresh blank tape. Those were the days.
I was a shooter when DVCAM first arrived (was actually part of the testing for Sony). Try shooting in the field with $95,000 on your shoulder! I bought one of a LATER generation of Sony DVCAM camcorders several years ago for $300 (and now I'm on XDCAM)..
Dude… that’s nuts! The most expensive thing I’ve ever held was a 20k medical device at a hospital that they let me look at after my surgery, and I didn’t even want to touch it… I couldn’t even imagine carrying around a Porsche all day, worrying I might drop it or something! Haha I never realized that those news cameras were so expensive! I knew they’d cost a lot, but I figured maybe like 10k or so… Did you know how expensive it was when you started, or find out later? Or was your boss like “That’s a 70,000$ camera, and if you break it you’d better flee the country.”? Haha
@@DanteYewToob In our case, the Sony tech rep showed the declared value when it cleared Customs. All told, the two camcorders and the editing deck cost more than the station had cost to put on the air!
I'm an engineer and worked for RCA in the 1990's. Looking back at this stuff, it just seems, depressing to be honest. All this junk we worked on, all replaced by digital video encoding. I wouldn't want to go back to these bad old days. It's just all so enormously primitive. The idea we had analogue, and I remember when the MP2 format was finalized. In the early 1990's, we needed a million dollar machine to convert analog into MP2 digital. Now that runs on a $75 toy machine.
@@SoloPilot6 DVCAM cameras were not worth the same as Betacam cameras no where near. The whole reason the BBC went with DVCAM was because they were roughly than half price of what the SP Betas and DigiBetas had cost even If it was no where near a good as DigiBeta and not quite as good as analogue SP.
Runtime really was a major factor. My grandmother was an early adopter and she sold her Sony Betamax and got a VHS VCR specifically because it would let her record CBS's entire Daytime Soap block while she was at work: The Young and the Restless, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow. (God I watched so much of that crap as a kid) The only other person I knew who had a VCR before most people did; My uncle Mike had thought the VCR was just a gimmick until the RCA VBT200 and he realized it could record live sports broadcasts and he got one not long after and they were still using that same VCR into 2000s!
Except in Europe, where a typical L-750 Beta tape runs for 3 hours 15 minutes where a E-180 VHS of the time was shorter at 3 hours. (Both formats had longer tapes, but these were the most popular in the early 1980s).
@@video99couk Of course, but it would prove too little too late. I admit I don’t know much about how things played out in the European market; Here in the States VHS was already outselling BetaMAX 3 to 1 by 1980 and it had become clear that VHS was going to be the dominant format. BetaMAX sales would drop off precipitously, and the format limped along for a few more years but it was just a battle of attrition, the war had long been won.
Audio/Video-philes often gloss over the size/recording time 'feature'. Don't get me wrong, I can (sometimes) tell the difference between an MP3 and a FLAC file at my desktop with my good headphones. But in the car? On a plane? On a phone? (Even with headphones) Outside a studio in general? No way. Space is still at a premium. 128kbps MP3 is FINE. Even now that space is 'cheap' there is still a good use for lossy-formats as long as you ALSO keep the loss-less ones. Back when 'going outside' and 'social' things were regular occurrences, a 720p portable projector and a 512GB MicroSD card with 600 movies on it, transcoded down to 720p, was a PERFECT way to set up a guerilla-drive-in movie. Was the video quality 'perfect'? Absolutely not. Did it matter when you were projecting onto the wall of a building? Nope.
@@SudaNIm103 I dunno how it really played out either since I was a primary schooler, but as a kid who grew up in '80s England, I only have vague recollections of knowing 2 people who owned Betamax recorders and 1 dude with a Video 2000 that he used well into the '90s, with everyone else having VHS.
Fun fact: One other use of Betacam (& UMatic) was to (by way of extra equipment) record audio to Betacam tape as a PCM digital audio signal, as a precursor to DAT, in the process of mastering early CDs ... With the digital audio sample rate of 44.1kHz (that we still use today) set in part by the constraints of recording onto video equipment. So if you stumble across a Beta tape that won't play in a Betamax/2/3 or Betacam/SP/Digital/SX/IMX/HD/SR player ... it might just contain a WAV file!
@@theEagleBeagle Yes, Umatic players are all mechanical marvels, and all very heavy. 40kg of steel stampings in them, like somebody took an entire typewriter factory and poured it into a box.
Finally! Someone attempts to clear up the Betamax vs Betacam confusion. The amount of times I've had to explain that Max and Cam are entirely different formats is too damn high
The 'Number' of times NOT the amount of times NUMBER refers to QUANTITY / COUNT AMOUNT refers to WEIGHT Undertake an extensive reading program to better educate yourself and improve your knowledge of the English language
@@andrew_koala2974 Amount is a totally acceptable word to use in this case. It doesn't just apply to weight, not sure where you got that from. Amount is generally used to describe uncountable values; number countable ones. And since how many times you have dealt with the same question isn't something most people would keep track of, "amount" seems like a totally valid word to use.
I cannot imagine how much work this was for you, but seeing you seamlessly transition between current digital technology, and Betamax, VHS, and Betacam, really great work! Thank you so much for your work.
Fun fact: Professional Beta (DigiBeta & HDcam) was still going strong in the 2000s, but died very suddenly - not because hard drives were better yet, but because the Tsunami in Japan destroyed Sony production facilities & created a worldwide shortage of Beta tapes. Post houses had to figure out other ways to ship masters to stations. People were hoarding tapes for special projects that absolutely needed them, especially large tapes (hard drives were quite small & expensive for lengthy broadcast masters, especially HD data sizes). It was an interesting time in the industry. I remember having to call around to different shops and pay THEM to make a master for us just so we could use their remaining tape stash.
I built a 2110 playout facility. Yet we had to put in the IMX and SR decks as we still have the odd advertiser who sends a tape, or the SD reruns for the afternoon that still mostly are on SX.
Ha, in the comment he's talking about 2110 which is where you use data cables and network switches to send video around a facility rather than traditional video cables and video routers. Yet despite that change some customers still use tapes, in this case Sony IMX and HDCAM-SR which were both successors to Betacam.
For the record.... We actually STILL use BetaSP in broadcast. A LOT of news archive video is on it (and UMATIC!). Plus, when we still ran master control locally (it's hubbed out now), we got a LOT of paid programs coming in on Beta. In fact, we JUST removed that Beta deck not that long ago, even though old Master Control has been out of use for about 4 years now.
I feel sorry for you :( It's been pretty much dead at the network level for years. Even tne archives are digital. But as i look behind me in the edit room, i see a row of betacam tapes. Lol
We still have this exact model of deck racked up, and a stack of them in storage for spares/parts. And a room full of every imaginable tape format of archived video from the decades gone by.
The analog mechanisms needed to make it work at all is astonishing. Man, digital era solved not only the quality, but simplified everything down to a micro level. Also there is a happy bug crawling around at 11:35
If you only knew just the insane level of those microprocessors that accomplished this... The complexity wasn't removed. it was multiplied and outsourced to another industry :P
Processors have advantage of being printable using a photomask & etching. Reduces cost vs. complicated analog board filled with discrete resisters, potentiometers, etc
Digital format is also easier to edit downto the pixel level. That was never possible with analog. Digital is also more compact: Handheld video recorders in a phone vs. bulky S-VHSC camcorders
I started working in a tv studio this month and there's still a beta VCR in use, a much newer one with mpeg encoding (MSW-A2000P). On the first week they asked me to digitalize an old Betacam L cassette from '86 and with me being born in '95 and grown up with cartoons recorded on VHS from satellite TV i was absolutely blown away for how good the signal looked. Something i never witnessed with consumer analog PAL
The DVW and MSW-A2000P decks are brilliant. So much stuff very high end technology in there for the time. The A means it's compatible with all the previous analogue formats going right back to Betacam Oxide (before SP) as well as digital Betacam SX and Digital Betacam/MPEG IMX formats. Necessary for a pro TV station with a huge back-catalogue of tapes. There was a good reason those high-end machines cost $100,000 when new.
You know those DVDs you buy or rent with favorite shows like Star Trek TNG or Seinfeld or Friends? ALL of those shows were edited & stored on Betacam SP. Basically DVD quality on analog tape.
@@electrictroy2010All 3 of those shows were shot on 35mm film. They were probably transferred onto Beta SP back in the day for broadcast. But since they still have the film reel, they can be scanned well past 4k today.
Pal was an amazing standard. The 25fps was closer to film so movies always looked better than NTSC. Pal, being the newer format also had 100 extra lines. I got to watch a straight from BBC archive transfer of a tom baker episode of dr who and the quality was amazing. Interesting bit of trivia. BBC use at least a half dozen tape systems over 40 years before settling on Betacam. The most terrifying used a metal tape... which when running full speed, you couldn't be in the room. If the tape snapped if would kill you.
@@chrissyclark7836 The BBC never used metal tape for video recording. I suspect you're thinking of VERA, which is often erroneously claimed to have used metal tape, but actually used regular recording tape, one reel of which still survives on its distinctive metal spool at the Science Museum in London. The dangerous machines were the audio recorders which used steel wire running at high speed.
As a electronic technician for over 30 years, I have worked on these machines and on camcorder as well. Your video is worth listening, it is a reference !
My college media department used Betacam for everything. I remember the nightmare over-the-shoulder camcorder that took the full size Betacam carts. The student editing decks though where all S-VHS with a single Betacam to bring all their footage over. But I was so sorry to see you didn’t have the jog-dial interface with the Betacam unit. Those were soooooo smooth and satisfying. Your scrubbing through the footage alone brought back so many memories. ❤
We used three quarter inch tape, separate camera and a separate decks, it was so cumbersome back then and weighted a ton, I can still feel the deck strap on my shoulder. I'm glad we live in the future now.
@@grandetaco4416 And every… single… battery pack… had memory issues so the “up to 60 mins” of life meant we usually carried four or five for a one hour shoot. :( Yes, modern battery tech is amazing and I am so jealous that half the students probably use handheld camcorders or cell phones now. So jealous. Hehe.
I remember high school days, Panasonic S-VHS camcorders slung over shoulders, editing on Panasonic decks with the editing controller's jog shuttle... Twenty-some-odd years later, when editing videos on a PC, I find I really miss that convenience. Maybe someday I'll invest in one for PC. We had one Sony Hi8 Handycam, and one Sony Hi8 recorder deck, but the school didn't want to invest in the hardware to connect the two for true Hi8 editing. Because of the inconvenience of transferring to another format, most of the students refused to use the Handycam or even touch Hi8 at all. While they do staged scenes with the cameras on tripods, I'm filming a semi-dramatic chase scene on the Cross-Country trail with a palmcorder!
@@dashcamandy2242 Years ago, I had a Contour Design Shuttle Pro which wasn’t quite the smooth jogwheel the Sony unit had, but was worlds better than my then best option the Kensington TurboRing. (That ring was an amazing jog-dial but Kensington discontinued it… And the Orbit Pro’s just wasn’t the same.) So you might check that out. I have no idea where mine ended up. :p
Fascinating when you swapped the video from Beta to VHS, I got instantly hit with a wave of nostalgia. A lot of the TV I watched as a kid was on VHS tapes, and a lot of those were hand-me-downs from my Aunt who had recorded a bunch of kids shows from the TV for my older cousin. Seeing those VHS artefacts with the blocky colours and hard edges is big nostalgia!
My favorite part of editing video on BetaSP back in the day - the Jog/Shuttle wheel. That was so cool, scrolling frame by frame or bouncing around. Really satisfying.
some VHS machines eventually got jog wheels, but man it does not look very good to try and go "frame by frame" (well... actually field by field) on VHS 😂
I love the format wars. You have groups of engineers pulling out all the stops to out-do their competitors and it ultimately brings more value to the consumers. Brilliant minds at work that aren't making weapons of war or having to solve some unsolvable societal problem... just answer the questions of can Dad can record his entire football game and can Nan record one of her stories while watching another.
man this video unlocked the weirdest childhood memory, my father was a reporter for local news and in the mid 90s to very early 2000s he was using a UVW-1800 (before upgrading to a DNW-A225 in the early 2000s) and seeing it in this video i can distinctly remember as a toddler i once put a pop tart in the cassette drawer 🤣
I have to say something! The script, editing and the overall production of this video is astonishing. Having followed this channel for multiple years, it doesn't surprise me, but I hope others can see all the work behind making such a video. I'm only 17m44s in the video for now, but I'm hoping to see some outtakes or bloopers at the end. I love those!
