Came here expecting just a "Hey, I got this!- and onto the next thing" video like most channels that do pickup vids, wasn't expecting it to be a bunch of actual mini overviews and demonstrations. Love this, it's like a dozen mini CRD videos in one :)
yeah only recently found this channel, but already im a super fan, no other channel even gets close! well, maybe technology connections! that channel is in a comfy second place now :)
In the nineties I used a small business that would make the slides for you, if you needed high quality slides, but couldn't afford a slide making gizmo. You would ftp in the slides/presentation/graphic, or deliver a disk, and a few days later get your slides, or get it same day for some extra $. The guy running the business was decently busy making slides for small businesses needed them occasionally, scientists going to present at a conference, or college student wanting a bit of extra on their final presentation. Eventually computer projectors killed his business. It was a must if you wanted nice color slides. In college I just used laser printed transparencies and an overhead projector, but if I wanted color, his business would have been my choice.
46:42 - This warms my heart. As someone who loves to hunt for, collect, archive, and eventually upload obscure vintage software, I _really_ hope those tapes you found still have that show on them. Most of us know what happened to Dr. Who and tons of other BBC shows that are seemingly lost forever when they decided to erase and/or just throw out old tapes.
Same goes for a lot of soap operas in the 60s in the US, I think a lot of early Days of Our Lives episodes got lost this way. And in the case of Dark Shadows only one episode is completely lost minus the audio and some screencaps, the rest of them either survived because the masters weren't thrown out or a monochrome backup copy recorded by kinescope or something similar iirc was made.
Polaroid made a similar device called the "Digital Palette" with a SCSI port to upload an image to an internal frame buffer. What made it interesting was the way it exposed the film, It used only 0% or 100% CRT illumination but varied the length of time pixels were on to create a gray scale. In conjunction with the filter wheel, it would expose a full color image. They made a number of different backs for it. We modded it to fit to a Bolex 16mm film camera and controlled a Stevens motor to advance frame by frame. We could transfer animation from the Commodore Amiga to 16mm film this way.
Ages ago in the early 2000s I maintained one for students to analog-ize their Photoshop'd photography projects so they could turn them in on developed photographs. I heard that it was cheaper to get film blown up to large sizes than it was to print the digital file on a large format printer. It was slow (by modern standards) and the software was really picky and had strict internet activation.
@@greenconscious210 plug the hype photo printer more it could printer photo, but it didn't take expert spot the difference, even today, unless, top end, using exotic waxes and such, price for price, you get way more photos, and going expensive/exotic is just replacing film and print media, unless you talking road side bill board sizes, where hi-res digital , not think? us colur spot the size of your finger tips
@Nick Lopez I actually used one of those while getting my Degree in photography. The program had just started teaching its first digital photography class (yup I'm that old) and we still turned those digital pieces into film to develope and go in the lab and print ourselves from film. Most of my study was in historical & experimental photography techniques so I jumped at the chance to do this when it became available
Don't you have enough exotic retro computers already? 🤣 Seriously though, it would be nice to see some stuff on the Sorcerer. I don't remember ever coming across one in the wild here in the UK.
Usagi, I'd love to see you do a video on the Exidy Sorcerer (every vintage computer channel should have one!). Your kind of deep dive would be really interesting even though the Sorcerer was my fist computer and I'm very familiar with it. C'mon CRTDude, send it to Usagi!
I'm a sound mixer in film and your description of timecode was spot on. You keep a master clock, which is either your sound recorder's internal clock or a timecode generator. Each camera gets it's own timecode generator which is jammed from that master, along with the timecode slates. Timecode isn't only for syncing the audio recording to the video, it's also there to sync many streams of video to streamline editing when you have multiple cameras on set (which is always). Timecode also encodes 8 user bits, which are those numbers that flash when you clack the slate. People use for date and roll number (10.11.22.01 for instance). The industry standard right now is Tentacle Sync, which is a company that started as a crowdfunding campaign and went on to beat out Ambient and Denecke with a timecode box that was better in every way and half the price. We went from $400 hunks of aluminum that took 9 volts or AAs to bluetooth connected, usb-c charging, $200 units about the size of a 9 volt!
yeah i forgot about the camera-to-camera sync, which is funny because it's actually the most important reason for me to know about TC - I've been meaning to do something about that for months ever since I got my second camera, right now I'm just using a clapperboard + triggering both cameras at once and then matching up the clip durations. barely works. anyway, thank you!
So many thoughts to add! I kept this knowledge for just these occasions. I was working at a media company still using U-Matic tapes in the early 2000's. The company worked at horse racing tracks around the city and people could order a VHS copy of races. So even in Y2K, U-Matic (recorded in Low Band too - more on that below) had better quality than VHS. So it made economical sense for the company to keep using it. We did have some Betacam and Betacam SP, but all archives were low band U-Matic. 5000 series U-Matics are low/high band decks. This is something to do with colour recording on tape, I've forgotten the specifics. Effectively high bands recordings are not-backward compatible. There was also some anecdotal talk about low band lasting better, but meh. We also used 9000 series decks as well. These were U-Matic SP (metal tape instead of metal oxide), but archive was always in low band standard tape. I learned how to edit on a 5850 without an edit controller and manually rolling the players. This was a real "this is why you do this" kind of education that helped me no end later on. We had one 5600. This was used as our end of day deck at the main city track. This deck has a mechanical counter with a "loop" mode. To use it, we'd make a tape of the day's racing at the end of the day. Then we'd NOT rewind the tape after recording, put it in the 5600, zero the counter THEN rewind the tape. The deck would then continuously run the tape up to zero on the counter, then rewind to the start. U-Matic doesn't have a time-code track (like Betacam does) so everything was done with tape counters unless you added extra equipment and sacrificed an audio channel. The mechanical counter was a bit more reliable than the electronic ones too. Your DVCAM time-code demo showed a big issue, really well - you had two different time-codes on one tape and they're out of sync. The display box wired to the output and the deck itself were showing both time-codes at the same time. The out of sync time-codes will make a VTR continuously scrub a tape when you tell a VTR to "go to time code blah...", the like when editing with a controller. The perpetual scrubbing happened when the tape would slow down close to the go to time-code set, see a different time-code, start scrubbing fast again, then seeing a different time-code again repeat the process in a loop. As you mentioned there is LTC on an audio track, but there is also VITC (Vertical Interval Time Code) in the video. This is encoded in the blank lines at the top of the frame, like closed captions. A broadcast monitor will have a switch/button to change the video timing and show the VBI (Vertical Blanking Interval). Use that to check the data is present. By default VTRs will use LTC on high speed scrubbing and playback, then use VITC at slow speeds and paused. The time-code display on most VTRs will show an some kind of indication depending on which is in use. Two types are used because the LTC audio track won't decode at very slow speeds and the VITC data corrupts when high speed scrubbing. VTRs will have switches/menus for changing to using only one type of time-code in the event that the two differed like your tape. You could also re-dub LTC from the VITC quite easily - the other way round lost a video generation and just wasn't done. In one recoding situation, I would set the U-Bits (User Bits) to the date, set the time-code to current time and then set the time-code generator (in the camera) to free running. In that mode the time-code just runs regardless of tape recording. I set it this way because where I worked at the time, races were referred to by their time of day. The editors loved it because the tapes came to them with all the day's races already ID'ed for them (location in the shot, date in the u-bits and ToD in the time-code) without having to guess.
The difference in displays in the DSR-45 segment is because the DSR-45 is set to display the Counter, not time code. It's the little switch above the LED display. The TC output will however always output LTC,which contains both the "Time" part of the time code and the User Bits. DV/DVCAM/DVCPRO formats use DV time code, where the data is stored as, well, data; not as a linear track like audio or within the video lines like VITC like the analog formats.
Shows the difference in technology generations. I learned and worked on mostly analogue equipment. When I did eventually work with digital tape formats, they were engineered to mimic “the old ways”. I didn’t notice the counter button. I saw two time-codes and called “autowash”. 😅
SMPTE Timecode is very commonly used in the live events industry. A lot of shows use it to synchronize lighting, video, pyrotechnics and automation to an audio track.
It was commonly used in recording studios to lock multiple tape machines and other equipment. We had standalone time code generators in the rack of almost every studio I worked in back in the day.