The incredible amount of editing it must have taken to line up the the switching between the digital/VHS/Betamax/Betacam signals is well appreciated. Thank you!
Thank you so much... this was an indie-documentary tour de force! I'd forgotten how relaxing and enjoyable it is to just sit and listen to you talk over my head about fantastically ingenious consumer engineering!
That particular Betacam machine didn't just demux the chroma, it digitized Y/C for timebase correction, which was required for genlocking to studio sync on the REF VIDEO input. It also had drop out compensation, if the tape had a dropout the DOC would fill it in with previously captured samples. That's what a lot of the boards in there are for. Demuxing is essentially "free" when you're doing TBC, you just read the Pb/Pr samples out in parallel at 1/2 the sample rate.
Betacam more complicated than genlock, TBC, Y/C...remarkable difference is separate recording of Y, R-Y & B-Y by an ingenious method of CTDM - Compressed Time Division Multiplex. So no more cross color distortions, other spurious artifacts or reduced Y-levels, since Y info now occupies one full track while R-Y & B-Y time compresed & occupies 1/2 ,1/2 divided next line. Video head has separate chips for Y & Chroma components.
I worked with U-Matics, Betacam, and even GASP! Ampex VPR-6, I loved them all. Ampex was my favorite, it was oldtimer when I was working in broadcast, but we still had TV shows on these tapes, so it was used. Learning to thread tape on them was a scientific achievment :) I enjoyed this video, it made me go back in time. There are lot of details that comes with more expensive devices, we had Sony BVW-75P machines, they were crazy good and were my daily use machines.
I started editing on Ampex VPR-2B 1 inch machines. Threading them was 'fun'. What wasn't fun was if someone let the tape play off the end and you had to thread it from the take up reel! That was MUCH harder. I was working for a broadcaster when Betacam was introduced. They came to demo it to us. What was really impressive was that colour (South African spelling!) bars off tape looked like straight from the generator - absolutely clean divisions between the bars. Later I worked on Sony BVW-75P and BVW-65P (player version) in a 3 machine edit suite. It was amazing how many generations you could copy and still have good quality.
Professional Video Engineer here. I loved this video. Amazing content. I learned on Betacam decks. They were amazing. And they were used well into the 2000s. To answer the question about the offset heads, I'm pretty sure, if I remember right, that the Chroma and luma heads being offset in the record didn't matter because they were also offset in playback. So the Chroma is still reading simultaneously to the luma at the same spot where it was written. I don't think that there was color information being recorded in the blanking interval. That doesn't jive with my understanding of how analog video worked. A few more things: We just called this stuff "Beta" and left out the Cam part in the professional space. We all knew it was Betacam, not Betamax. And we called the tapes "Beta 90" and "Beta 30" The original Betacam only died because the tsunami in Japan wiped out the factory that made the tapes. I remember this happening. Suddenly no one could get any tapes and they were selling for thousands of dollars on eBay because everyone was desperate for them. Then Sony announced they would not rebuild the factory because it was a dying format and not worth it. And overnight the entire professional video industry was forced to finally let go of our beloved Betacam for good. Another thing to note: the Chroma channel is derived from a 4:2:2 sub sample in component video. So it essentially has half the information as the luma channel. That's why you only needed one head to record it. You were recording half the information. And for tape size, the Beta 30 tapes being smaller was absolutely essential. When doing eng work and putting the tape into a shoulder mounted camera, this smaller tape was a god send. And in a television studio, where you may be storing hundreds of half hour TV shows, the smaller 30 min tapes were ideal for lowering storage. We used to have pallets of tapes in the professional space. If you only needed 30 min for your sitcom, having a smaller tape for it was much much better than storing even VHS sized cassettes. And finally, if you see this comment, I have some Beta Decks that still work and have the jog wheels. It was great to see how much you loved the satisfying feeling of operating a professional beta deck. You should try it with the jog wheel! It's a joy. I will gladly loan you one to play around with.
I lived through the VHS - BETA wars as a kid and ended up professionally producing broadcast video using U-Matic then eventually those 1800 machines. I preferred using those to cut video over the DVCam decks we upgraded to. Something you might find cool to try is entering the Service Mode on that 1800. You can activate every single solenoid and motor in the unit to prove each is working. I sometimes had to enter that mode to get a stubborn tape to eject. Still have one in my basement destined for the e-recycler I’m afraid. Anyhow thanks for the video.
Pretty simple to line up separate video recordings in the editor timeline on separate video tracks and just chop them around, time consuming, but simple.
I worked at a videocassette/CD/audiotape manufacturing plant in the late 90s. We had literally hundreds of recorders in racks for the "Normal Speed Duplication" area, pulling off of the masters in the "Digital Betacam" format that literally just recorded video on hundreds of tapes at a time. We also had a "High Speed Duplication" area that worked very differently, but was also neat.
hearing about how color is kinda cheated to work really explains both how tapes looked and how tape errors look, with the colors becoming separated from each other. and it sounds like betacam basically pulled an old NES music trick out of the hat, recording rapidly in alternation to cheat 'two things' out of one thing's room of things. Also, I'm realizing now that I've seen Betacams in operation on tv shows, when a TV studio is pulling up footage, fastforwarding it, etc. the sound brought back memories. .. how have I never noticed that Large and Small have the same initials as Long and Short???
In TV Betacam tapes that would be played on air always had to have bars and tones so we could use a TBC to correct the colors, most local shows (churches) didn't understand the purpose and would just steal color bars from some vhs tape and stick it on the beginning on the tape so they weren't from the equipment that shot the video so correcting to those colors never worked and usually meant we'd have to stop an ingest and find a frame to try and color correct with.
@@gmirwin yeah, they are supposed to be calibrated to the tape, both audio and video. You use the scopes to align the colors, set white and black levels, and audio level. Bars go into a leader board which most people have seen as the countdown. That final sudden beep is supposed to be exactly 30 frames from the first frame of the show, which helps you start the tape exactly where it's suppose to.
Beautifully done! Also, the best part about the Betacam SP VTRs (the DVWM2000 and similar models) was that each of the channels - Video, Audio, and Time Code were individually editable whether manually, or remote. You could mark-in, mark-out and record over the channel or channels you want to edit and for the duration - it was freaking amazing! When I was editing on these monsters, it felt as though I was operating a nuclear silo, LOL.
Aaaahhhhh YES!!! The old "Split Edit" using that monster-sized multi-machine linear editing controller you could buy separate from Sony !!! I can't believe I've been doing this since 1987. OMG! Where did all the time go! V
It's amazing how pervasive that myth about adult content is; I've seen it crop up multiple times even in techy circles, even in circles that generally know about their tech history. I ofc know better (your videos on the topic being a reason why, though I had familiarity with it before then) and I knew Betacam was a separate thing already - but I didn't know too much about it until now. Excellent video as ever, love the snark. That Betacam VCR is an absolute monster, I love it. The quality of footage it records made my jaw drop - I don't know why, it is indeed broadcast quality - but that night and day comparison with Betamax is insane. It really looks incredible for analogue video tape.
What’s interesting about this myth is that in The Netherlands, the myth is instead told about Video 2000 - the third format, created by Philipsm that barely anyone outside The Netherlands has heard about. Like with Betamax, it is unfounded.
@@gymnasiast90 That's really interesting. I only know about Video 2000 because of the old format war retrospective Alec did, talking about how it was from a North American perspective and so wouldn't cover that. I live in the UK and I don't know exactly how the war went down here but I think it was just VHS vs. Beta here mainly - and I think VHS even more thoroughly crushed it here. And yeah no doubt for the exactly same reasons - Philips had no say on what content was distributed on the format - it isn't true.
Thank you for setting the record straight on this. It clears up some confusion for me. I edited video at a local TV news station in the late aughts and was thoroughly mystified by the Betacam tapes everywhere. They had the larger/older tapes in their archives, and the smaller/newer HD tapes in contemporaneous use. No one was knowledgeable enough to explain to me the history of the distinction between Betamax and Betacam, or that there even _was_ a distinction.
Something that is more impressive than a Betacam is just how long Sony's U-Matic was used in TV production. Well into 2000s. There are U-Matic tapes out there with promotional material for Revenge of the Sith (2005), and other feature films that were released in theatres in 2008 or later.
It’s amazing how long U-matic persisted. I’m kinda surprised it wasn’t repurposed as a digital video format using metal tape and modern head designs - in theory it would have been easier to do than with Beta, but mechanically the 3/4” decks were just much more complicated and expensive to produce, so I can see why Sony held off until the tech made it possible to achieve with 1/2” tape. A 3/4” digital deck could have been delivered years sooner, but would have been hellishly expensive and the costs would have never come down much even as the electronics got cheaper because the mechanisms would have remained expensive and bulky. They were probably also worried about a digital, VHS-derived format stealing their thunder.
My university's media department was using U-Matic SP until around 2000 or so when they finally went digital. I got a tour of their facilities and asked why they weren't using Betacam SP. Their only answer was "media services provides these tapes, so that is the format we use"
Well the "U" loading mechanism was still used by Sony for decades, even in their VHS deck they ironically made around 92... VHS loading is usually an "M" so that's where that silly name comes from, i think...
@@freeculture That's true. Unlike Sony, JVC didn't mind deviations from their original VHS patent. There were all sorts of loading mechanisms variants on VHS devices. As for Sony, in their mind the Betamax (not referring to their U-Matic) was perfect by the virtue of being THEIR design, therefore (Sony) didn't allowed any sort of engineering freedom for third party manufacturers of it's PERFECT design when it came to Betamax's tape transport. Sony was, and still is a weirdo company when it comes to these sort of things*. *Control freaks😠
You asked about the time offset from the Betacam offset heads: It's really a non-issue once you think about it, because the offset that's put in when recording is automatically undone by the same offset during playback. This is simply due to the fact that the same heads are used for both record and playback. I'm assuming that Sony was careful to make the positional offset between the heads the same on all their heads, so tracks recorded on one machine would play back correctly on any other Betacam machine. Hope that's clear. Thanks for an informative video. I'd always wondered what Betacam was all about, and never knew that it started out using the same Betamax cassette. BTW, loved the TOS Star Trek clips.
Further, I think that the issue of the heads being separated is compensated for by having the following head offset slightly higher so that it hits the edge of the tape at the same time as the leading head in the helical scan.
My father had a huge collection of beta tapes when he passed away (as well as a betamax machine), and some of the movie titles were suspiciously... modern? We quickly found out that every single Beta tape was... an "adult film" that he had later just re-labeled with popular movie titles. My mom didn't find the humor in this, but I thought it was HILARIOUS. Damn. I miss you, Dad!
Oh that's DOUBLE hilarious that people thought Beta DIDN'T have dirty movies! Ha! I'd bet money that Dad collected those partly just for that reason. Omg that's so funny. I can't wait to tell my sister. Ha! Dad is still throwing punchlines from the grave. Love you, Dad! 😂
Dad's should let us know that they are cool before it is too late. I found a bunch of weed, porn and 2 guns in my dad's trunk... damn dad. Wtf were you into?
This video isn’t pointless, because lot of us who worked in television broadcasting used Betacam well into the mid 2000s! I used to work in tape editing for press releases from colleges. We used the Sony Betacam VTR for video recordings, and we also archived video on DVDs or digital files on computer!
It’s honestly kind of wild how long Betacam was around for. We were still shooting on it in high school (along with S-VHS) in 2006 and at the TV station I worked at we were still receiving some paid programming on Betacam tapes as late as 2014.
Think about the cost to convert the format for a newsroom. You'd have to convert cameras and edit bays at the same time to avoid dubbing the tapes. Betacam probably lived as long as it did because until HD, the newer formats didn't offer that much improvement. As long as they could buy tapes and parts, they kept the old ones running. And as the well-financed stations replaced their equipment, they donated their old stuff to high schools and cable-access stations.
when i was in grade school im so amazed at how the mechanical part of both vhs and betamax, my father used to fix them back in the day & i'm so eager to help him fixing the timing issue of the gears. great video as always.
Even into the mid 2000s HBO in NYC used betacam. My cousin worked there before I got into the industry and actually had the job of digitizing many of HBOs betacam tapes. Fun time checking out all the crazy gear they had.
Awesome video Alec! I've worked in the broadcast industry from 2004 to 2019 and saw the transition from Betacam to Digibeta to XDCam (tape on a disc 😂) to no tapes at all. I can totally relate to your enjoyment of operating the beige machine. I've worked with them a ton and they really are a joy to operate. Especially the more expensive models with jog buttons and other gadgets. Betacam has been THE standard in broadcast for many, many years. The S size tapes were used in cameras mostly, where the L tapes were used for editing, mastering and delivery. I remember the days of the bi-weekly delivery of a box of 10 master tapes to the television station for our daily show. Yes, someone had to drive down to the television station to BRING them a box of tapes. Awesome times. XDCam discs were the standard for capturing video for a few years. Right after tape and before we all went solid state. Strange format with a magneto-optical disc in a very cool looking cartridge. Maybe you should do a video about this format once? Thanks for the great content Alec! As usual.
I was in TV around that same time as well, when digital video storage was getting cheaper by the day and you could see the end of the road for Betacam, but it seemed like it was never coming and you'd be using those chunky boys forever.
We were using mastering on D2 tapes when I came in in the mid-90s, then we switched to DigiBeta. That transition period from analog video to digital video in the editing world was the wild west, man. Companies and tech came and went all the time as the industry tried to figure out what worked. It's fun to go back and look at industry magazines from back then, if only to look at mpeg1 rendering speed benchmarks that measured in minutes per frame instead of frames per second.
@@CantankerousDave I have read that for Video Cd they actually used an operator pointing out the important parts of each frame to the encoder. Maybe only for the first demo discs where they wanted the best quality.
I recently started collecting Betacam and Betacam SP (hoping to get to the other formats soon) and I was hoping you’d make a video about this topic! Thanks for this! It was very informative and enjoyable. The amount of effort you put into your videos is great and is very much appreciated. This channel is one of my favorites.
I worked at a Canadian master control where we had decks for news feeds, commercials, and programs. We used SP, Digi, SX, and HDCAM (SR). My fave is when we started doing HD in primetime. As a Canadian station, we'd air one program live from FOX off of satellite, while recording a current program from NBC to air right after. As soon as the credits were rolling, the recording was stopped, racked and ready for the top of the hour. Fun times, until we got non-linear ingest.
Gun to my head, I would absolutely say that in the picture quality comparison, VHS-SP looks better than Beta II: the picture is slightly more aliased, but still sharper (especially between foreground and background), the colors a bit cooler and pleasing (though more accurate? no idea), but these are the sort of differences I could entirely believe being owned to the mechanical variations in an analogue video tape format, and again, even the VHS-DVD combo "feels" a lot more modern than a seemingly ancient Beta recorder (even if that difference probably doesn't matter here). Great video as usual, thank you!
BetacamSP completely wipes the floor with VHS. Utterly no comparison, when you see it set up properly. Far less noise on BetacamSP, hugely better luma bandwidth and as for chroma bandwidth we're on another planet.
I completely agree... I also think maybe he should of used a betamax-i player for testing and maybe even tried to find an old 2 head VCR. By the time VHS was discontinued, it was common to find 6 head vcr (4 read and 2 record)
The color on VHS is clearly worse in my opinion, it's just slightly over-saturated; when compared to the normal camera footage, Beta II is clearly the more color accurate. The difference is especially obvious when you compare skin colors between the two; VHS almost makes it look like he's in redface lmao.
I'm not going to get into an internet-argument over it, but I find the VHS in that comparison to be SUPER over-sharp. If I had to choose, I'd still go with the VHS, but it definitely has that "CRANK every post-processing knob to 11 to make it 'look better' in the Tv store" look. It's like going to a buddies house and seeing how bad their Tv looks, then going into the settings and seeing that they have brightness, contrast, and 'color' set to 100% with every filter still set to the default 'on'. (Yes I am one of those ass-holes that will immediately start color-calibrating your Tv without being asked to. Out-of-the-box settings on cheap Tvs are a criminal offence.)
In Brazil Beta was very uncommon, but here in São Paulo (the biggest city) at the then economic center on Paulista Avenue there was one rental Store that only had beta. It took me a time to realize why: many movies were Japanese: Japan Consulate was on the same building or very near I can't remember. I deduced that Japanese movies were common in Beta.
I got into making home videos as a kid and eventually worked my way into the movie industry. As a teen/young adult in the late 90’s, I always wanted to get my hands on betacam equipment for my projects. It never came to fruition. Still, I love these old machines and droll over them like the teenage film dork that I was.
I'm just gonna keep leaving you more comments in hopes that it further boosts you up in the algorithm. Your content is so informative, so concise, so well produced and you sincerely deserve all the success you've worked so hard to attain. I can't thank you enough for everything you do and I hope you're happy and content in your life. You're a real gem, brotha. You have such a way with pulling me out of the dumps and I can't thank you enough for just being you. ❤️
I want to like seriously hang out at his house or visit him. I feel like maybe he's too "lazy", his self described adjective-not mine, to go out and do anything or have enough fun, maybe I'm wrong, but I wish I had his phone number because I also live in the Chicago region, Elkhart, IN to be more precise. Can you help me find him like his phone number or something? Thanks! I'm serious:)
This takes me back… in the late 80s I worked at a video duplication facility. We didn’t handle Betamax (it was already dead) but did everything else: 3/4”, Betacam, 1” type C, and even occasionally 2” Quad and 1/2” EIAJ! I labeled all the VHS tapes that came out of duplication, boxed them up and shipped them out. Years later I became a producer for the video production side of the company. Good times.
This made me so nostalgic for editing with Betacam. I once edited a minute thirty package, with reporter track and b-roll, in the ten minutes before it aired. No ingesting, no rendering, just set your ins and hit edit. Granted, if you made a mistake in the edit, fixing it was a nightmare. But for straight up speed, nothing beat the Betacam.
I loved deck to deck editing and as the mechanics were really solid you could work quickly. Lost interest in it professionally when everything went non-linear as the ‘process’ wasn’t really there
Dawno nie oglądałem tak dobrze zrobionego, tak pełnego informacji a jednocześnie tak spokojnego, merytorycznego filmu. Pełen profesjonalizm. Wielski szacunek i pozdrowienia.
I love dispelling these cultural myths with historical and technical deep dives. It's amazing how certain confident assertions can live on and distort culture. Great video!
I spent a lot of time with those decks in an edit bay preparing for the morning news between 1am-3am in the early 2000’s. The edit controller that we used to control two at once was next level. We would play those decks like instruments. We also had a giant automated machine made by Odetics that would keep four of those decks loaded up full of commercials for master control. I had always been into recording equipment previously, and getting to go work in broadcast was a dream come true at the time. So many cool toys and smart engineers. I left just as everything was converting to digital.
wow, so I'm picturing one of those robotic tape libraries for server data backups. then I start thinking about the synchronization needed. I have edited both 3/4 inch and betacam SP, and IIRC Betacam SP had to roll the tape back 3 seconds, then start playing. (I saw the technician working on one of them and it took three seconds to go from where the drum was just barely skimming the tape, (to prevent wear on the tape while giving you a freeze frame, to having the tape fully wrapped around the drum.) The complexity of having all those tapes perefectly cueued, (Probably used timecode, or a single frame signal) starting them rolling exactly three seconds before cutting to that deck, then rewinding back to cue, must have been a sight to behold.
@@timdowning3600 5 sec preroll happens on edits, so the decks have enough time to synchronize properly. There is also preview feature so you can preview cuts before actually recording anything. Play function works as youd expect, like on any other vtr. Betacam decks also have advanced head controls so you can fast forward or play backwards without ruining image.
That's a nice Betacam unit, it was heavily used in broadcast studios and professional video editing. FYI the hours meter data shown has to be multiplied X10 in order to see the real time in hours. You can also connect it to your monitor through the composite video out labelled as "Super" (Superimpose), that will display extended information from the menus :)
I worked in television for over 40 years and working with Beta cam an SP in the 90's was great. The Betacam SP camcorders with chips instead of tubes were the end all in analog before the digital transition. Your video made me think back to a time when media was still enjoyable. By the time I retired two years ago the pressure to make sure things were posted on the station's social media took away from the time to make sure you had the very best product that could be put on the air. That pressure and Covid made me decide to retire at my retirement age instead of working on several more years. Directing the morning program which was very enjoyable became a burden due to the pandemic. However I am a fan of your channel due to your diverse content and also growing up in the Chicago area. From some of your earlier videos on the Chevy Bolt I recognized the expressways and it brought back some nice memories just like watching the video on Betacam of my time in the late 20th Century. Keep doing the good work.
Riiiiight, I think you've just helped answer a weird question I've had for years. When I was a kid (I'm in the UK) I always wondered why American shows always seemed to have really saturated colours, and I think it's because when the tapes came over they likely needed re-taping and the saturation gets doubled, whereas local to the UK shows wouldn't be re-taped so never got doubled!
A lot of US shows came over to the UK on colour film, that's how they were shot (unlike in the UK where for cheapness we shot a lot of stuff straight to video tape).
@@owensmith7530 it was quite common to film UK shows on film when outside (cameras were MASSIVE) and on video inside. There's even an esoteric reference to this in a monty python sketch. NTSC was the butt of many insults, with many british broadcasting engineers jokingly referring to NTSC as "Never The Same Colour Twice".
I've been watching since the traffic light videos or so and it never ceases to amaze me how good a job you do. This video is fantastic, dense, straightforward, and uses a couple tricks that are just neato. Thank you for everything.
Awesome video, brings me back 2003 when I was taking video editing in film school and we learned to use these exact Betacam SP units, I was always amazed at how precise and responsive they were when integrated with our Avid editing PCs and it was amazing seeing such clear video from a tape.
I used Betacam SP machines from early 90s until early 2000s. Beautiful machines to use, especially with a jog and shuttle controller. Ability to receive rs232 commands and output SMPTE timecode meant that I could control the machine from a computer and also synchronise all components of my shows. Just hearing its familiar sounds brings back so many memories ❤ Thank you for making this
Quality content as always. This channel never disappoints. Every video is a hit. Never a dull moment. The editing is top-notch, the scripting is fantastic (even the part that wasn't scripted), the humor is great and not overdone. Just everything about this channel is fantastic. Really a cut above the rest.
Oh yes, finally a video about my most favorite broadcast tape format. 😄😍 For everyone interested in seeing Betacam SP captured in its complete component glory (minus TH-cam’s compression), my channel holds a bunch of old recordings from a german TV program called “NBC GIGA” (which was basically our ZDTV/TechTV/G4 for anyone still familiar with that). I personally own one UVW and three PVW decks from Sony which I use to digitize and preserve all those original archival recordings from 20 years ago. ☺
Hi, great video! brings me back to the times I used to handle these daily! (2004-2014) (mostly digital betacam, though, digibeta). One note: Digital betacam was not superseded by the SX or IMX version, these were cheaper alternatives that used higher compression rates (even using mpeg-2), mostly for news gathering where cost of cameras was more important than picture quality.
This video has taken my memories back to my first job maintaining and operating Betacam machines. I was one of the guys that have done repairings and preventive works in Betacam Digital and SP machines. They weighted a LOT and were a dust magnet. About the cassette size, in fact, one decisive factor for the Betacam success was the S cassette size. Betacam professional camcorders for the news production were the smallest (something that for Umatic was unthinkable)
Before Betacam, professional "portable" video for news usually meant that the poor sound man had to lug a "portable" Umatic or even a portable C format recorder (open reel) on a shoulder strap or on a cart. Oh and a big weight in NiCad batteries. Quicker in post, but a lot bulkier and heavier then 16mm film.
Back in early 80s, I visited a television station studio for local abc broadcasts and news. They had a few betacam machines with those large cassettes. At the time, I knew it was something for professional use only, but didn’t realize how advanced the machine truly was. Thanks for sharing!
I worked for a long time at a church whose entire video archive was on Betacam. Setting aside the tapes that weren't stored correctly, it's truly amazing how high the quality has remained on some of that content that's 40 years old. We had it professionally digitized before the players disappear entirely, and it looks better than most digital content from the 2000s.
The unscripted portion around the 30 min mark was impressively well done. Wouldn't have known that was off the cuff if you hadn't said. My parents (mostly my mom) were early adopters of time shifting. They had a Betamax that looked much like the ones in the ads you showed (with the channel knobs on the front). However, my only memory of it was sitting in a shelf in the garage (in the late 80s). My earliest memory of a VCR in the house was a woodgrain, top loading unit (I think it was an RCA, but can't remember for sure). We moved out of that house in 1994 when I was 9 yrs old and I think we trashed both of those units when we moved, but I wish I could go back and tell them to hold on to both since they were freaking classics.
Thank you for your work on your videos. Yes your videos are longer then most content creators but i do love the thoroughness of all your videos. I love the research and the detail you get into. I ensure the hard work you put into all your videos. I feel knowledgeable afterwards. This was a cool breakdown again.