47:00 The TechTV/G4 merger was one of the most anger inducing events I ever experienced growing up and the more I hear about it the angrier I get remembering it... Tech TV, a TV network focused on technology and helping people learn about it and present it in a way that felt genuine and not like a sales pitch. Call For Help, Screensavers, Extended Play, Cinematech, Eyedrops, I watched the hell out of all of them, it was pretty much the one TV network where I was fully engrossed in every show they ran. And then G4 came along and turned it from "tech culture" to "DUDE BRO DUDE COLLEGE BABES AND PARTIES AND GAMES BRO LIKE SERIOUSLY BRO, DUDE LIKE GAMES ARE SICK BRO" garbage, they ruined Extended Play by turning Adam and Morgan into weird uncanny valley characters that were shells of their actual personalities with this weird "dominatrix Morgan" thing and renaming it X-Play. They then proceeded to gut every bit of tech programming Tech TV had and replace it with more weird game adjacent shows, they replaced The Screensavers with Attack of the Show which had this weird... I don't even know, like a Tom Green Show kinda vibe to it? It just made no sense. Basically G4 moved in, grabbed a show or two, and canned the rest, like what was the point of merging if they were going to do that? After that merger (less of a merger and more of a takeover, they dropped the G4-TechTV branding after just a few months and just went back to calling themselves G4) I basically never watched television again.
@@Dong_Harvey I know it's a pretty petty thing for me to be angry about, especially since it happened almost 2 decades ago, it was just "A Nice Thing" that got ruined for no good reason and stuck with me through the years.
Basically every “merger” works like that sadly. They buy it for the name, for one or two key products, and kill the rest. The talent leaves but doesn’t keep the IP they helped create. Entire product lines wither and die-out, not because there’s no market appetite, but just because management doesn’t like them. Which of course is why T-Mobile had to say “merger of equals” so many times to get the FCC’s approval to buy Sprint.
@@Lierofox I feel ya. I never watched TechTV but I accidentally watched an episode of G4-whatever once and was not inclined to make that mistake again. I also have very similar emotions about my lost love, BeOS. I can feel my collar getting hot just thinking of it.
The suitcase RCA camcorder was same model I had. Got it used from a yardsale and it didn't work at first but I was able to fix it. It's nothing special by itself. But that camera was there the day in '95 we unexpectedly got a new kitten. That cat grew up to be my best pal for the next almost 20 years before he left us. I will be forever grateful to RCA for giving me the chance to record that kitten's first day with us. And other things of course. But that tape is my most treasured possession. Yes I digitized it years ago and put copies in multiple places. You would think I had plans for a UFO engine the way I have backed up and protected that cat video. I know my priorities.
I remember begging my parents for a subtitled DBZ movie in like 1997 (those 30 minute ones). I think the comic book shop charged something like $50 for a 132 generation copy VHS, but man did I love it. I like how at the beginning it also said, "if you bought this from anyone else you got ripped off." Haha, good times.
Ah, I remember all the 90s fansubs which said that at the start of every episode. I still have a couple of slightly more recent rips of some of those original tapes for some shows that never got an official DVD release.
I paused on the time code and went frame by fame and noticed it was only even numbered frames then that it went to 60, and was able to change the resolution to a 60hz resolution then go through frame by frame and see all the numbers! Thank you! that was actually a hugely rewarding experience
For that Chinon ES3000, it appears that it needs linear flash, the PCMCIA predecessor to ATA flash that the overwhelming majority of PCMCIA flash (and CF) are. I have a spare linear flash card if you want it. (Apple Newtons also needed linear flash, rather than ATA flash.) I have a spare I'd be willing to send your way.
I think old Cisco routers used to use those as well? I've got two PCMCIA flash cards pulled out of dead routers and they were recognized as 16 MB linear flash by Linux.
Exidy was an arcade game manufacturer and the inside of the Exidy Sorcerer basically looks like a late 70's / early 80's arcade PCB right down to the lack of solder mask. Arcade PCBs from that era were manufactured as cheaply as possible and sometimes had poor design especially in the power supply. It wouldn't surprise me if the Sorcerer was manufactured by whoever was doing their arcade machines at the time.
Your enthusiasm never gets old. So glad someone is collecting and archiving this stuff. Your details and insights are wonderful. I have seen so many of these devices but never much considered their history or where they fit in in the audio/video ecosystem. Great Stuff!
The Sorcerer by my recollection was an attempt to be an ultimate TRS80, PET or Apple ii clone, but much like piston engined warplanes after World War 2, newer technology was appearing to make it redundant. I'd definitely want one if I wasn't on the other side of the world! Thanks for highlighting this 😀
Man, all these cameras and recorders remind me of the old storage room of the local news station I used to work at, and many of the exact models like the DSR-45 and the Horita SMPTE timecode generator were used extensively. We even had the Hitachi remote controlled camera that was primarily used as a "skycam" cutaway during news and a morning show, mounted on a tower.
I had an inkling it was due to the sharpness making focusing easier :) Especially because nowadays colour previews have to have all sorts of tricks, like showing yellow blobs where some edge-detection algorithm says things are past a sharpness threshold. And the operator has to adjust until finding the peak “yellow blobbyness”, if using that feature.
@@kaitlyn__L Yea, color monitors make you rely on their interpretation of contrast when you turn on “peaking” an overly bright light can make the monitor give you the false impression of sharp focus. Color is nice but B&W is all an operator really needs if they have a director telling them where to point and how to adjust framing
Your Panasonic TV/VCR combo got a pretty respectable amount of screen time in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. The famous industrial designer Syd Mead (RIP) was the film's "visual futurist" and, while I can't say for sure, there's a chance he was the one responsible for selecting that particular model. Either way, it certainly has that "looked in 1984 like it could be from 26 years in the future" je ne sais quoi.
I once worked at a small public access cable tv studio... we used the Vidionics title machine there... I laughed a lot when you brought that thing out... thanks for the stroll down memory lane!
OMG the canon XL-1 and XL-2 were what we used when I worked in indie film. good times. I wasn't aware of the other models around this. Fascinating. LOL "I only wanted this because it's weird" I get that :D Super cool find.
SMPTE is also widely used in the live production industry, it's used to sync all elements of a show together. If you've been to an arena show in the past ~15 years chances are most of the lighting and automation was running off timecode, with the operators mostly standing by for safety purposes. Those little boxes are actually super standard kit for us, they even make nixie tube models cuz we're all nerds too.
One note on the 3.5 inch 9v center positive power cable on the time code burner, a ton of guitar pedals specifically DOD and EHX use center positive plugs so its very easy to find 9v center negative to positive converters.
IIRC, the old Atari 2600 console used the same jack, but not sure of the polarity. It would definitely have meant a large amount of spare power supplies available.
That particular Videonics Titler is great for circuit bending. I’ve bent one myself and got amazing colorful glitch effects. It still works as a fully functional titler too.
Man, from cable access to major market TV, to film….MEMORY LANE for many people here! Thanks for being the one to store all the junk we can’t and reviewing! Many thanks!
Great video ! So interesting especially the titlers and other tv and film prod things! Also very happy you’ve tried a steadicam! I’ve seen them in person often but it was always hands off
Old Steadicams are always fun. A high point of Jonathan Creek for me was seeing him operate a late-90s one in one episode, which was part of a gambit to let him snoop around an office without being noticed - “everyone ignores the cameraman!” I like how the mini VTR is clearly related to your New Favourite Thing. Whether one descended from the other, or they were just developed simultaneously. I bet they hooked-into the viewfinder port on that RCA one _purely_ because power and video was already being routed through one cable, having everything to do with component cost and nothing to do with signal path. Wow, that serial titler makes fansubs just as easy as the frustrating process of manually scripting a .SRT or .SSA file! I’m being flippant of course, it’s undoubtedly easier than manual timing, but it’s still often a huge PITA. That is the rest of what I wanted to comment on, since these ones seemed less-worthy of their own comments than the other items.
I love seeing the evolution of video. In the mid 1990s I was shooting in SD with Sony 8mm handy-cam and now in 2022 I’m using a Panasonic GH6 for 5.7K internal ProRes
Little insight on LTC/MTC and it’s current use in the live event industry: that same signal is often used to sync video and lighting to a band or dj performance, and is often distributed as a normal audio signal along with and backing tracks a band might play to. Crazy how such an old tool has been repurposed today!
Fun trip down technology lane! I utilized at least eight of the items you featured here. The Panasonic WV-F70 was the cost-efficient 2CCD alternative to the 3CCD 300CLE and WV-F250, with the 250 having a similar docking pin attachment to that of the F70. My F70 was paired with a portable Panasonic AG-7400 SVHS deck, as the AG-7450 was a bit more expensive even used at the time, which also could pair with any other camera with a 10/14-pin interface. These Panasonic cameras were also a cost-cutting measure for some mid to small market local TV stations vs. purchasing new BetaSP or the infamous Panasonic M-II videotape format in the early 1990's, with the major downfall being generational loss when edited to Beta, 3/4" or SVHS.
whoever slapped that Apple sticker on the powernote is a class-a mad lad. fully thought it was some crazy Brother-Apple collaboration and you were downplaying it for effect.
Damn I love stuff like this even tho I don't have any real use for it. I do have a huge kink for 90s pro level video equipment, that's why I own multiple pvm monitors and weird switches and stuff. go on with stuff like that Greetings from Germany
18:08 oh my god, as soon as i saw that Brother laptop, i knew i'd seen it before and immediately texted my dad about it. and sure enough!! he used to work a lot with data recovery from old computers, and i remember him bringing one of those home to recover word processing files off it. he told me that seeing it again made his day, so even though it's total junk, i'm glad you shared it
On the topic of the 1440x1080, yes, it was entirely bandwidth, but even with the shrunken frame, HDV still suffers bitrate starvation artifacts (though part of that might be because it sort of predates AVCHD so the codec was not as efficient and those 28Mb/s just weren't quite enough--same bitrate as the old DV format because tape speeds).
And here I thought it was also about improving sensor yields. Since I knew eg the cameras used for Star Wars II and III had “full 2K” (so probably a little more than 1920 wide), but were _extremely_ expensive at the time even compared to all the rest of the market.
@@bakonfreek I’m sure your reason was a primary concern - why invest in better yields if there isn’t the bandwidth to begin with? So it’s no coincidence we started seeing better only after SD cards had caught-up enough to replace (H)DV. But then that also tracks with why the bigger sensors were so obscenely expensive, because only a handful of products would be made with each to recoup the cost, since no one else even had the bandwidth. Though that said, I wonder what rate Digibeta ran at… hmm okay, 90Mbps. Guess that was what you had to use if you wanted better 1440x1080, or had the very very rare camera with more pixels.
Makes sense, though even on much higher bandwidth formats (DVCPRO HD, 100Mb/s), sensors were often not even 720 capable, but to be fair, the 1080i/p resolution on that format capped at 1280×1080 (even though the tape ran so fast that DVCPRO HD only ever used non-mini DV cassettes).
@@bakonfreek yeah, every TV show I’ve known that used Digibeta was SD (albeit PAL so 96 extra lines). But with an HD-suitable codec it seems like it was capable! I imagine the dearth of non-cinema-projection 1080-line home displays until the end of the 00s was an incentive to just use slower speeds and lower resolutions for most productions.
In the mid 90s I was working for a company that had much more sophisticated machines for transfering computer graphics to 35mm film. It contained a large spool of film and you could send multiple files to it and it would process all the images. It was very hi res and took quite some time to transfer a file to a single slide. Quality was awesome though.
I really appreciate the value of your collectorship/museum/stewardship/whatever for these things - stuff like that Polaroid accessory. Fantastic to make sure that some of those survive and eventually become a complete system again
That Exidy Sorcerer brings back a lot of memories. It was my first computer and came with 32kb on board. The S100 had ram cards adding up to a whopping 56kb and a floppy interface card for my Micropolis double sided double density hard sectored 5.25 in floppy drives. To round things off I had a green phosphor monitor and an Epson MX 80 dot matrix printer. This was in 1981.Anyway, my system would operate either Micropolis Dos or CP/M, booting of drive 0 with an Enter command. I would run Micropolis Basic, Exidy Basic, Pascal MT Plus, Cobol and few other things. Yes, it did have rudimentary graphics using the character sets on the keyboard and I actually would code my own in hex. I still have mine, but it needs to be repaired. It was a good machine for its time.
I have a bunch of those cards they got from a guy who thought they were meant for a TRS 80. One of them is a discard the other one has a processor on it a 6800, and the other one is a big Ram card which I think goes to 256k
Back in my day 256k wasn't possible AFAIK. That card probably came later. As I recall, some guy wanted to modify the motherboard and increase the ram to 64k, but I refused in case he damaged the computer. My S100 has about 8 cards including the floppy controller, which is why it maxed out at 56k, which was more than enough to RUN CP/M, wordstar and most CP/M software of the day. Just an additional comment on the 8 track case, I thought it was so cool and smart. This machine was from the 70s, after all.
I have used that exact Panasonic P2 camera in college, and let me tell you the image quality on that thing's screen was diabolical. Always made me think I was over or underexposing. The output files were okay if you did lighting correctly.
I was not expecting a steadycam that was super cool, being a camera geek I've also always thought it would be super cool to just mess around with one too :D.
Man, watching you geek out on the Steadicam was gold. I would be too. The first time I laid hands on a gimbal I spent half the day whirling around the house with it like a dervish on crack.
Steadicams, especially those old school ones that do not yet have electric gimbals and whatnot, are really an art to master. And you need to go through the whole balancing rigmarole again if you swap lenses, filters, Matte boxes, etc. - even swapping to a different battery pack at the bottom can throw the entire thing off. It is VERY easy to mess footage up if you have not balanced the rig properly (edit: AND not done a ton of practice!). Your horizon is going to be all over the place and watching that kind of footage it can make some people reaaaally queasy, almost seasick.
Woah that RCA camcorder is the one my dad bought when I was maybe 4 years old. All my childhood home movies were recorded on that thing and it eventually pretty much became mine. Didn't have that little titler though, I would have loved that.
OMG that tiny sony deck takes me back!!! I used that in college years after it was put in storage to record the bad SD cameras for our first sports broadcasts at the community college I was at. It was awesome until it ate the tape and melted!! 😂
those seemingly random text in old forgotten NVRAM is likely altered bits from particles hitting and flipping bits, in sense you have an SMS from distant stars dying, famous last words.
Great video and well presented. You are a wealth of knowledge and entertaining to watch. As someone who was a teenager in the 70's, I can assure you it wasn't all that dreary but the tech was limited! Thanks for the video.
Hot tip for you. I was a pro snowboarder and those cameras replaced 16mm shooting for a couple year. I can remember being on shoots with it @ Mt. Hood in the 90’s. It was durable and we all were in awe when it started showing up on the slopes. Good score!
Wow! That canon! I used the xl1 back in the early 2000 and it took some truly great pictures. The 'film' mode was great. Interestingly 28 days later was shot on an xl1. It's not just about the resolution of the format but the lens and the glass. Congrats on the xlh1. Would be a great camera to shoot on just for how it feels and also a great design and form factor.
I have DSR-45 and i love it. It's a rare combination of being cute, small and feature-rich pro device. And you missed the most important feature - almost ASMR level motorised tape door which can be triggered by eject button
Xl1 never showed up in my highschool film class. We were using TV cameras recorded to VHS or consumer grade digital 8 cameras, out to mac's for digital editing. And this was for "career ready" classes '99 and '00
Well it took a few days but I'm through it. It's great seeing you as a total nerd who just likes stuff getting to, you know, find stuff he likes, and then talk about it. Obviously, your subscribers also like a huge chunk of this as well, like myself, but our interests are largely parallel. For example, I'm a photographer. You like video. I like old tech that are still good to use with modern applications. You just like old tech. So I'm getting all that passion I have for my stuff but on things I've never seen in detail before. Very cool.
Many years ago a media studies graduate told me that he improvised a steady cam for a film project by suspending his camera in a stocking with a hole cut in it for the lens.
21:54 It's cheaper to make one big PCB than a bunch of little ones - They were probably trying to save production from having to make a second PCB and a ribbon going down and then engineering reasonable mounts for said PCB. Probably a couple bucks saved there, not just pennies. The 8 track thing is interesting! I thought that cartridge looked familiar. Thinking about it, this was actually a really good idea. High quality label printing and cartridge shells already existed, why not use them? Pretty durable too, in my experience. This probably helped them save a ton of money and keep the bottom line for the machine further down which was no small feat. But also totally hilarious in retrospect, I agree. 23:31 That sounds like the Quantum ProDrive - Yeah, no surprise that it doesn't work. 24:00 That drive is actually working! It's totally fine! You just need to put a drop or two of oil in it and it will go back to working! That drive actually sounds like it's in really good shape. Spindle bearing good, stepper quiet, no scraping. What you're seeing there is that the drive is failing it's seek test because of missed steps on the pull back - It's probably just sticky inside. 27:43 Yeah the analog side there is unhappy about something. You're seeing retrace lines, so either the brightness is way too high or the frequency is WAY off. I'm thinking both - Turn the brightness level down a bunch until you can't see the retrace lines (the vertical lines you see in the video) and then, since the composite seems to be working, plug something in there and turn the horizontal until you probably wind up with a rolling picture, then turn the vertical until it locks. Probably just a portable TV inside with the exception of the lens and the carousel. I would be very interested to see you get it working! Interesting piece of history there. The other option I think would have been either printing it out and photographing it or using a plotter! 39:55 Did not know that, now I absolutely need to find an ancient sub of Sailor Moon or something to see both their bad translation and their use of Sony HandyCam titler
I worked in a studio in the 90's. We used SMPTE to sync a 24-track tape machine to an Atari 1040STE running 2.0 via a converter-box. With a fresh tape, you'd start by laying down the SMPTE-code from to Atari to usually track 24. When that was done, Cubase was set to "slave" to incomming time-code. After that, the controller for the tape-machine was now basically the master-controls for play/stop/ff/rw. The Atari would usually sync up within 1 second, and also be in the right spot in the song of course. Worked really well.