I work in news broadcasting and I love the Betacam SX machines. We used to record onto them regularly until 2018 for archiving purposes. Once we switched to HD (yes it took us that long), it wasn’t practical anymore. We still have a LOT of archives on Betacam tape. So we’ll occasionally fire up the SX machines. I love the whirring of the machine and using the jog wheel to navigate the tape. The engineering is simply awesome. Thank you for making this video. I’ll be sharing with my younger colleagues who don’t know the dusty machines in the corner that well. I used to share hours long breakdown of all the parts (highly recommend still)
Nice mention for MII :) - Also SVHS was used professionally - at least in local TV news (as well as High-8). I have in a closet two pro SVHS decks I used to actually edit video with that have as many connectors on the back.
S-VHS increased video bandwidth to ~5 MHz which was basically broadcast quality... but only when it comes to luma. Chroma still used the standard VHS color-under scheme, which produced the same smeary colors, not looking broadcast quality at all. AFAIU, the point of color-under isn't really to conserve bandwidth, but rather to minimize the effect of uneven tape speed on the frequency and phase of the color signal. An alternative would be to use time base correction, but that used to be prohibitively expensive for consumer-grade gear.
Colour under systems are fascinating...how they can compensate more or less for tape jitter is really elegant. Customers would get a lot of tech for the money they paid.
I used SVHS at my high school. It was...not great and certainly not broadcast quality. Certainly was better than VHS, but nowhere near Betacam quality. Editing it to a second generation final version was not great quality at all. Then we got one MiniDV camera. It had the DB9 connector on it to let us connect it to the editing hardware, but they wouldn't let us use it that way. We had to copy the complete video over to SVHS first. They were just afraid of wearing out the mechanisms and heads in the MiniDV camcorder that obviously cost them a pretty penny in 1998.
I'm a video engineer and actually learned a lot from this video. I only got into the industry 8 years ago, and I work in live events, so by the time I started, we were already all-in on Flash drives and hard drives for media storage, though we still use BNC and XLR connectors every day for our equipment. Thanks for making this video!
The recording format switch, dude. Absolutely brilliantly played. You used your media to show your topic directly. Fan. Fucking. Tastic. And still delivering a very good product of your media.
So, I totally forgot to comment this on the Television saga, but this video reminded me. I've been known to dabble in "glitch art" from time to time, and after one too many "this reminds me of scrambled cable TV channels" comments, I set about coming up with a way to replicate the VideoCipher scrambling effect. It was mostly thanks to your videos about how color TV works that I was able to make any sense of the algorithm and come up with (what I think was) a decently faithful recreation.
You just reminded me of that and i hate it 🙂 Inverted colors wobbly image shaking all over the place, eww. Don't re-create that lol. It also reminds me of the things people used to to to watch without paying...
The screen shake as you plopped those behemoth units on the table was hilarious. 😂 Also, a lot of people (myself included) used the VHS EP option almost exclusively to record TV back in the day because, as you said, it gave the most bang for our buck. On our terrible mid-80s TV with terrible resolution I never really noticed a difference.
BOTH formats are so incredibly mechanical that it is a wonder how they worked at all. All the mechanics of wrapping the tape around the head - are amazing. I remember you had to be careful 'watching' the video while fast-forwarding because the head would heat up (I think). Good stream. I never knew Betacam was a thing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
I worked with Beta-SP and DigiBeta for over 15 years, and there were never issues with FFWD or RWD heating up the heads. Possibly that was only in the very earliest machines.
I remember that sort of wild west early period of home video rental, when dedicated video stores weren't a thing yet and places like supermarkets and pharmacies were doing video rentals, and a lot of them had enormous VCPs available to rent along with the tapes. They were permanently mounted in huge black plastic suitcases, I assume to make them as unwieldy and unattractive as possible, and you basically had to sign a contract that said the store's owners could help themselves to an internal organ of their choice if anything happened to the machine. :)
I think blockbusters had something similar for console rentals. Always found those console rentals way too expensive though my memory might be fuzzy as I was still pretty young.
I had forgotten about the rental tape players. When we just had specialty stores they just rented regular machines. When Kroger started renting tapes they had the machines in plastic cases that looked like typewriter cases.
Former master control operator and engineer from the 1990s here - thanks for taking me back in time! We had Sony BVW-40s (Betacam but not SP) before we expanded to a couple more SP units. They were built to be serviced- they came with service manuals in big binders written in endearing Engrish. We also had extender boards, so one of those circuit boards could be pulled out, slide the extender in its place, then slide the board into it while bench servicing if the procedure called for it. They use special screws called Totsu which is sort of like a flathead but has a little tension finder on it so it could hold the screw without being magnetic. I used to run around with a clipboard to take down the hour meter readings as I cleaned the heads on a weekly basis so we could track our preventative maintenance schedule by replacing the brushes and slip rings on the head, heads, pinch rollers, etc etc….
If you ever wondered how commercials used to work in the 90s, we had a Sony Betacart. It’s a giant refrigerator sized thing, with four side loading Betacam players, and a vertical bank of 40 cassette holders, and (the best part) a robotic elevator that whisked up and down jockeying the tapes. The tapes were barcoded and the whole thing was managed by a central computer terminal with a floppy disk drive that predated HD diskettes, so we had a finite stash of DD disks. OK, you’re bored by now….
So that scene from Hackers was actually accurate?
Edit: if that was what you were doing in the 90's you probably weren't in the target audience for that flick, my bad for assuming. The scene itself is basically two people fighting remotely for control of the automated tape changer.
I used to run company backups to a robotic DLT-IV data tape library and watching and controlling the arm was the best part about changing the weekly backup tapes. It was eventually replaced by a 1U LTO library that was completely enclosed and not nearly as much fun (but much faster with fewer tapes).
Not bored at all. I toured our local TV station back in that era and have been fascinated by broadcast equipment ever since.
Former master control and tape room op from 1993-2006 here. I can still hear that Betacart elevator in my sleep sometimes. Mostly it's in nightmares though because it would be the sound the damn thing made when it jammed, followed by the alarm. CHKZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
The Betacart was a huge step up from the old TCR machines, but it was temperamental in its own way.
@@xerothedarkstar Hackers was kind of accurate, first of all in the movie it was U-Matic, and a Betacart machine just used a clamp on the end of the robotic arm to grasp the cassette, not the overly complex but cool looking mechanism used in hackers.
This really is my favorite channel. No unnecessary music. Straight to the point with a little history and with actual object. And the humor.
no unnecessary music, but sadly also no unnecessary puppet show. rip techmoan’s skits, killed by youtube thinking that puppets=children’s content
No music is the best thing ever.
Incompatibly smooth jazz is the most necessary of music.
@@JohnLee-ue6gy I think they're talking about during the video and not the end
Ugh, the humor is what makes me watch significantly less of this channel. I want to let my attention be drawn towards the subject matter, not the presenter.
I don't know how you do it, but you manage to make me watch a 40 minute video on something I never cared about once in my life, and you do it consistently. Never seen a channel keep up this quality before, its insane. I love your work man.
He even tells you that the video doesn't matter right in the beginning, yet here we are at the end of the video 😂
Man, you said a mouth full; about halfway in I thought, why the hell am I watching this; while I lived through the whole BETA VHS period, and remember the BETA and VHS sides of the video store, the fine points I just learned were never of concern to me; however, I watched every last second, then subbed.
I do remember people saying BETA was better, but had both machines at one time or the other, and saw no noticeable difference in picture quality.
Amazes me too... Top notch energy and technical information in a great format that doesn't feel like it's dumbing it down (too much).
He gets me every single time. ‘I don’t care this much about dishwashers’ but then I sit though not one but two long dishwasher videos. I don’t care about this either. I’m gonna watch every minute anyhow.
I literally had to go back and check that it was 40 minutes after reading your comment. It did not feel like 40 minutes at all!
As a pro video editor since the 90's I worked all the way from Betacam SP, M2, BetaSX and DigiBeta. Watching this was a joy. Nothing beats those buttons, the sounds of the transports and the fast winding. Many thanks for his video and great channel.
I worked for Game Creek Video (mobile television trucking company) until the end of 2008 and even though HD was pretty standard already, I remember the Betacam (or variation of it, I don't remember what was being used at the time as I was just an engineer, not part of the production).
@@AJSHOPE broadcast television was in transition to HD during 2008. Upgrading an entire park of cameras to HD was hell of investment. And keep in mind thousands of tapes in the archive that had to be accessible.
Pretty sure a lot of big TV facilities still have dozens of those in operation.
Broadcast TV started broadcasting HD in 1998. Each station was assigned an NTSC channel for analog and ATSC channel for digital HD
.
@@electrictroy2010 CNN transitioned to HD in 2007 or so. In late ninetees high-end CRT TV were just too good to switch to HD TVs of that era. So while HD broadcast was possible it was not worth to ugrade yet.
As a black and homosexual transgender muslim, I totally agree!
One other *tiiny tiny little* difference between Betamax & Betacam for professional use is that Betacam has a timecode track, which is critical for professional video editing where the ability to reference any specific frame of video is a necessity.
Arrgh! I should have included this in the script. Oh well!
@@TechnologyConnections If only TH-cam had the same editing features of Betacam...
(I mean other than audio replacement, video filtering, non-destructive trimming & clipping, and a full suit of closed captioning tools that TH-cam offers.
... But no TeleText support.)
@@TechnologyConnections Plus your edit deck has a provision for at least 2 players, and a recorder, with jog shuttle wheels for precise setting of edit points, which, in conjunction with the frame store on a lot of them, also allowed near seamless switching between different players, allowing you to have near zero blank frames between cuts.
For the stand alone player you also got a wired remote, plugged in the back (and common across almost the entire range in connection and function, ignoring advanced features on older players without locking them up), and which gave you full control, including slow frame, jog, and also, on the later players with frame store on board, full variable speed slow motion, and reverse slow motion as well. Did horrid things with drive motor timing, in that it would have to play a frame, reverse to the previous frame, and drive forward to the next frame, all in the interval between frames. But you got that magic slow mo so beloved of sports commentators, allowing you to scrub forward and back for instant replay.
Destroyed the tape fast though with it sitting there rubbing on a single spot though if you did it for long, so sports recordings they would have 2, overlapping the time in record for a minute or so, so you could rewind the one while the other recorded, so you always had at least the last 20 minutes of video to use for a blow by blow play.
Then you need to speak about the digital recorders, exact same tape, exact same play mechanism, and with analogue playback ability on them, but recording could be fully digital, including full multichannel audio, with the audio tracks only there as guard band, so they got the audio 2 channel downmix if wanted.
I'm guessing that the timecode track was also a necessity for accurately cutting and splicing together the two-components-multiplexed-on-a-single-head video track that was mentioned.
The delightful light-up buttons have another purpose: When the deck is being controlled from outside (via the "Remote" DB9 connector on the back), such as during editing operations, the lights would indicate what the deck was being told to do.
(I spent a summer working in a video studio at the tail end of the linear editing era, and we had Panasonic M-II and S-VHS editing decks being controlled from editing software on a Windows desktop; the array of blinkenlights on the decks during an edit run was mesmerizing).
There was a company in Oxford that used MII. I'd never seen it before. When they were sent BetaSP tapes from their clients, some runner was sent to me to dub every tape from BetaSP to their portable MII deck.
As one of my mentors said, after I'd half-apologised for spending some time and effort adding LED indicators to a simple split power supply: more indicators is never a mistake.
Ahh M-II. I did a co-op in school at a studio that had m2 machines and an Amiga with a video toaster. It could control the m2 machine and record individual frames (was neat to watch it rewind, play and briefly blink the record led to record the frame) from lightwave 3D. Had lots of fun setting up overnight renders with that!
I worked at the phone company research arm (Bellcore) during the early MPEG days (as in, back when it took hours per minute to compress mpeg). We had a whole rack of these recorders so we could have the original input and compare it to the compressed levels. That's when I learned how to use the color bars.
@@darrennew8211 okay so we have some really experienced old timers coming in here to give their knowledge. Appreciate it!
Those Beta/VHS/Modern transitions don't get enough love. They're excellently executed!
Totally agree sir! That kind of editing is not easy.. he just makes it look that way!