Gonna guess there's already some comments about this, but the small box Hitachi camera was likely used as a remote controlled camera for broadcast somewhere. A TV station I worked for had a similar HD model shoved in the corner of the newsroom for the newsroom "flash cam" position. Since there wasn't enough space around it to operate it, there was no need for accoutrements like a viewfinder or manual lens control. There was a second identical one hung from a pan/tilt head in the lighting grid of the studio, for bump shots.
Saw you at Re-PC today. Yeah, the e-clips go away, you should have spares. Also things you should have spares: Any captive spring pins in the vest, the aircraft pin (several broken ones are on my desk), and any thumbscrews as well. Also, the vest will have a number of hex screws/bolts in it, you should have either hex drivers or a screwdriver with bits for all of them and check all of them before flight. Bonus points if you add a remove before flight streamer to the aircraft pin.
I have to find a sorcerer computer now. It is absolutely a beauty. I think I am going to have to take a trip to California now. Amazing finds and I hope your trip was as fun as it seemed.
Regarding your Mac SE - give it a love tap when it's running - the drives were known for having issues with stiction and I've had an SE II running just fine after a gentle tap on the case*. Obvs - your mileage may vary - it's not a guaranteed method nor will it prevent it happening again but it can be enough to fire it up and pull data from it.
I'm pretty sure that "weird hand grip next to the lens" on the XLH1 was Canon's way of imitating the controls found on ENG camcorder lenses, which are on a "grip block" mounted on the left-side of the lens itself and have a multi-pin control cable which plugs into the camera body. Canon's version of those controls on their XLH1 means that their lenses are less bulky and the controls don't change when the lens does.
this is great, i have one of those videonics titlers but i`ve never bothered to try it out because I assumed it would be more of a PITA than a useful tool- definitely going to be pulling that out of storage now!
That Canon XL H1 reminds me of my first pro camera, the Canon XH-A1s. Released around 2007 it was fucking awesome. By todays standards the dynamic range kid of sucks but it shot 25P fairly sharp, obviously 1440x1080 but still great. It was used to film Crank 2 High Voltage as well!
Plenty of television stations transitioning to HD with more limited budgets, at the time, utilised these for in the field reporting. For that, It was pretty good for the money but not much more. Getting an entire theatrically released film out of it is downright amazing.
@@GeorgeVCohea-dw7ou The DP's in Crank 2 got shots while on rollerskates and stuff, there used to be a case study on Canon's website years ago with awesome BTS pictures.
@@patrik_x86 Whoa, that is an experimental technique that would be extraordinarily rare used with A-list actors, which Statham was on the edge of at that time. Absolutely fascinating that a DP could get away with utilising such a camera and oddball concepts. There is almost no way Crank 2 would have been produced a year or even months later. I remember that it was not quite as compelling as the first one, but it might be time to revisit the series, especially now knowing this titbit.
@@patrik_x86 I actually know someone who knows Brandon Trost but I had not realised that he was the cinematographer on Crank 2. The films he typically does aren't really my cup of tea, and the familiarity is not there for me, unfortunately.
So rad!!! I wish I could find tech. I used to run a BBS in the 80/90s and was thinking of trying to find a 8086 and doing a retro BBS connected to the internet. The time code clocks would work with my Mackie d8b mixer. Those are cool.
THE VIDEONICS TITLEMAKER! I think that was legit my first "game console"-like entertainment as a kid, I had a lot of fun with it. My father used it professionally for a long time making weddings and that kind of stuff.
This was such a fun video to watch. Not only way the gear super cool and fascinating, but also your charming presentation style made this especially fun and engaging. The perfect balance of hitting the key points, but also occasionally going into depth on the neat quirks. Thanks for making this video, truly fascinating to see how video creation was developed around technological limitations back in the day. So much hassle!
28:51 - QC! I love the videos like this - dumping a whole bunch of general knowledge/trivia into my brain that I'll probably never need again, but will think back on and be like 'oh yeah, neat' Thanks!
At one point as a child we had a hand-me-down complete Digital Rainbow 100 - it was a dual-cpu Z80/8088 desktop machine that could run CP/M, CP/M-86 or a machine specific version of MS-DOS. As far as I remember I only ever got the CP/M disk and the "Learning" informational disk working as a kid, and eventually because it wasn't all that useful it was discarded. Wish I still had it though.
In the 80s at the university I worked for, we had a Olympus OM1? pointing at a monochrome monitor with a home made filter changer in a room that was totally dark. A servo controlled shutter release was used to open the shutter, the monitor was connected to a home brew 256 x 256 x 1 bit frame store and the image was downloaded from a mainframe at 256k baud. The image was flashed a number of frames to get the different per bit brightness. This allowed full color slides to be made. At that time a 256 x 256 x 8bit system was a large rack and cost 10s of thousands.
47:19 Nice! I own a DSR-30, the prosumer DVCAM deck. Bought it new and made a shelf of PDV-184Ns recording off the air. It's full width and has a fluorescent display, which I can't really read from across the living room. I wish they had stuck with the LEDs for that, too. My Spectracom 8183 clock does have the big LEDs, so I know (knew) when the commercials are about to end. They made that for mobile and law enforcement and similar uses, where, again, readability at a distance is important.
Thanks for another video that had me exclaiming: "I have that!" for a few items, and "I want one of those!" for a lot more. I own a Canon XL-1, and it was the best standard def camcorder I've owned, and even better with a manual ENG type lens that still has the auto iris hookup. Too bad everything went to HD before I got a lot of use out of my XL-1!
We were using something like the Polaroid Palette to make slides for portfolio review of digital art at SVA in like 2000ish. Probably one of the more modern models though.
I understand the humanity of tech specs more than the humanity of humans.
Oh hi Tay, pleasantly surprised to see you here, cheers.
Lucky for me then.
Pizza Pat says hi!
Thanks to you, I understand chocolate rain.
Do you still move away from the mic to breathe in?
Time and time again I'm impressed of your skill to NOT walk out with practically everything these warehouse places have
This is the CRD decent-into-madness plot arc that hopefully never happens
Came here expecting just a "Hey, I got this!- and onto the next thing" video like most channels that do pickup vids, wasn't expecting it to be a bunch of actual mini overviews and demonstrations. Love this, it's like a dozen mini CRD videos in one :)
yeah only recently found this channel, but already im a super fan, no other channel even gets close! well, maybe technology connections! that channel is in a comfy second place now :)
In the nineties I used a small business that would make the slides for you, if you needed high quality slides, but couldn't afford a slide making gizmo. You would ftp in the slides/presentation/graphic, or deliver a disk, and a few days later get your slides, or get it same day for some extra $. The guy running the business was decently busy making slides for small businesses needed them occasionally, scientists going to present at a conference, or college student wanting a bit of extra on their final presentation. Eventually computer projectors killed his business. It was a must if you wanted nice color slides. In college I just used laser printed transparencies and an overhead projector, but if I wanted color, his business would have been my choice.
46:42 - This warms my heart. As someone who loves to hunt for, collect, archive, and eventually upload obscure vintage software, I _really_ hope those tapes you found still have that show on them. Most of us know what happened to Dr. Who and tons of other BBC shows that are seemingly lost forever when they decided to erase and/or just throw out old tapes.
Same goes for a lot of soap operas in the 60s in the US, I think a lot of early Days of Our Lives episodes got lost this way. And in the case of Dark Shadows only one episode is completely lost minus the audio and some screencaps, the rest of them either survived because the masters weren't thrown out or a monochrome backup copy recorded by kinescope or something similar iirc was made.
Polaroid made a similar device called the "Digital Palette" with a SCSI port to upload an image to an internal frame buffer. What made it interesting was the way it exposed the film, It used only 0% or 100% CRT illumination but varied the length of time pixels were on to create a gray scale. In conjunction with the filter wheel, it would expose a full color image. They made a number of different backs for it. We modded it to fit to a Bolex 16mm film camera and controlled a Stevens motor to advance frame by frame. We could transfer animation from the Commodore Amiga to 16mm film this way.
Ages ago in the early 2000s I maintained one for students to analog-ize their Photoshop'd photography projects so they could turn them in on developed photographs. I heard that it was cheaper to get film blown up to large sizes than it was to print the digital file on a large format printer.
It was slow (by modern standards) and the software was really picky and had strict internet activation.
@@greenconscious210 plug the hype photo printer more it could printer photo, but it didn't take expert spot the difference, even today, unless, top end, using exotic waxes and such, price for price, you get way more photos, and going expensive/exotic is just replacing film and print media, unless you talking road side bill board sizes, where hi-res digital , not think? us colur spot the size of your finger tips
@Nick Lopez I actually used one of those while getting my Degree in photography. The program had just started teaching its first digital photography class (yup I'm that old) and we still turned those digital pieces into film to develope and go in the lab and print ourselves from film. Most of my study was in historical & experimental photography techniques so I jumped at the chance to do this when it became available
Oh man, that Exidy Sorcerer is epic! If you're still looking to rehome, I have a home and would love to do a deep dive into it!
I'm already excited for this video and I'm not even sure if it's going to exist yet!
You were the first person I thought of when it came on screen 😅
Make it happen CRD!!!
Don't you have enough exotic retro computers already? 🤣 Seriously though, it would be nice to see some stuff on the Sorcerer. I don't remember ever coming across one in the wild here in the UK.
Usagi, I'd love to see you do a video on the Exidy Sorcerer (every vintage computer channel should have one!). Your kind of deep dive would be really interesting even though the Sorcerer was my fist computer and I'm very familiar with it. C'mon CRTDude, send it to Usagi!
I'm a sound mixer in film and your description of timecode was spot on. You keep a master clock, which is either your sound recorder's internal clock or a timecode generator. Each camera gets it's own timecode generator which is jammed from that master, along with the timecode slates. Timecode isn't only for syncing the audio recording to the video, it's also there to sync many streams of video to streamline editing when you have multiple cameras on set (which is always). Timecode also encodes 8 user bits, which are those numbers that flash when you clack the slate. People use for date and roll number (10.11.22.01 for instance).
The industry standard right now is Tentacle Sync, which is a company that started as a crowdfunding campaign and went on to beat out Ambient and Denecke with a timecode box that was better in every way and half the price. We went from $400 hunks of aluminum that took 9 volts or AAs to bluetooth connected, usb-c charging, $200 units about the size of a 9 volt!
yeah i forgot about the camera-to-camera sync, which is funny because it's actually the most important reason for me to know about TC - I've been meaning to do something about that for months ever since I got my second camera, right now I'm just using a clapperboard + triggering both cameras at once and then matching up the clip durations. barely works. anyway, thank you!
So many thoughts to add! I kept this knowledge for just these occasions.
I was working at a media company still using U-Matic tapes in the early 2000's. The company worked at horse racing tracks around the city and people could order a VHS copy of races. So even in Y2K, U-Matic (recorded in Low Band too - more on that below) had better quality than VHS. So it made economical sense for the company to keep using it. We did have some Betacam and Betacam SP, but all archives were low band U-Matic.
5000 series U-Matics are low/high band decks. This is something to do with colour recording on tape, I've forgotten the specifics. Effectively high bands recordings are not-backward compatible. There was also some anecdotal talk about low band lasting better, but meh. We also used 9000 series decks as well. These were U-Matic SP (metal tape instead of metal oxide), but archive was always in low band standard tape. I learned how to edit on a 5850 without an edit controller and manually rolling the players. This was a real "this is why you do this" kind of education that helped me no end later on.
We had one 5600. This was used as our end of day deck at the main city track. This deck has a mechanical counter with a "loop" mode. To use it, we'd make a tape of the day's racing at the end of the day. Then we'd NOT rewind the tape after recording, put it in the 5600, zero the counter THEN rewind the tape. The deck would then continuously run the tape up to zero on the counter, then rewind to the start. U-Matic doesn't have a time-code track (like Betacam does) so everything was done with tape counters unless you added extra equipment and sacrificed an audio channel. The mechanical counter was a bit more reliable than the electronic ones too.
Your DVCAM time-code demo showed a big issue, really well - you had two different time-codes on one tape and they're out of sync. The display box wired to the output and the deck itself were showing both time-codes at the same time. The out of sync time-codes will make a VTR continuously scrub a tape when you tell a VTR to "go to time code blah...", the like when editing with a controller. The perpetual scrubbing happened when the tape would slow down close to the go to time-code set, see a different time-code, start scrubbing fast again, then seeing a different time-code again repeat the process in a loop. As you mentioned there is LTC on an audio track, but there is also VITC (Vertical Interval Time Code) in the video. This is encoded in the blank lines at the top of the frame, like closed captions. A broadcast monitor will have a switch/button to change the video timing and show the VBI (Vertical Blanking Interval). Use that to check the data is present.
By default VTRs will use LTC on high speed scrubbing and playback, then use VITC at slow speeds and paused. The time-code display on most VTRs will show an some kind of indication depending on which is in use. Two types are used because the LTC audio track won't decode at very slow speeds and the VITC data corrupts when high speed scrubbing. VTRs will have switches/menus for changing to using only one type of time-code in the event that the two differed like your tape. You could also re-dub LTC from the VITC quite easily - the other way round lost a video generation and just wasn't done.
In one recoding situation, I would set the U-Bits (User Bits) to the date, set the time-code to current time and then set the time-code generator (in the camera) to free running. In that mode the time-code just runs regardless of tape recording. I set it this way because where I worked at the time, races were referred to by their time of day. The editors loved it because the tapes came to them with all the day's races already ID'ed for them (location in the shot, date in the u-bits and ToD in the time-code) without having to guess.
Wow, thank you for all this info, especially about the mismatched timecode - I had noticed it and wondered what it meant!
The difference in displays in the DSR-45 segment is because the DSR-45 is set to display the Counter, not time code. It's the little switch above the LED display.
The TC output will however always output LTC,which contains both the "Time" part of the time code and the User Bits.
DV/DVCAM/DVCPRO formats use DV time code, where the data is stored as, well, data; not as a linear track like audio or within the video lines like VITC like the analog formats.
Shows the difference in technology generations. I learned and worked on mostly analogue equipment. When I did eventually work with digital tape formats, they were engineered to mimic “the old ways”.
I didn’t notice the counter button. I saw two time-codes and called “autowash”. 😅
I went to the eWaste center and only came back with a monochrome monitor, so this is perfect for me. I will live through your work
Wow, a monochrome monitor? How lucky. I only found a Mag-Lite today.
"I went to the E-waste center and all I got was this lousy CRAY"
SMPTE Timecode is very commonly used in the live events industry. A lot of shows use it to synchronize lighting, video, pyrotechnics and automation to an audio track.
It was commonly used in recording studios to lock multiple tape machines and other equipment. We had standalone time code generators in the rack of almost every studio I worked in back in the day.
A bunch of synthesisers had support for it in the 90s too. Nowadays they mostly just use MIDI sync though.
They have wordclock and tri-level sync these days too.
I had an Atari St with the SMPTE tracks box and all. With a keyboard and a reel to reel, I was king of the world. But indeed, damn good tech.
and timecode readers like that are still quite expensive (around 600$), I'm quite jealous of his find!
The Steadicam was so revolutionary, its inventor earned an Oscar for it.
I met him once many years ago.
Rocky
@@retrogamestudios6688 a
Garrett Brown, the legend.
47:00
The TechTV/G4 merger was one of the most anger inducing events I ever experienced growing up and the more I hear about it the angrier I get remembering it...
Tech TV, a TV network focused on technology and helping people learn about it and present it in a way that felt genuine and not like a sales pitch. Call For Help, Screensavers, Extended Play, Cinematech, Eyedrops, I watched the hell out of all of them, it was pretty much the one TV network where I was fully engrossed in every show they ran.
And then G4 came along and turned it from "tech culture" to "DUDE BRO DUDE COLLEGE BABES AND PARTIES AND GAMES BRO LIKE SERIOUSLY BRO, DUDE LIKE GAMES ARE SICK BRO" garbage, they ruined Extended Play by turning Adam and Morgan into weird uncanny valley characters that were shells of their actual personalities with this weird "dominatrix Morgan" thing and renaming it X-Play. They then proceeded to gut every bit of tech programming Tech TV had and replace it with more weird game adjacent shows, they replaced The Screensavers with Attack of the Show which had this weird... I don't even know, like a Tom Green Show kinda vibe to it? It just made no sense.
Basically G4 moved in, grabbed a show or two, and canned the rest, like what was the point of merging if they were going to do that? After that merger (less of a merger and more of a takeover, they dropped the G4-TechTV branding after just a few months and just went back to calling themselves G4) I basically never watched television again.