The beta is clearly worse quality. How could anyone mistake it. I dig beta and im kinda sad it is so crap compared to vhs
@@Wtfinc probably masked by low quality TV's. captured digitally it's obvious to see the differences, but i would imagine on a 15-20in CRT set, you probably would have a harder time picking out all the differences
@@Wtfinc Truly not nearly as good as LASERDISC
Jaw dropped
I love the camera shake when he sets the two tape recorders on the table. It really shows how heavy they were
The studio versions were a LOT heavier! the DWM2000s were the standard when I worked and weighed as much as 35-40 kg
Ha they were built like tanks 😅
This was cool. I actually didn't know anything about how betacam worked. Funny story, when I was a kid, I used to record my Commodore 64 onto VHS and I could never understand why the quality looked so bad on playback. Because with regular TV recordings, which usually don't display small text and fine pixel arrangements, I simply couldn't tell that the quality was lower.
It's great to see you here, David. I like it when my favorite youtubers interact with one another!
I totally read this in Davids voice.
Same
this man screen captured before it was even a thing.
heyo, I also follow your channel :D
I love Alec's snark. It's part of his charm.
Thanks
@@Alec_Reaper hi you sneak, wrong alec
Love that he doesn't care that the old VHS and batamax recordings make him look like he hasn't slept in a month.
I was today years old when I learned his name. And I’ve been watching for years…..
Totally part of what keeps my attention actually eyes on watching his videos, instead of putting them on and fiddling with a project at my desk, gotta pay attention to catch those quick snarky quips one liners puns and straight up trolls he slips in both where they fit perfectly and when you least expect them 🤣
I was a cameraman during the mid 80s. We were using the Betacam cameras that cost $70000 each. When shooting outdoor, we had to carry the cameras along during lunchtime. We were forbidden to leave the cameras in the vehicle.
The Betacam PAL tape ran for 20 minutes only. So at 19 minutes recording point, I had to alert my other partner to focus on the subject. Because I need to replace it with fresh blank tape.
Those were the days.
I was a shooter when DVCAM first arrived (was actually part of the testing for Sony). Try shooting in the field with $95,000 on your shoulder! I bought one of a LATER generation of Sony DVCAM camcorders several years ago for $300 (and now I'm on XDCAM)..
Dude… that’s nuts! The most expensive thing I’ve ever held was a 20k medical device at a hospital that they let me look at after my surgery, and I didn’t even want to touch it… I couldn’t even imagine carrying around a Porsche all day, worrying I might drop it or something! Haha
I never realized that those news cameras were so expensive! I knew they’d cost a lot, but I figured maybe like 10k or so…
Did you know how expensive it was when you started, or find out later? Or was your boss like “That’s a 70,000$ camera, and if you break it you’d better flee the country.”? Haha
@@DanteYewToob In our case, the Sony tech rep showed the declared value when it cleared Customs. All told, the two camcorders and the editing deck cost more than the station had cost to put on the air!
I'm an engineer and worked for RCA in the 1990's. Looking back at this stuff, it just seems, depressing to be honest. All this junk we worked on, all replaced by digital video encoding. I wouldn't want to go back to these bad old days.
It's just all so enormously primitive. The idea we had analogue, and I remember when the MP2 format was finalized. In the early 1990's, we needed a million dollar machine to convert analog into MP2 digital. Now that runs on a $75 toy machine.
@@SoloPilot6 DVCAM cameras were not worth the same as Betacam cameras no where near. The whole reason the BBC went with DVCAM was because they were roughly than half price of what the SP Betas and DigiBetas had cost even If it was no where near a good as DigiBeta and not quite as good as analogue SP.
Runtime really was a major factor. My grandmother was an early adopter and she sold her Sony Betamax and got a VHS VCR specifically because it would let her record CBS's entire Daytime Soap block while she was at work: The Young and the Restless, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow. (God I watched so much of that crap as a kid) The only other person I knew who had a VCR before most people did; My uncle Mike had thought the VCR was just a gimmick until the RCA VBT200 and he realized it could record live sports broadcasts and he got one not long after and they were still using that same VCR into 2000s!
Except in Europe, where a typical L-750 Beta tape runs for 3 hours 15 minutes where a E-180 VHS of the time was shorter at 3 hours. (Both formats had longer tapes, but these were the most popular in the early 1980s).
@@video99couk Of course, but it would prove too little too late. I admit I don’t know much about how things played out in the European market; Here in the States VHS was already outselling BetaMAX 3 to 1 by 1980 and it had become clear that VHS was going to be the dominant format. BetaMAX sales would drop off precipitously, and the format limped along for a few more years but it was just a battle of attrition, the war had long been won.
@@SudaNIm103 The war had long been "won".
Audio/Video-philes often gloss over the size/recording time 'feature'.
Don't get me wrong, I can (sometimes) tell the difference between an MP3 and a FLAC file at my desktop with my good headphones.
But in the car?
On a plane?
On a phone? (Even with headphones)
Outside a studio in general?
No way. Space is still at a premium. 128kbps MP3 is FINE.
Even now that space is 'cheap' there is still a good use for lossy-formats as long as you ALSO keep the loss-less ones.
Back when 'going outside' and 'social' things were regular occurrences, a 720p portable projector and a 512GB MicroSD card with 600 movies on it, transcoded down to 720p, was a PERFECT way to set up a guerilla-drive-in movie.
Was the video quality 'perfect'? Absolutely not.
Did it matter when you were projecting onto the wall of a building? Nope.
@@SudaNIm103 I dunno how it really played out either since I was a primary schooler, but as a kid who grew up in '80s England, I only have vague recollections of knowing 2 people who owned Betamax recorders and 1 dude with a Video 2000 that he used well into the '90s, with everyone else having VHS.
Fun fact: One other use of Betacam (& UMatic) was to (by way of extra equipment) record audio to Betacam tape as a PCM digital audio signal, as a precursor to DAT, in the process of mastering early CDs ... With the digital audio sample rate of 44.1kHz (that we still use today) set in part by the constraints of recording onto video equipment.
So if you stumble across a Beta tape that won't play in a Betamax/2/3 or Betacam/SP/Digital/SX/IMX/HD/SR player ... it might just contain a WAV file!
Boy do I have an interesting video coming up soon!
@@TechnologyConnections TC / Techmoan crossover? DAT'd be amazing.
the 3/4" Umatic era was..... heavy
Yss, and pcm recording was also done to 3/4" and 1" type c videotape
@@theEagleBeagle Yes, Umatic players are all mechanical marvels, and all very heavy. 40kg of steel stampings in them, like somebody took an entire typewriter factory and poured it into a box.
Finally! Someone attempts to clear up the Betamax vs Betacam confusion. The amount of times I've had to explain that Max and Cam are entirely different formats is too damn high
The 'Number' of times
NOT the amount of times
NUMBER refers to QUANTITY / COUNT
AMOUNT refers to WEIGHT
Undertake an extensive reading program to better educate yourself
and improve your knowledge of the English language
@@andrew_koala2974 Seriously?
@@andrew_koala2974 Amount is a totally acceptable word to use in this case. It doesn't just apply to weight, not sure where you got that from. Amount is generally used to describe uncountable values; number countable ones. And since how many times you have dealt with the same question isn't something most people would keep track of, "amount" seems like a totally valid word to use.
@@Figitarian Great answer. The number is when the number is small and countable. The amount when its become a volume.. 😄
@@Figitarian Let the errorists have their fun, it only makes them look infantile.
I cannot imagine how much work this was for you, but seeing you seamlessly transition between current digital technology, and Betamax, VHS, and Betacam, really great work! Thank you so much for your work.
That splitscreen of Betacam/Betamax could not have been easy to do as seamlessly as you did. Well done, I see the work that went into that!
Fun fact: Professional Beta (DigiBeta & HDcam) was still going strong in the 2000s, but died very suddenly - not because hard drives were better yet, but because the Tsunami in Japan destroyed Sony production facilities & created a worldwide shortage of Beta tapes. Post houses had to figure out other ways to ship masters to stations. People were hoarding tapes for special projects that absolutely needed them, especially large tapes (hard drives were quite small & expensive for lengthy broadcast masters, especially HD data sizes). It was an interesting time in the industry. I remember having to call around to different shops and pay THEM to make a master for us just so we could use their remaining tape stash.
I remember this, literally forced the entire industry to change workflows overnight
I built a 2110 playout facility. Yet we had to put in the IMX and SR decks as we still have the odd advertiser who sends a tape, or the SD reruns for the afternoon that still mostly are on SX.
2011
that was the year of the tsunami. Also note professionals use betaCAM which is completely different from consumer betamax
.
Ha, in the comment he's talking about 2110 which is where you use data cables and network switches to send video around a facility rather than traditional video cables and video routers. Yet despite that change some customers still use tapes, in this case Sony IMX and HDCAM-SR which were both successors to Betacam.
that's... a tragic yet intriguingly awesome way to have your era ended. literally died because of a natural disaster.
For the record.... We actually STILL use BetaSP in broadcast. A LOT of news archive video is on it (and UMATIC!). Plus, when we still ran master control locally (it's hubbed out now), we got a LOT of paid programs coming in on Beta. In fact, we JUST removed that Beta deck not that long ago, even though old Master Control has been out of use for about 4 years now.
I feel sorry for you :(
It's been pretty much dead at the network level for years. Even tne archives are digital.
But as i look behind me in the edit room, i see a row of betacam tapes. Lol
We still have this exact model of deck racked up, and a stack of them in storage for spares/parts. And a room full of every imaginable tape format of archived video from the decades gone by.
@@mikkowilson2 Seems like There will be a LOT of
Recapping in someone's Future! 😢🎱😵🤞🧐😈
@@wilneal8015 Yeah ... The sad reality is that most of the content on those tapes will never see the light of day.
Oh man we went hard for DVC Pro and just a couple years ago finished copying the full archive of Andy Griffith to hard drive.
The analog mechanisms needed to make it work at all is astonishing. Man, digital era solved not only the quality, but simplified everything down to a micro level. Also there is a happy bug crawling around at 11:35
If you only knew just the insane level of those microprocessors that accomplished this... The complexity wasn't removed. it was multiplied and outsourced to another industry :P
Processors have advantage of being printable using a photomask & etching. Reduces cost vs. complicated analog board filled with discrete resisters, potentiometers, etc
Digital format is also easier to edit downto the pixel level. That was never possible with analog. Digital is also more compact: Handheld video recorders in a phone vs. bulky S-VHSC camcorders
@@electrictroy2010 How many million engineering hours go into each buddy
How delightful! Looks like a lady bug! Didn't catch that the first time, so thanks!
I love how the Betamax player literally shook the camera when you *thunked* it down on the table.
Or it literally shook the video editor 😉
@@DavidBurstrom shhhhhhhhhhhhh, it’s funnier this way
That's how you know it was built with quality parts and the build quality of an absolute tank.
Betacam surely
He didn't even thunk it down. He placed it gently and it still asserted its dominance over the room.
As someone that used to work in the broadcast engineering space, it's wonderful to see this topic finally covered by someone like you!
I started working in a tv studio this month and there's still a beta VCR in use, a much newer one with mpeg encoding (MSW-A2000P). On the first week they asked me to digitalize an old Betacam L cassette from '86 and with me being born in '95 and grown up with cartoons recorded on VHS from satellite TV i was absolutely blown away for how good the signal looked. Something i never witnessed with consumer analog PAL
The DVW and MSW-A2000P decks are brilliant. So much stuff very high end technology in there for the time. The A means it's compatible with all the previous analogue formats going right back to Betacam Oxide (before SP) as well as digital Betacam SX and Digital Betacam/MPEG IMX formats. Necessary for a pro TV station with a huge back-catalogue of tapes. There was a good reason those high-end machines cost $100,000 when new.
You know those DVDs you buy or rent with favorite shows like Star Trek TNG or Seinfeld or Friends? ALL of those shows were edited & stored on Betacam SP.
Basically DVD quality on analog tape.
@@electrictroy2010All 3 of those shows were shot on 35mm film. They were probably transferred onto Beta SP back in the day for broadcast. But since they still have the film reel, they can be scanned well past 4k today.
Pal was an amazing standard. The 25fps was closer to film so movies always looked better than NTSC.
Pal, being the newer format also had 100 extra lines.
I got to watch a straight from BBC archive transfer of a tom baker episode of dr who and the quality was amazing.
Interesting bit of trivia. BBC use at least a half dozen tape systems over 40 years before settling on Betacam.
The most terrifying used a metal tape... which when running full speed, you couldn't be in the room. If the tape snapped if would kill you.
@@chrissyclark7836 The BBC never used metal tape for video recording. I suspect you're thinking of VERA, which is often erroneously claimed to have used metal tape, but actually used regular recording tape, one reel of which still survives on its distinctive metal spool at the Science Museum in London. The dangerous machines were the audio recorders which used steel wire running at high speed.