Yeah, I remembered that, it sucked so back I never forgave our economy
@@Dong_Harvey I know it's a pretty petty thing for me to be angry about, especially since it happened almost 2 decades ago, it was just "A Nice Thing" that got ruined for no good reason and stuck with me through the years.
Basically every “merger” works like that sadly. They buy it for the name, for one or two key products, and kill the rest. The talent leaves but doesn’t keep the IP they helped create. Entire product lines wither and die-out, not because there’s no market appetite, but just because management doesn’t like them.
Which of course is why T-Mobile had to say “merger of equals” so many times to get the FCC’s approval to buy Sprint.
@@kaitlyn__L its nice to know that those totally human corporations have every means to demand equal rights under the law of commerce
@@Lierofox I feel ya. I never watched TechTV but I accidentally watched an episode of G4-whatever once and was not inclined to make that mistake again. I also have very similar emotions about my lost love, BeOS. I can feel my collar getting hot just thinking of it.
The suitcase RCA camcorder was same model I had. Got it used from a yardsale and it didn't work at first but I was able to fix it. It's nothing special by itself. But that camera was there the day in '95 we unexpectedly got a new kitten. That cat grew up to be my best pal for the next almost 20 years before he left us. I will be forever grateful to RCA for giving me the chance to record that kitten's first day with us. And other things of course. But that tape is my most treasured possession. Yes I digitized it years ago and put copies in multiple places. You would think I had plans for a UFO engine the way I have backed up and protected that cat video. I know my priorities.
I remember begging my parents for a subtitled DBZ movie in like 1997 (those 30 minute ones). I think the comic book shop charged something like $50 for a 132 generation copy VHS, but man did I love it. I like how at the beginning it also said, "if you bought this from anyone else you got ripped off." Haha, good times.
Ah, I remember all the 90s fansubs which said that at the start of every episode. I still have a couple of slightly more recent rips of some of those original tapes for some shows that never got an official DVD release.
You can't have enough wii fit balance boards, they actually make very good weight scales with homebrew tools.
I paused on the time code and went frame by fame and noticed it was only even numbered frames then that it went to 60, and was able to change the resolution to a 60hz resolution then go through frame by frame and see all the numbers! Thank you! that was actually a hugely rewarding experience
For that Chinon ES3000, it appears that it needs linear flash, the PCMCIA predecessor to ATA flash that the overwhelming majority of PCMCIA flash (and CF) are. I have a spare linear flash card if you want it. (Apple Newtons also needed linear flash, rather than ATA flash.) I have a spare I'd be willing to send your way.
I think old Cisco routers used to use those as well? I've got two PCMCIA flash cards pulled out of dead routers and they were recognized as 16 MB linear flash by Linux.
@@grawity they did undead do that
Exidy was an arcade game manufacturer and the inside of the Exidy Sorcerer basically looks like a late 70's / early 80's arcade PCB right down to the lack of solder mask. Arcade PCBs from that era were manufactured as cheaply as possible and sometimes had poor design especially in the power supply. It wouldn't surprise me if the Sorcerer was manufactured by whoever was doing their arcade machines at the time.
Your enthusiasm never gets old. So glad someone is collecting and archiving this stuff. Your details and insights are wonderful. I have seen so many of these devices but never much considered their history or where they fit in in the audio/video ecosystem. Great Stuff!
The Sorcerer by my recollection was an attempt to be an ultimate TRS80, PET or Apple ii clone, but much like piston engined warplanes after World War 2, newer technology was appearing to make it redundant. I'd definitely want one if I wasn't on the other side of the world! Thanks for highlighting this 😀
Man, all these cameras and recorders remind me of the old storage room of the local news station I used to work at, and many of the exact models like the DSR-45 and the Horita SMPTE timecode generator were used extensively. We even had the Hitachi remote controlled camera that was primarily used as a "skycam" cutaway during news and a morning show, mounted on a tower.
B&W makes it easier to see contrast and helps you find focus faster. Peaking helps a lot on color monitors. (works in broadcast)
I had an inkling it was due to the sharpness making focusing easier :)
Especially because nowadays colour previews have to have all sorts of tricks, like showing yellow blobs where some edge-detection algorithm says things are past a sharpness threshold. And the operator has to adjust until finding the peak “yellow blobbyness”, if using that feature.
@@kaitlyn__L Yea, color monitors make you rely on their interpretation of contrast when you turn on “peaking” an overly bright light can make the monitor give you the false impression of sharp focus. Color is nice but B&W is all an operator really needs if they have a director telling them where to point and how to adjust framing
Your Panasonic TV/VCR combo got a pretty respectable amount of screen time in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. The famous industrial designer Syd Mead (RIP) was the film's "visual futurist" and, while I can't say for sure, there's a chance he was the one responsible for selecting that particular model. Either way, it certainly has that "looked in 1984 like it could be from 26 years in the future" je ne sais quoi.
I once worked at a small public access cable tv studio... we used the Vidionics title machine there... I laughed a lot when you brought that thing out... thanks for the stroll down memory lane!
We're watching Cathode Ray Dude transform himself into a Super Hero in real time! That's half a Doctor Octopus suit right there!
OMG the canon XL-1 and XL-2 were what we used when I worked in indie film. good times. I wasn't aware of the other models around this. Fascinating. LOL "I only wanted this because it's weird" I get that :D Super cool find.
22:50 the 8 track case is genius. Have you ever priced out a custom plastic mold?
I can't help but giggle at the small serial titler. That thing just fills me with joy
SMPTE is also widely used in the live production industry, it's used to sync all elements of a show together. If you've been to an arena show in the past ~15 years chances are most of the lighting and automation was running off timecode, with the operators mostly standing by for safety purposes. Those little boxes are actually super standard kit for us, they even make nixie tube models cuz we're all nerds too.
One note on the 3.5 inch 9v center positive power cable on the time code burner, a ton of guitar pedals specifically DOD and EHX use center positive plugs so its very easy to find 9v center negative to positive converters.
IIRC, the old Atari 2600 console used the same jack, but not sure of the polarity. It would definitely have meant a large amount of spare power supplies available.
70s and 80s tech is just so delightful. Like, this is the tech that influenced Neuromancer and cyberpunk as whole. Madness. Love it so much.
That particular Videonics Titler is great for circuit bending. I’ve bent one myself and got amazing colorful glitch effects. It still works as a fully functional titler too.
Man, from cable access to major market TV, to film….MEMORY LANE for many people here! Thanks for being the one to store all the junk we can’t and reviewing! Many thanks!
Great video ! So interesting especially the titlers and other tv and film prod things!
Also very happy you’ve tried a steadicam! I’ve seen them in person often but it was always hands off
Old Steadicams are always fun. A high point of Jonathan Creek for me was seeing him operate a late-90s one in one episode, which was part of a gambit to let him snoop around an office without being noticed - “everyone ignores the cameraman!”
I like how the mini VTR is clearly related to your New Favourite Thing. Whether one descended from the other, or they were just developed simultaneously.
I bet they hooked-into the viewfinder port on that RCA one _purely_ because power and video was already being routed through one cable, having everything to do with component cost and nothing to do with signal path.
Wow, that serial titler makes fansubs just as easy as the frustrating process of manually scripting a .SRT or .SSA file! I’m being flippant of course, it’s undoubtedly easier than manual timing, but it’s still often a huge PITA.
That is the rest of what I wanted to comment on, since these ones seemed less-worthy of their own comments than the other items.
I love seeing the evolution of video. In the mid 1990s I was shooting in SD with Sony 8mm handy-cam and now in 2022 I’m using a Panasonic GH6 for 5.7K internal ProRes
I'm looking forward to the titler video! They all remind me of public access shows from the 90s and have a special place in my heart.
Little insight on LTC/MTC and it’s current use in the live event industry: that same signal is often used to sync video and lighting to a band or dj performance, and is often distributed as a normal audio signal along with and backing tracks a band might play to. Crazy how such an old tool has been repurposed today!
I recently got a deprecated Canon XL2 from my job, so this video was nice to learn about it's cousin's weirdness!
Fun trip down technology lane! I utilized at least eight of the items you featured here. The Panasonic WV-F70 was the cost-efficient 2CCD alternative to the 3CCD 300CLE and WV-F250, with the 250 having a similar docking pin attachment to that of the F70. My F70 was paired with a portable Panasonic AG-7400 SVHS deck, as the AG-7450 was a bit more expensive even used at the time, which also could pair with any other camera with a 10/14-pin interface. These Panasonic cameras were also a cost-cutting measure for some mid to small market local TV stations vs. purchasing new BetaSP or the infamous Panasonic M-II videotape format in the early 1990's, with the major downfall being generational loss when edited to Beta, 3/4" or SVHS.
whoever slapped that Apple sticker on the powernote is a class-a mad lad. fully thought it was some crazy Brother-Apple collaboration and you were downplaying it for effect.
Damn I love stuff like this even tho I don't have any real use for it.
I do have a huge kink for 90s pro level video equipment, that's why I own multiple pvm monitors and weird switches and stuff.
go on with stuff like that
Greetings from Germany
Exidy Sorcerers are very cool and I haven't seen one on any of the big retrocomputing channels yet!
LOL they spent 9k on a camcorder they never used in case they wanted to film wildlife?!? Must be nice to have that kinda dough!! 😳😳😳
9k in 2005 no less
Picked up an almost new Canon 200mm f1.8 from a guy who thought it weighed 3.2 pounds not 3.2 kilos. He found it too heavy to use
I spent 3k for a Nikon D90 DSLR 13 yrs ago for no good reason and I used it probably a dozen of time. Humans do a lot of stupid stuff.
It's called CREDIT. Very unlikely that they paid that in straight cash.
@@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266 I thought my sigma 600mm was heavy...
18:08 oh my god, as soon as i saw that Brother laptop, i knew i'd seen it before and immediately texted my dad about it. and sure enough!! he used to work a lot with data recovery from old computers, and i remember him bringing one of those home to recover word processing files off it. he told me that seeing it again made his day, so even though it's total junk, i'm glad you shared it
Oh man, that Exidy Sorcerer looks VERY cool. (And very clean, given its age!)
You got an Exidy Sorcerer?!?!?!? Super cool!!!
On the topic of the 1440x1080, yes, it was entirely bandwidth, but even with the shrunken frame, HDV still suffers bitrate starvation artifacts (though part of that might be because it sort of predates AVCHD so the codec was not as efficient and those 28Mb/s just weren't quite enough--same bitrate as the old DV format because tape speeds).
And here I thought it was also about improving sensor yields. Since I knew eg the cameras used for Star Wars II and III had “full 2K” (so probably a little more than 1920 wide), but were _extremely_ expensive at the time even compared to all the rest of the market.
I could see that being justification as well. I have largely just read repostings of publications that have made their way onto the VideoHelp boards.
@@bakonfreek I’m sure your reason was a primary concern - why invest in better yields if there isn’t the bandwidth to begin with? So it’s no coincidence we started seeing better only after SD cards had caught-up enough to replace (H)DV.
But then that also tracks with why the bigger sensors were so obscenely expensive, because only a handful of products would be made with each to recoup the cost, since no one else even had the bandwidth.
Though that said, I wonder what rate Digibeta ran at… hmm okay, 90Mbps. Guess that was what you had to use if you wanted better 1440x1080, or had the very very rare camera with more pixels.
Makes sense, though even on much higher bandwidth formats (DVCPRO HD, 100Mb/s), sensors were often not even 720 capable, but to be fair, the 1080i/p resolution on that format capped at 1280×1080 (even though the tape ran so fast that DVCPRO HD only ever used non-mini DV cassettes).
@@bakonfreek yeah, every TV show I’ve known that used Digibeta was SD (albeit PAL so 96 extra lines). But with an HD-suitable codec it seems like it was capable! I imagine the dearth of non-cinema-projection 1080-line home displays until the end of the 00s was an incentive to just use slower speeds and lower resolutions for most productions.
In the mid 90s I was working for a company that had much more sophisticated machines for transfering computer graphics to 35mm film. It contained a large spool of film and you could send multiple files to it and it would process all the images. It was very hi res and took quite some time to transfer a file to a single slide. Quality was awesome though.
I really appreciate the value of your collectorship/museum/stewardship/whatever for these things - stuff like that Polaroid accessory. Fantastic to make sure that some of those survive and eventually become a complete system again
I think the Exidy Sorcerer is insanely cool. It's been on my list for years.
That Exidy Sorcerer brings back a lot of memories. It was my first computer and came with 32kb on board. The S100 had ram cards adding up to a whopping 56kb and a floppy interface card for my Micropolis double sided double density hard sectored 5.25 in floppy drives. To round things off I had a green phosphor monitor and an Epson MX 80 dot matrix printer. This was in 1981.Anyway, my system would operate either Micropolis Dos or CP/M, booting of drive 0 with an Enter command. I would run Micropolis Basic, Exidy Basic, Pascal MT Plus, Cobol and few other things. Yes, it did have rudimentary graphics using the character sets on the keyboard and I actually would code my own in hex. I still have mine, but it needs to be repaired. It was a good machine for its time.
I have a bunch of those cards they got from a guy who thought they were meant for a TRS 80. One of them is a discard the other one has a processor on it a 6800, and the other one is a big Ram card which I think goes to 256k
Back in my day 256k wasn't possible AFAIK. That card probably came later. As I recall, some guy wanted to modify the motherboard and increase the ram to 64k, but I refused in case he damaged the computer. My S100 has about 8 cards including the floppy controller, which is why it maxed out at 56k, which was more than enough to RUN CP/M, wordstar and most CP/M software of the day. Just an additional comment on the 8 track case, I thought it was so cool and smart. This machine was from the 70s, after all.
New video, time to get a snack, soda and watch the show!!
Thank you for uploading!!!
Great channel!! Oldies but goodies!!
Greats from France!!
I have used that exact Panasonic P2 camera in college, and let me tell you the image quality on that thing's screen was diabolical. Always made me think I was over or underexposing. The output files were okay if you did lighting correctly.
I was not expecting a steadycam that was super cool, being a camera geek I've also always thought it would be super cool to just mess around with one too :D.
Steadycams are awesome! Glad you got your hands on one.
That timing with the screen coming on at 34:48. Was *magnificent.*
Man, watching you geek out on the Steadicam was gold. I would be too.
The first time I laid hands on a gimbal I spent half the day whirling around the house with it like a dervish on crack.
Steadicams, especially those old school ones that do not yet have electric gimbals and whatnot, are really an art to master. And you need to go through the whole balancing rigmarole again if you swap lenses, filters, Matte boxes, etc. - even swapping to a different battery pack at the bottom can throw the entire thing off. It is VERY easy to mess footage up if you have not balanced the rig properly (edit: AND not done a ton of practice!). Your horizon is going to be all over the place and watching that kind of footage it can make some people reaaaally queasy, almost seasick.
Woah that RCA camcorder is the one my dad bought when I was maybe 4 years old. All my childhood home movies were recorded on that thing and it eventually pretty much became mine. Didn't have that little titler though, I would have loved that.
OMG that tiny sony deck takes me back!!! I used that in college years after it was put in storage to record the bad SD cameras for our first sports broadcasts at the community college I was at. It was awesome until it ate the tape and melted!! 😂
those seemingly random text in old forgotten NVRAM is likely altered bits from particles hitting and flipping bits, in sense you have an SMS from distant stars dying, famous last words.
Great video and well presented. You are a wealth of knowledge and entertaining to watch. As someone who was a teenager in the 70's, I can assure you it wasn't all that dreary but the tech was limited! Thanks for the video.
Your enthusiasm when talking about camcorders is infectious.
I lost it when you looked straight into the camera and said "This is now my red dress. It will fit again. Someday." 🤣
A temperamental red dress that will knock your teeth out. I love it.
Hot tip for you. I was a pro snowboarder and those cameras replaced 16mm shooting for a couple year. I can remember being on shoots with it @ Mt. Hood in the 90’s. It was durable and we all were in awe when it started showing up on the slopes. Good score!
Wow! That canon! I used the xl1 back in the early 2000 and it took some truly great pictures. The 'film' mode was great. Interestingly 28 days later was shot on an xl1. It's not just about the resolution of the format but the lens and the glass. Congrats on the xlh1. Would be a great camera to shoot on just for how it feels and also a great design and form factor.
I have DSR-45 and i love it. It's a rare combination of being cute, small and feature-rich pro device. And you missed the most important feature - almost ASMR level motorised tape door which can be triggered by eject button
Xl1 never showed up in my highschool film class. We were using TV cameras recorded to VHS or consumer grade digital 8 cameras, out to mac's for digital editing. And this was for "career ready" classes '99 and '00
Well it took a few days but I'm through it. It's great seeing you as a total nerd who just likes stuff getting to, you know, find stuff he likes, and then talk about it. Obviously, your subscribers also like a huge chunk of this as well, like myself, but our interests are largely parallel. For example, I'm a photographer. You like video. I like old tech that are still good to use with modern applications. You just like old tech. So I'm getting all that passion I have for my stuff but on things I've never seen in detail before. Very cool.
Many years ago a media studies graduate told me that he improvised a steady cam for a film project by suspending his camera in a stocking with a hole cut in it for the lens.