As a electronic technician for over 30 years, I have worked on these machines and on camcorder as well. Your video is worth listening, it is a reference !
I only have 17 years in myself, but I concur.
Do you service BSP decks? I'm looking for a repair service . Hard to find!
My college media department used Betacam for everything. I remember the nightmare over-the-shoulder camcorder that took the full size Betacam carts.
The student editing decks though where all S-VHS with a single Betacam to bring all their footage over.
But I was so sorry to see you didn’t have the jog-dial interface with the Betacam unit. Those were soooooo smooth and satisfying.
Your scrubbing through the footage alone brought back so many memories. ❤
We used three quarter inch tape, separate camera and a separate decks, it was so cumbersome back then and weighted a ton, I can still feel the deck strap on my shoulder. I'm glad we live in the future now.
@@grandetaco4416 And every… single… battery pack… had memory issues so the “up to 60 mins” of life meant we usually carried four or five for a one hour shoot. :( Yes, modern battery tech is amazing and I am so jealous that half the students probably use handheld camcorders or cell phones now. So jealous. Hehe.
@@tonybossaller4074 We used to use Battery Belts rather than descrete cells to power portable VTRs and Cameras back in the 80s.
I remember high school days, Panasonic S-VHS camcorders slung over shoulders, editing on Panasonic decks with the editing controller's jog shuttle... Twenty-some-odd years later, when editing videos on a PC, I find I really miss that convenience. Maybe someday I'll invest in one for PC.
We had one Sony Hi8 Handycam, and one Sony Hi8 recorder deck, but the school didn't want to invest in the hardware to connect the two for true Hi8 editing. Because of the inconvenience of transferring to another format, most of the students refused to use the Handycam or even touch Hi8 at all. While they do staged scenes with the cameras on tripods, I'm filming a semi-dramatic chase scene on the Cross-Country trail with a palmcorder!
@@dashcamandy2242 Years ago, I had a Contour Design Shuttle Pro which wasn’t quite the smooth jogwheel the Sony unit had, but was worlds better than my then best option the Kensington TurboRing. (That ring was an amazing jog-dial but Kensington discontinued it… And the Orbit Pro’s just wasn’t the same.) So you might check that out. I have no idea where mine ended up. :p
Fascinating when you swapped the video from Beta to VHS, I got instantly hit with a wave of nostalgia. A lot of the TV I watched as a kid was on VHS tapes, and a lot of those were hand-me-downs from my Aunt who had recorded a bunch of kids shows from the TV for my older cousin. Seeing those VHS artefacts with the blocky colours and hard edges is big nostalgia!
My favorite part of editing video on BetaSP back in the day - the Jog/Shuttle wheel. That was so cool, scrolling frame by frame or bouncing around. Really satisfying.
some VHS machines eventually got jog wheels, but man it does not look very good to try and go "frame by frame" (well... actually field by field) on VHS 😂
I actually prefer editing tape-to-tape rather than non-linear on a PC.
I love the format wars. You have groups of engineers pulling out all the stops to out-do their competitors and it ultimately brings more value to the consumers. Brilliant minds at work that aren't making weapons of war or having to solve some unsolvable societal problem... just answer the questions of can Dad can record his entire football game and can Nan record one of her stories while watching another.
Yeah forget those unsolvable actual problems facing society, we want better consumer goods.
@@yommish dog, the sony/jvc/matsushita engineers ain't gonna stop cancer even if they were put to the task lmfao
@@yommishyeah we live in dirt holes, but at least we don't have *insert disease* anymore
man this video unlocked the weirdest childhood memory, my father was a reporter for local news and in the mid 90s to very early 2000s he was using a UVW-1800 (before upgrading to a DNW-A225 in the early 2000s) and seeing it in this video i can distinctly remember as a toddler i once put a pop tart in the cassette drawer 🤣
That's funny.
I can only imagine the panic your father had getting the crumbs out of it
I mean.. at least it wasn't a Popsicle. 🙈
I have to say something!
The script, editing and the overall production of this video is astonishing. Having followed this channel for multiple years, it doesn't surprise me, but I hope others can see all the work behind making such a video.
I'm only 17m44s in the video for now, but I'm hoping to see some outtakes or bloopers at the end. I love those!
Omg yes, I came to say litterally the exact same thing word for word, this is legit his best vid yet
The incredible amount of editing it must have taken to line up the the switching between the digital/VHS/Betamax/Betacam signals is well appreciated. Thank you!
Thank you so much... this was an indie-documentary tour de force! I'd forgotten how relaxing and enjoyable it is to just sit and listen to you talk over my head about fantastically ingenious consumer engineering!
That particular Betacam machine didn't just demux the chroma, it digitized Y/C for timebase correction, which was required for genlocking to studio sync on the REF VIDEO input. It also had drop out compensation, if the tape had a dropout the DOC would fill it in with previously captured samples. That's what a lot of the boards in there are for. Demuxing is essentially "free" when you're doing TBC, you just read the Pb/Pr samples out in parallel at 1/2 the sample rate.
Consumer VHS VCRs typically had dropout compensation, though only line-based. I guess you're talking full frame?
Hmmm... I know some of these words...
Betacam more complicated than genlock, TBC, Y/C...remarkable difference is separate recording of Y, R-Y & B-Y by an ingenious method of CTDM - Compressed Time Division Multiplex. So no more cross color distortions, other spurious artifacts or reduced Y-levels, since Y info now occupies one full track while R-Y & B-Y time compresed & occupies 1/2 ,1/2 divided next line. Video head has separate chips for Y & Chroma components.
@@AaronSmart.online DOC normally done at line level. In Digital media it's ' error correction & concealment' much complicated than analog type DOC.
I think he’s talking about taxation
I worked with U-Matics, Betacam, and even GASP! Ampex VPR-6, I loved them all. Ampex was my favorite, it was oldtimer when I was working in broadcast, but we still had TV shows on these tapes, so it was used. Learning to thread tape on them was a scientific achievment :)
I enjoyed this video, it made me go back in time. There are lot of details that comes with more expensive devices, we had Sony BVW-75P machines, they were crazy good and were my daily use machines.
I started editing on Ampex VPR-2B 1 inch machines. Threading them was 'fun'. What wasn't fun was if someone let the tape play off the end and you had to thread it from the take up reel! That was MUCH harder. I was working for a broadcaster when Betacam was introduced. They came to demo it to us. What was really impressive was that colour (South African spelling!) bars off tape looked like straight from the generator - absolutely clean divisions between the bars.
Later I worked on Sony BVW-75P and BVW-65P (player version) in a 3 machine edit suite. It was amazing how many generations you could copy and still have good quality.
Professional Video Engineer here. I loved this video. Amazing content. I learned on Betacam decks. They were amazing. And they were used well into the 2000s.
To answer the question about the offset heads, I'm pretty sure, if I remember right, that the Chroma and luma heads being offset in the record didn't matter because they were also offset in playback. So the Chroma is still reading simultaneously to the luma at the same spot where it was written. I don't think that there was color information being recorded in the blanking interval. That doesn't jive with my understanding of how analog video worked.
A few more things:
We just called this stuff "Beta" and left out the Cam part in the professional space. We all knew it was Betacam, not Betamax. And we called the tapes "Beta 90" and "Beta 30"
The original Betacam only died because the tsunami in Japan wiped out the factory that made the tapes. I remember this happening. Suddenly no one could get any tapes and they were selling for thousands of dollars on eBay because everyone was desperate for them. Then Sony announced they would not rebuild the factory because it was a dying format and not worth it. And overnight the entire professional video industry was forced to finally let go of our beloved Betacam for good.
Another thing to note: the Chroma channel is derived from a 4:2:2 sub sample in component video. So it essentially has half the information as the luma channel. That's why you only needed one head to record it. You were recording half the information.
And for tape size, the Beta 30 tapes being smaller was absolutely essential. When doing eng work and putting the tape into a shoulder mounted camera, this smaller tape was a god send. And in a television studio, where you may be storing hundreds of half hour TV shows, the smaller 30 min tapes were ideal for lowering storage.
We used to have pallets of tapes in the professional space. If you only needed 30 min for your sitcom, having a smaller tape for it was much much better than storing even VHS sized cassettes.
And finally, if you see this comment, I have some Beta Decks that still work and have the jog wheels. It was great to see how much you loved the satisfying feeling of operating a professional beta deck. You should try it with the jog wheel! It's a joy. I will gladly loan you one to play around with.
I lived through the VHS - BETA wars as a kid and ended up professionally producing broadcast video using U-Matic then eventually those 1800 machines. I preferred using those to cut video over the DVCam decks we upgraded to.
Something you might find cool to try is entering the Service Mode on that 1800. You can activate every single solenoid and motor in the unit to prove each is working. I sometimes had to enter that mode to get a stubborn tape to eject. Still have one in my basement destined for the e-recycler I’m afraid.
Anyhow thanks for the video.
I was genuinely impressed with your editing of this video. The seamless transitions from analog to digital were quite impressive.
I remember when the company I worked for (Quantel) sold very expensive hardware just to make this possible.
Pretty simple to line up separate video recordings in the editor timeline on separate video tracks and just chop them around, time consuming, but simple.
@@JohnJackson66 The paint box guys? I am guessing it was like a multi input vision mixer?
@@JohnJackson66 ... and now it costs nearly nothing.
@@JimmerofOz It was the GenQ series that first allowed mixed format editing
I worked at a videocassette/CD/audiotape manufacturing plant in the late 90s. We had literally hundreds of recorders in racks for the "Normal Speed Duplication" area, pulling off of the masters in the "Digital Betacam" format that literally just recorded video on hundreds of tapes at a time. We also had a "High Speed Duplication" area that worked very differently, but was also neat.
hearing about how color is kinda cheated to work really explains both how tapes looked and how tape errors look, with the colors becoming separated from each other. and it sounds like betacam basically pulled an old NES music trick out of the hat, recording rapidly in alternation to cheat 'two things' out of one thing's room of things. Also, I'm realizing now that I've seen Betacams in operation on tv shows, when a TV studio is pulling up footage, fastforwarding it, etc. the sound brought back memories.
.. how have I never noticed that Large and Small have the same initials as Long and Short???
In TV Betacam tapes that would be played on air always had to have bars and tones so we could use a TBC to correct the colors, most local shows (churches) didn't understand the purpose and would just steal color bars from some vhs tape and stick it on the beginning on the tape so they weren't from the equipment that shot the video so correcting to those colors never worked and usually meant we'd have to stop an ingest and find a frame to try and color correct with.
@@sc0tt_p As a consumer, I never knew what those were for. Learned something else today.
@@gmirwin yeah, they are supposed to be calibrated to the tape, both audio and video. You use the scopes to align the colors, set white and black levels, and audio level. Bars go into a leader board which most people have seen as the countdown. That final sudden beep is supposed to be exactly 30 frames from the first frame of the show, which helps you start the tape exactly where it's suppose to.
Beautifully done! Also, the best part about the Betacam SP VTRs (the DVWM2000 and similar models) was that each of the channels - Video, Audio, and Time Code were individually editable whether manually, or remote. You could mark-in, mark-out and record over the channel or channels you want to edit and for the duration - it was freaking amazing! When I was editing on these monsters, it felt as though I was operating a nuclear silo, LOL.
Aaaahhhhh YES!!! The old "Split Edit" using that monster-sized multi-machine linear editing controller you could buy separate from Sony !!! I can't believe I've been doing this since 1987. OMG! Where did all the time go!
V
34:14 [Various Delightful Mechanical Noises]
I absolutely LOVE your subtitles, friend.
It's amazing how pervasive that myth about adult content is; I've seen it crop up multiple times even in techy circles, even in circles that generally know about their tech history. I ofc know better (your videos on the topic being a reason why, though I had familiarity with it before then) and I knew Betacam was a separate thing already - but I didn't know too much about it until now. Excellent video as ever, love the snark. That Betacam VCR is an absolute monster, I love it. The quality of footage it records made my jaw drop - I don't know why, it is indeed broadcast quality - but that night and day comparison with Betamax is insane. It really looks incredible for analogue video tape.
My mother worked in news production and directing through the late 90s and even she thought it was true!
If you want better quality? get a date?lol
What’s interesting about this myth is that in The Netherlands, the myth is instead told about Video 2000 - the third format, created by Philipsm that barely anyone outside The Netherlands has heard about. Like with Betamax, it is unfounded.