21:54 It's cheaper to make one big PCB than a bunch of little ones - They were probably trying to save production from having to make a second PCB and a ribbon going down and then engineering reasonable mounts for said PCB. Probably a couple bucks saved there, not just pennies.
The 8 track thing is interesting! I thought that cartridge looked familiar. Thinking about it, this was actually a really good idea. High quality label printing and cartridge shells already existed, why not use them? Pretty durable too, in my experience. This probably helped them save a ton of money and keep the bottom line for the machine further down which was no small feat.
But also totally hilarious in retrospect, I agree.
23:31 That sounds like the Quantum ProDrive - Yeah, no surprise that it doesn't work.
24:00 That drive is actually working! It's totally fine! You just need to put a drop or two of oil in it and it will go back to working! That drive actually sounds like it's in really good shape. Spindle bearing good, stepper quiet, no scraping. What you're seeing there is that the drive is failing it's seek test because of missed steps on the pull back - It's probably just sticky inside.
27:43 Yeah the analog side there is unhappy about something. You're seeing retrace lines, so either the brightness is way too high or the frequency is WAY off. I'm thinking both - Turn the brightness level down a bunch until you can't see the retrace lines (the vertical lines you see in the video) and then, since the composite seems to be working, plug something in there and turn the horizontal until you probably wind up with a rolling picture, then turn the vertical until it locks. Probably just a portable TV inside with the exception of the lens and the carousel.
I would be very interested to see you get it working! Interesting piece of history there. The other option I think would have been either printing it out and photographing it or using a plotter!
39:55 Did not know that, now I absolutely need to find an ancient sub of Sailor Moon or something to see both their bad translation and their use of Sony HandyCam titler
I worked in a studio in the 90's. We used SMPTE to sync a 24-track tape machine to an Atari 1040STE running 2.0 via a converter-box. With a fresh tape, you'd start by laying down the SMPTE-code from to Atari to usually track 24. When that was done, Cubase was set to "slave" to incomming time-code. After that, the controller for the tape-machine was now basically the master-controls for play/stop/ff/rw. The Atari would usually sync up within 1 second, and also be in the right spot in the song of course. Worked really well.
Gonna guess there's already some comments about this, but the small box Hitachi camera was likely used as a remote controlled camera for broadcast somewhere. A TV station I worked for had a similar HD model shoved in the corner of the newsroom for the newsroom "flash cam" position. Since there wasn't enough space around it to operate it, there was no need for accoutrements like a viewfinder or manual lens control. There was a second identical one hung from a pan/tilt head in the lighting grid of the studio, for bump shots.
Saw you at Re-PC today.
Yeah, the e-clips go away, you should have spares. Also things you should have spares: Any captive spring pins in the vest, the aircraft pin (several broken ones are on my desk), and any thumbscrews as well.
Also, the vest will have a number of hex screws/bolts in it, you should have either hex drivers or a screwdriver with bits for all of them and check all of them before flight.
Bonus points if you add a remove before flight streamer to the aircraft pin.
Your videos are fantastic. From a ‘very’ old broadcast engineering/ operations ‘professional’ .. keep up your great work . Best from Ireland
I have to find a sorcerer computer now. It is absolutely a beauty. I think I am going to have to take a trip to California now. Amazing finds and I hope your trip was as fun as it seemed.
I love that little Sony DV deck !
We had Cannon XL-1 cameras in radio/tv in High School. I love/miss those bad boys.
0:58 Hey, I had that monitor. So ridiculous. I loved it. Bought it from some old man from a classified ad in the Denver Post. $50. Good times.
Regarding your Mac SE - give it a love tap when it's running - the drives were known for having issues with stiction and I've had an SE II running just fine after a gentle tap on the case*.
Obvs - your mileage may vary - it's not a guaranteed method nor will it prevent it happening again but it can be enough to fire it up and pull data from it.
I'm pretty sure that "weird hand grip next to the lens" on the XLH1 was Canon's way of imitating the controls found on ENG camcorder lenses, which are on a "grip block" mounted on the left-side of the lens itself and have a multi-pin control cable which plugs into the camera body. Canon's version of those controls on their XLH1 means that their lenses are less bulky and the controls don't change when the lens does.
this is great, i have one of those videonics titlers but i`ve never bothered to try it out because I assumed it would be more of a PITA than a useful tool- definitely going to be pulling that out of storage now!
That Canon XL H1 reminds me of my first pro camera, the Canon XH-A1s. Released around 2007 it was fucking awesome. By todays standards the dynamic range kid of sucks but it shot 25P fairly sharp, obviously 1440x1080 but still great. It was used to film Crank 2 High Voltage as well!
Plenty of television stations transitioning to HD with more limited budgets, at the time, utilised these for in the field reporting. For that, It was pretty good for the money but not much more. Getting an entire theatrically released film out of it is downright amazing.
@@GeorgeVCohea-dw7ou The DP's in Crank 2 got shots while on rollerskates and stuff, there used to be a case study on Canon's website years ago with awesome BTS pictures.
@@patrik_x86
Whoa, that is an experimental technique that would be extraordinarily rare used with A-list actors, which Statham was on the edge of at that time. Absolutely fascinating that a DP could get away with utilising such a camera and oddball concepts. There is almost no way Crank 2 would have been produced a year or even months later.
I remember that it was not quite as compelling as the first one, but it might be time to revisit the series, especially now knowing this titbit.
@@patrik_x86
I actually know someone who knows Brandon Trost but I had not realised that he was the cinematographer on Crank 2. The films he typically does aren't really my cup of tea, and the familiarity is not there for me, unfortunately.
So rad!!! I wish I could find tech. I used to run a BBS in the 80/90s and was thinking of trying to find a 8086 and doing a retro BBS connected to the internet.
The time code clocks would work with my Mackie d8b mixer. Those are cool.
THE VIDEONICS TITLEMAKER! I think that was legit my first "game console"-like entertainment as a kid, I had a lot of fun with it. My father used it professionally for a long time making weddings and that kind of stuff.
This was such a fun video to watch. Not only way the gear super cool and fascinating, but also your charming presentation style made this especially fun and engaging. The perfect balance of hitting the key points, but also occasionally going into depth on the neat quirks. Thanks for making this video, truly fascinating to see how video creation was developed around technological limitations back in the day. So much hassle!
I love your channel. I love the hour long videos. I love your humor. I love the flow. I love the details!
I just picked up that RCA camcorder at a local yard sale for the minty price of $3!!❤ The door won’t open (making noises) but functional like yours!
28:51 - QC!
I love the videos like this - dumping a whole bunch of general knowledge/trivia into my brain that I'll probably never need again, but will think back on and be like 'oh yeah, neat'
Thanks!
At one point as a child we had a hand-me-down complete Digital Rainbow 100 - it was a dual-cpu Z80/8088 desktop machine that could run CP/M, CP/M-86 or a machine specific version of MS-DOS.
As far as I remember I only ever got the CP/M disk and the "Learning" informational disk working as a kid, and eventually because it wasn't all that useful it was discarded. Wish I still had it though.
In the 80s at the university I worked for, we had a Olympus OM1? pointing at a monochrome monitor with a home made filter changer in a room that was totally dark. A servo controlled shutter release was used to open the shutter, the monitor was connected to a home brew 256 x 256 x 1 bit frame store and the image was downloaded from a mainframe at 256k baud. The image was flashed a number of frames to get the different per bit brightness. This allowed full color slides to be made. At that time a 256 x 256 x 8bit system was a large rack and cost 10s of thousands.
47:19 Nice! I own a DSR-30, the prosumer DVCAM deck. Bought it new and made a shelf of PDV-184Ns recording off the air. It's full width and has a fluorescent display, which I can't really read from across the living room. I wish they had stuck with the LEDs for that, too. My Spectracom 8183 clock does have the big LEDs, so I know (knew) when the commercials are about to end. They made that for mobile and law enforcement and similar uses, where, again, readability at a distance is important.
Oh, wow, I saw one of those RCA titler keypads at my local Goodwill earlier this week. I should see if they still have it.
Thanks for another video that had me exclaiming: "I have that!" for a few items, and "I want one of those!" for a lot more. I own a Canon XL-1, and it was the best standard def camcorder I've owned, and even better with a manual ENG type lens that still has the auto iris hookup. Too bad everything went to HD before I got a lot of use out of my XL-1!
Woot woot! So excited! And shout the heck out to Robert. You’ve built such an amazing following.
We were using something like the Polaroid Palette to make slides for portfolio review of digital art at SVA in like 2000ish. Probably one of the more modern models though.
58:08 - That just may be the LONGEST video camera system ever!