@@gymnasiast90 Oh yeah that. I think Technoan did a video on that.
@@gymnasiast90 That's really interesting. I only know about Video 2000 because of the old format war retrospective Alec did, talking about how it was from a North American perspective and so wouldn't cover that. I live in the UK and I don't know exactly how the war went down here but I think it was just VHS vs. Beta here mainly - and I think VHS even more thoroughly crushed it here.
And yeah no doubt for the exactly same reasons - Philips had no say on what content was distributed on the format - it isn't true.
Top tier editing. The transitions were delicious. You're the best damn technology historian in the biz.
Thank you for setting the record straight on this. It clears up some confusion for me.
I edited video at a local TV news station in the late aughts and was thoroughly mystified by the Betacam tapes everywhere. They had the larger/older tapes in their archives, and the smaller/newer HD tapes in contemporaneous use. No one was knowledgeable enough to explain to me the history of the distinction between Betamax and Betacam, or that there even _was_ a distinction.
Something that is more impressive than a Betacam is just how long Sony's U-Matic was used in TV production. Well into 2000s. There are U-Matic tapes out there with promotional material for Revenge of the Sith (2005), and other feature films that were released in theatres in 2008 or later.
It’s amazing how long U-matic persisted. I’m kinda surprised it wasn’t repurposed as a digital video format using metal tape and modern head designs - in theory it would have been easier to do than with Beta, but mechanically the 3/4” decks were just much more complicated and expensive to produce, so I can see why Sony held off until the tech made it possible to achieve with 1/2” tape. A 3/4” digital deck could have been delivered years sooner, but would have been hellishly expensive and the costs would have never come down much even as the electronics got cheaper because the mechanisms would have remained expensive and bulky.
They were probably also worried about a digital, VHS-derived format stealing their thunder.
My university's media department was using U-Matic SP until around 2000 or so when they finally went digital. I got a tour of their facilities and asked why they weren't using Betacam SP. Their only answer was "media services provides these tapes, so that is the format we use"
Well the "U" loading mechanism was still used by Sony for decades, even in their VHS deck they ironically made around 92... VHS loading is usually an "M" so that's where that silly name comes from, i think...
@@freeculture That's true. Unlike Sony, JVC didn't mind deviations from their original VHS patent. There were all sorts of loading mechanisms variants on VHS devices. As for Sony, in their mind the Betamax (not referring to their U-Matic) was perfect by the virtue of being THEIR design, therefore (Sony) didn't allowed any sort of engineering freedom for third party manufacturers of it's PERFECT design when it came to Betamax's tape transport. Sony was, and still is a weirdo company when it comes to these sort of things*.
*Control freaks😠
You asked about the time offset from the Betacam offset heads: It's really a non-issue once you think about it, because the offset that's put in when recording is automatically undone by the same offset during playback. This is simply due to the fact that the same heads are used for both record and playback. I'm assuming that Sony was careful to make the positional offset between the heads the same on all their heads, so tracks recorded on one machine would play back correctly on any other Betacam machine. Hope that's clear.
Thanks for an informative video. I'd always wondered what Betacam was all about, and never knew that it started out using the same Betamax cassette.
BTW, loved the TOS Star Trek clips.
Exactly what I thought, the two signals are recorded with an offset and later read back with the exact same offset.
Further, I think that the issue of the heads being separated is compensated for by having the following head offset slightly higher so that it hits the edge of the tape at the same time as the leading head in the helical scan.
My father had a huge collection of beta tapes when he passed away (as well as a betamax machine), and some of the movie titles were suspiciously... modern? We quickly found out that every single Beta tape was... an "adult film" that he had later just re-labeled with popular movie titles. My mom didn't find the humor in this, but I thought it was HILARIOUS. Damn. I miss you, Dad!
Oh that's DOUBLE hilarious that people thought Beta DIDN'T have dirty movies! Ha! I'd bet money that Dad collected those partly just for that reason. Omg that's so funny. I can't wait to tell my sister. Ha! Dad is still throwing punchlines from the grave. Love you, Dad! 😂
I label my pron tapes with hand labels (stuff 1, stuff 2, etc). I’m surprised your dad did extra work of using Hollywood titles
In the early 80s Playboy released video on laserdisc, VHS, and Beta so pron was definitely available across all formats
Your dad sounds like a legend. Peace
Dad's should let us know that they are cool before it is too late. I found a bunch of weed, porn and 2 guns in my dad's trunk... damn dad. Wtf were you into?
I really appreciate all of the extra effort put into capturing video from the different formats!
27:31 Okay, that deadpan pronunciation of "YPbPr" actually did make me laugh out loud. Well done, sir.
This video isn’t pointless, because lot of us who worked in television broadcasting used Betacam well into the mid 2000s! I used to work in tape editing for press releases from colleges. We used the Sony Betacam VTR for video recordings, and we also archived video on DVDs or digital files on computer!
It’s honestly kind of wild how long Betacam was around for. We were still shooting on it in high school (along with S-VHS) in 2006 and at the TV station I worked at we were still receiving some paid programming on Betacam tapes as late as 2014.
Think about the cost to convert the format for a newsroom. You'd have to convert cameras and edit bays at the same time to avoid dubbing the tapes. Betacam probably lived as long as it did because until HD, the newer formats didn't offer that much improvement. As long as they could buy tapes and parts, they kept the old ones running. And as the well-financed stations replaced their equipment, they donated their old stuff to high schools and cable-access stations.
2014?????
when i was in grade school im so amazed at how the mechanical part of both vhs and betamax, my father used to fix them back in the day & i'm so eager to help him fixing the timing issue of the gears. great video as always.
Even into the mid 2000s HBO in NYC used betacam. My cousin worked there before I got into the industry and actually had the job of digitizing many of HBOs betacam tapes. Fun time checking out all the crazy gear they had.
I stopped sends tapes with my productions to TV around 2016.
Awesome video Alec! I've worked in the broadcast industry from 2004 to 2019 and saw the transition from Betacam to Digibeta to XDCam (tape on a disc 😂) to no tapes at all. I can totally relate to your enjoyment of operating the beige machine. I've worked with them a ton and they really are a joy to operate. Especially the more expensive models with jog buttons and other gadgets. Betacam has been THE standard in broadcast for many, many years. The S size tapes were used in cameras mostly, where the L tapes were used for editing, mastering and delivery. I remember the days of the bi-weekly delivery of a box of 10 master tapes to the television station for our daily show. Yes, someone had to drive down to the television station to BRING them a box of tapes. Awesome times.
XDCam discs were the standard for capturing video for a few years. Right after tape and before we all went solid state. Strange format with a magneto-optical disc in a very cool looking cartridge. Maybe you should do a video about this format once?
Thanks for the great content Alec! As usual.
I was in TV around that same time as well, when digital video storage was getting cheaper by the day and you could see the end of the road for Betacam, but it seemed like it was never coming and you'd be using those chunky boys forever.
We were using mastering on D2 tapes when I came in in the mid-90s, then we switched to DigiBeta. That transition period from analog video to digital video in the editing world was the wild west, man. Companies and tech came and went all the time as the industry tried to figure out what worked. It's fun to go back and look at industry magazines from back then, if only to look at mpeg1 rendering speed benchmarks that measured in minutes per frame instead of frames per second.
@@CantankerousDave I have read that for Video Cd they actually used an operator pointing out the important parts of each frame to the encoder. Maybe only for the first demo discs where they wanted the best quality.
I recently started collecting Betacam and Betacam SP (hoping to get to the other formats soon) and I was hoping you’d make a video about this topic! Thanks for this! It was very informative and enjoyable. The amount of effort you put into your videos is great and is very much appreciated. This channel is one of my favorites.
I worked at a Canadian master control where we had decks for news feeds, commercials, and programs. We used SP, Digi, SX, and HDCAM (SR). My fave is when we started doing HD in primetime. As a Canadian station, we'd air one program live from FOX off of satellite, while recording a current program from NBC to air right after. As soon as the credits were rolling, the recording was stopped, racked and ready for the top of the hour. Fun times, until we got non-linear ingest.
Gun to my head, I would absolutely say that in the picture quality comparison, VHS-SP looks better than Beta II: the picture is slightly more aliased, but still sharper (especially between foreground and background), the colors a bit cooler and pleasing (though more accurate? no idea), but these are the sort of differences I could entirely believe being owned to the mechanical variations in an analogue video tape format, and again, even the VHS-DVD combo "feels" a lot more modern than a seemingly ancient Beta recorder (even if that difference probably doesn't matter here). Great video as usual, thank you!
BetacamSP completely wipes the floor with VHS. Utterly no comparison, when you see it set up properly. Far less noise on BetacamSP, hugely better luma bandwidth and as for chroma bandwidth we're on another planet.
I completely agree... I also think maybe he should of used a betamax-i player for testing and maybe even tried to find an old 2 head VCR. By the time VHS was discontinued, it was common to find 6 head vcr (4 read and 2 record)
I think it's just some trickery there. Same what mobile phone camera apps do, e.g. bump contrast. It definitely doesn't have more resolution.
The color on VHS is clearly worse in my opinion, it's just slightly over-saturated; when compared to the normal camera footage, Beta II is clearly the more color accurate. The difference is especially obvious when you compare skin colors between the two; VHS almost makes it look like he's in redface lmao.
I'm not going to get into an internet-argument over it, but I find the VHS in that comparison to be SUPER over-sharp.
If I had to choose, I'd still go with the VHS, but it definitely has that "CRANK every post-processing knob to 11 to make it 'look better' in the Tv store" look. It's like going to a buddies house and seeing how bad their Tv looks, then going into the settings and seeing that they have brightness, contrast, and 'color' set to 100% with every filter still set to the default 'on'.
(Yes I am one of those ass-holes that will immediately start color-calibrating your Tv without being asked to. Out-of-the-box settings on cheap Tvs are a criminal offence.)
In Brazil Beta was very uncommon, but here in São Paulo (the biggest city) at the then economic center on Paulista Avenue there was one rental Store that only had beta. It took me a time to realize why: many movies were Japanese: Japan Consulate was on the same building or very near I can't remember. I deduced that Japanese movies were common in Beta.
I got into making home videos as a kid and eventually worked my way into the movie industry. As a teen/young adult in the late 90’s, I always wanted to get my hands on betacam equipment for my projects. It never came to fruition. Still, I love these old machines and droll over them like the teenage film dork that I was.
Thank you for your clarification for those of us who use the metric system, otherwise I would never have known that 60 minutes is an hour
I'm just gonna keep leaving you more comments in hopes that it further boosts you up in the algorithm. Your content is so informative, so concise, so well produced and you sincerely deserve all the success you've worked so hard to attain. I can't thank you enough for everything you do and I hope you're happy and content in your life. You're a real gem, brotha. You have such a way with pulling me out of the dumps and I can't thank you enough for just being you. ❤️
I want to like seriously hang out at his house or visit him. I feel like maybe he's too "lazy", his self described adjective-not mine, to go out and do anything or have enough fun, maybe I'm wrong, but I wish I had his phone number because I also live in the Chicago region, Elkhart, IN to be more precise. Can you help me find him like his phone number or something? Thanks! I'm serious:)
This takes me back… in the late 80s I worked at a video duplication facility. We didn’t handle Betamax (it was already dead) but did everything else: 3/4”, Betacam, 1” type C, and even occasionally 2” Quad and 1/2” EIAJ! I labeled all the VHS tapes that came out of duplication, boxed them up and shipped them out. Years later I became a producer for the video production side of the company. Good times.
This made me so nostalgic for editing with Betacam. I once edited a minute thirty package, with reporter track and b-roll, in the ten minutes before it aired. No ingesting, no rendering, just set your ins and hit edit. Granted, if you made a mistake in the edit, fixing it was a nightmare. But for straight up speed, nothing beat the Betacam.
I loved deck to deck editing and as the mechanics were really solid you could work quickly. Lost interest in it professionally when everything went non-linear as the ‘process’ wasn’t really there
Dawno nie oglądałem tak dobrze zrobionego, tak pełnego informacji a jednocześnie tak spokojnego, merytorycznego filmu. Pełen profesjonalizm. Wielski szacunek i pozdrowienia.
I love dispelling these cultural myths with historical and technical deep dives. It's amazing how certain confident assertions can live on and distort culture. Great video!
I spent a lot of time with those decks in an edit bay preparing for the morning news between 1am-3am in the early
2000’s. The edit controller that we used to control two at once was next level. We would play those decks like instruments.
We also had a giant automated machine made by Odetics that would keep four of those decks loaded up full of commercials for master control.
I had always been into recording equipment previously, and getting to go work in broadcast was a dream come true at the time. So many cool toys and smart engineers.
I left just as everything was converting to digital.
wow, so I'm picturing one of those robotic tape libraries for server data backups. then I start thinking about the synchronization needed. I have edited both 3/4 inch and betacam SP, and IIRC Betacam SP had to roll the tape back 3 seconds, then start playing. (I saw the technician working on one of them and it took three seconds to go from where the drum was just barely skimming the tape, (to prevent wear on the tape while giving you a freeze frame, to having the tape fully wrapped around the drum.)
The complexity of having all those tapes perefectly cueued, (Probably used timecode, or a single frame signal) starting them rolling exactly three seconds before cutting to that deck, then rewinding back to cue, must have been a sight to behold.
Used a whole WALL of those back in the day when i was recording at the studio. Good times.
@@timdowning3600 5 sec preroll happens on edits, so the decks have enough time to synchronize properly. There is also preview feature so you can preview cuts before actually recording anything. Play function works as youd expect, like on any other vtr.
Betacam decks also have advanced head controls so you can fast forward or play backwards without ruining image.
Ok
That's a nice Betacam unit, it was heavily used in broadcast studios and professional video editing. FYI the hours meter data shown has to be multiplied X10 in order to see the real time in hours.
You can also connect it to your monitor through the composite video out labelled as "Super" (Superimpose), that will display extended information from the menus :)
3:03 "They both have model numbers divisible by 1800..." 😂
The level of snark in this one is a sight to behold. Thanks again for an awesome video, Alec!
😅
You can tell by how their names are different 😂
All hail the 🦈 SnarkMaster! 🦈
Alec Benjamin?
27:37 I can't tell you how many times I've played this bit.
26:52 "The quick brown fox jumps over the lorem ipsum"
I'm stealing that for my next T-shirt print lol.
I've watched this video a few times and I just now noticed that. It's such a good an understated joke, glad someone else in the comments noticed it!
I worked in television for over 40 years and working with Beta cam an SP in the 90's was great. The Betacam SP camcorders with chips instead of tubes were the end all in analog before the digital transition. Your video made me think back to a time when media was still enjoyable. By the time I retired two years ago the pressure to make sure things were posted on the station's social media took away from the time to make sure you had the very best product that could be put on the air. That pressure and Covid made me decide to retire at my retirement age instead of working on several more years. Directing the morning program which was very enjoyable became a burden due to the pandemic. However I am a fan of your channel due to your diverse content and also growing up in the Chicago area. From some of your earlier videos on the Chevy Bolt I recognized the expressways and it brought back some nice memories just like watching the video on Betacam of my time in the late 20th Century. Keep doing the good work.
Riiiiight, I think you've just helped answer a weird question I've had for years. When I was a kid (I'm in the UK) I always wondered why American shows always seemed to have really saturated colours, and I think it's because when the tapes came over they likely needed re-taping and the saturation gets doubled, whereas local to the UK shows wouldn't be re-taped so never got doubled!
A lot of US shows came over to the UK on colour film, that's how they were shot (unlike in the UK where for cheapness we shot a lot of stuff straight to video tape).
@@owensmith7530 it was quite common to film UK shows on film when outside (cameras were MASSIVE) and on video inside. There's even an esoteric reference to this in a monty python sketch.
NTSC was the butt of many insults, with many british broadcasting engineers jokingly referring to NTSC as "Never The Same Colour Twice".
I will never stop marveling over the amount of effort put into these videos
I've been watching since the traffic light videos or so and it never ceases to amaze me how good a job you do. This video is fantastic, dense, straightforward, and uses a couple tricks that are just neato. Thank you for everything.
Awesome video, brings me back 2003 when I was taking video editing in film school and we learned to use these exact Betacam SP units, I was always amazed at how precise and responsive they were when integrated with our Avid editing PCs and it was amazing seeing such clear video from a tape.
I love watching objectively pointless, but educational videos! Keep on going :D
I used Betacam SP machines from early 90s until early 2000s. Beautiful machines to use, especially with a jog and shuttle controller. Ability to receive rs232 commands and output SMPTE timecode meant that I could control the machine from a computer and also synchronise all components of my shows.
Just hearing its familiar sounds brings back so many memories ❤ Thank you for making this
Quality content as always.
This channel never disappoints. Every video is a hit. Never a dull moment.
The editing is top-notch, the scripting is fantastic (even the part that wasn't scripted), the humor is great and not overdone. Just everything about this channel is fantastic.
Really a cut above the rest.
35:09 I learned to edit on these machines in the late 90s and used them when I worked briefly in television. This is a nostaligic video for me.
Oh yes, finally a video about my most favorite broadcast tape format. 😄😍
For everyone interested in seeing Betacam SP captured in its complete component glory (minus TH-cam’s compression), my channel holds a bunch of old recordings from a german TV program called “NBC GIGA” (which was basically our ZDTV/TechTV/G4 for anyone still familiar with that). I personally own one UVW and three PVW decks from Sony which I use to digitize and preserve all those original archival recordings from 20 years ago. ☺
Its guite impressive quality "Like a DVD" 😉
Hi, great video! brings me back to the times I used to handle these daily! (2004-2014) (mostly digital betacam, though, digibeta). One note: Digital betacam was not superseded by the SX or IMX version, these were cheaper alternatives that used higher compression rates (even using mpeg-2), mostly for news gathering where cost of cameras was more important than picture quality.
This video has taken my memories back to my first job maintaining and operating Betacam machines. I was one of the guys that have done repairings and preventive works in Betacam Digital and SP machines. They weighted a LOT and were a dust magnet.
About the cassette size, in fact, one decisive factor for the Betacam success was the S cassette size. Betacam professional camcorders for the news production were the smallest (something that for Umatic was unthinkable)
Before Betacam, professional "portable" video for news usually meant that the poor sound man had to lug a "portable" Umatic or even a portable C format recorder (open reel) on a shoulder strap or on a cart. Oh and a big weight in NiCad batteries.
Quicker in post, but a lot bulkier and heavier then 16mm film.
Back in early 80s, I visited a television station studio for local abc broadcasts and news. They had a few betacam machines with those large cassettes. At the time, I knew it was something for professional use only, but didn’t realize how advanced the machine truly was. Thanks for sharing!
I worked for a long time at a church whose entire video archive was on Betacam. Setting aside the tapes that weren't stored correctly, it's truly amazing how high the quality has remained on some of that content that's 40 years old. We had it professionally digitized before the players disappear entirely, and it looks better than most digital content from the 2000s.
The unscripted portion around the 30 min mark was impressively well done. Wouldn't have known that was off the cuff if you hadn't said.
My parents (mostly my mom) were early adopters of time shifting. They had a Betamax that looked much like the ones in the ads you showed (with the channel knobs on the front). However, my only memory of it was sitting in a shelf in the garage (in the late 80s). My earliest memory of a VCR in the house was a woodgrain, top loading unit (I think it was an RCA, but can't remember for sure). We moved out of that house in 1994 when I was 9 yrs old and I think we trashed both of those units when we moved, but I wish I could go back and tell them to hold on to both since they were freaking classics.
Thank you for your work on your videos. Yes your videos are longer then most content creators but i do love the thoroughness of all your videos. I love the research and the detail you get into. I ensure the hard work you put into all your videos. I feel knowledgeable afterwards. This was a cool breakdown again.
I work in news broadcasting and I love the Betacam SX machines.
We used to record onto them regularly until 2018 for archiving purposes. Once we switched to HD (yes it took us that long), it wasn’t practical anymore.
We still have a LOT of archives on Betacam tape. So we’ll occasionally fire up the SX machines. I love the whirring of the machine and using the jog wheel to navigate the tape. The engineering is simply awesome.
Thank you for making this video. I’ll be sharing with my younger colleagues who don’t know the dusty machines in the corner that well. I used to share hours long breakdown of all the parts (highly recommend still)
I’ll also add that while we didn’t use the tapes for our HD the codec you mentioned, HDCAM, was used in our Panasonic P2 ENG cameras
35:46 that groan is worrying, are you ok alec
It's so sexy to save space and to hide the hatch under controls... 😊
Nice mention for MII :) - Also SVHS was used professionally - at least in local TV news (as well as High-8). I have in a closet two pro SVHS decks I used to actually edit video with that have as many connectors on the back.
Super VHS was common in local access TV stations and such (I used it at my high school TV station). Anything above that level was Betacam.
S-VHS increased video bandwidth to ~5 MHz which was basically broadcast quality... but only when it comes to luma. Chroma still used the standard VHS color-under scheme, which produced the same smeary colors, not looking broadcast quality at all.
AFAIU, the point of color-under isn't really to conserve bandwidth, but rather to minimize the effect of uneven tape speed on the frequency and phase of the color signal.
An alternative would be to use time base correction, but that used to be prohibitively expensive for consumer-grade gear.
Colour under systems are fascinating...how they can compensate more or less for tape jitter is really elegant. Customers would get a lot of tech for the money they paid.
I used SVHS at my high school. It was...not great and certainly not broadcast quality. Certainly was better than VHS, but nowhere near Betacam quality. Editing it to a second generation final version was not great quality at all.
Then we got one MiniDV camera. It had the DB9 connector on it to let us connect it to the editing hardware, but they wouldn't let us use it that way. We had to copy the complete video over to SVHS first. They were just afraid of wearing out the mechanisms and heads in the MiniDV camcorder that obviously cost them a pretty penny in 1998.
I'm a video engineer and actually learned a lot from this video. I only got into the industry 8 years ago, and I work in live events, so by the time I started, we were already all-in on Flash drives and hard drives for media storage, though we still use BNC and XLR connectors every day for our equipment.
Thanks for making this video!
God I love these longer videos. Anything that gets me closer to your CED series is a win for me.
The recording format switch, dude. Absolutely brilliantly played. You used your media to show your topic directly. Fan. Fucking. Tastic. And still delivering a very good product of your media.
So, I totally forgot to comment this on the Television saga, but this video reminded me. I've been known to dabble in "glitch art" from time to time, and after one too many "this reminds me of scrambled cable TV channels" comments, I set about coming up with a way to replicate the VideoCipher scrambling effect. It was mostly thanks to your videos about how color TV works that I was able to make any sense of the algorithm and come up with (what I think was) a decently faithful recreation.
You just reminded me of that and i hate it 🙂 Inverted colors wobbly image shaking all over the place, eww. Don't re-create that lol. It also reminds me of the things people used to to to watch without paying...
The screen shake as you plopped those behemoth units on the table was hilarious. 😂
Also, a lot of people (myself included) used the VHS EP option almost exclusively to record TV back in the day because, as you said, it gave the most bang for our buck. On our terrible mid-80s TV with terrible resolution I never really noticed a difference.
BOTH formats are so incredibly mechanical that it is a wonder how they worked at all. All the mechanics of wrapping the tape around the head - are amazing. I remember you had to be careful 'watching' the video while fast-forwarding because the head would heat up (I think). Good stream. I never knew Betacam was a thing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
Watch the older video. He explained how it was done in as simple way as possible by him.
The rotating drum is already spinning very fast. It can handle the friction-caused heat as it scrapes past the tape.
@@jamesisaac7684I second this recommendation! It's a great video 😁
I worked with Beta-SP and DigiBeta for over 15 years, and there were never issues with FFWD or RWD heating up the heads. Possibly that was only in the very earliest machines.
The "wait..." at 35:13 made me freaking loose it :D
I remember that sort of wild west early period of home video rental, when dedicated video stores weren't a thing yet and places like supermarkets and pharmacies were doing video rentals, and a lot of them had enormous VCPs available to rent along with the tapes. They were permanently mounted in huge black plastic suitcases, I assume to make them as unwieldy and unattractive as possible, and you basically had to sign a contract that said the store's owners could help themselves to an internal organ of their choice if anything happened to the machine. :)
ah, the days of the grocery store video department...
I think blockbusters had something similar for console rentals. Always found those console rentals way too expensive though my memory might be fuzzy as I was still pretty young.
In Sweden, those rentable VHS players were called "Moviebox". Pretty nifty name.
I had forgotten about the rental tape players. When we just had specialty stores they just rented regular machines. When Kroger started renting tapes they had the machines in plastic cases that looked like typewriter cases.
Excellent video! This really helps explain the differences between the formats and the myths between the video formats in layman's terms.
18:37 forced a "WOW" out of me. The quality difference is absolutely nuts.
28:37 XD XD XD This guys has amazing comedic timing and dry wit