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Author Topic: Thinking back to BETAMAX... And Beyond Evans A Criswell Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1579 From: Huntsville, AL, USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 07-07-2004 04:52 PM                        Mark, it's great to see someone posting here who has worked with some of the older types of machines! One program I was thinking about writing was a program to simulate some of the effects of a misadjusted quad machine for artistic purposes. (Feed it an image and out comes an image with "quad" artifacts). I have toyed with emulating the "VHS" look by converting images from RGB colorspace to YIQ and low-pass filtering the Y, I and Q components to different values (240 lines for Y, and about 40 for the other two). Then convert back to RGB and you get an image with the VHS style color bleeding and smearing. I've always been fascinated by video recorder technology. I love it when I see quad banding artifacts on some old shows that originated from quad tapes.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-07-2004 05:22 PM                     Analog video artifacts are kind of fun to spot. The easiest one for me to pick out is tube camera burns. I was watching the movie "Aliens" and noticed such an artifact. Check out when the troops are fixing to land on LV-427. They're circling over the compound and there is video playback to show what is below. On one of the monitors you see tube camera streaks trailing off light sources in the compound. Pretty funny. In such an advanced, futuristic world why would they still be using vacuum tubes in video cameras? Considering most broadcast TV stations have converted over to digital tape formats like DVCAM, DVC-PRO and Digital Betacam, I wonder what the selling price would be for some used Betacam and BetacamSP decks. The home version of Beta was a bit superior to VHS, but only half the quality of standard Betacam (or at least the standard broadcast Betacam used twice the amount of tape as home beta). BetacamSP was the pinnacle of that format. And those big L-shaped cassettes weren't too awful cheap either. I have some old U-matic and Beta tapes up in the closet of my computer room. Too bad I have no playback equipment for it. The footage is mostly bloopers and stuff like that I grabbed from air check tapes at a TV station in Georgia where I worked over a decade ago. Probably not worth paying an arm and a leg to get converted.  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 07-07-2004 05:27 PM                        Funny. We worked so hard to eliminate those artifacts. My first tape worm job was at KLVX channel 10, the local PBS affiliate here. At the time we were a turnkey RCA package--in the tape room was a TR-50 (high band color with editor), two TR-4's (low band color), and out in the remote truck, a TR-5 set up for recording only (no playback). Once I became a freelancer (mostly for Merv Griffin's TAV, Trans American Video) I became quite familiar with the Ampex 1200 and 2000, and at the end of the quad era, the AVR-1. By then I had pretty much transitioned to being a camera shader (on the magnificent Norelco PC-70 and PCP-90), but still had to work with the tape guys a lot. TAV 140 (later 740) and 540 were the premiere remote production trucks on the west coast in those days. Fond memories.  |  IP: Logged Phil Hill I love my cootie bug Posts: 7595 From: Hollywood, CA USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 07-07-2004 06:18 PM                  quote: Paul Mayer We worked so hard to eliminate those artifacts. Not to single out Paul... but I enjoy it! Artifacts? JEEZE! Yous are soooo damn "digital" it's pathetic! We used to call it "banding" and "scalloping"! HEY! your tip penetration is wrong on head 2! >>> Phil  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-07-2004 07:22 PM                        Great pictures, Mark! Bobby--Beta SP machines are still in demand and aren't cheap. I believe that Sony still sells the PVW-2800 and, of course, all the newer formats (SX, IMX, Digi-Beta, HDCAM, etc.) use the same tape shell and machines are available that will play those tapes. Even though it's sort of "obsolete," Beta SP seems to be sort of like 3/4" used to be--the format that everyone has, even if it isn't their primary format. As far as I know, the oxide Betacam machines aren't very useful, although Betamax home machines will play and record on the oxide tapes (not the SP tapes), though the format is totally different.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-07-2004 10:12 PM                     Evans, When I see any old show, 50's early 60's that was 2" Quad originated it almost gives me goose bumps just to know that the tape is still playable and that there is/was a machine somewhere in the world that still existed to be able to play it back. Many really old Quad originated tapes could only be played back on the machine they were recorded on... not on the same model, but only on the same machine with the same head panel and so on that recorded the tape. Not till the early 60's was quad tape at all interchangable from machine to machine. There are truely some dedicated video preservationists out there that do amazing work to get the last drop of video and audio back off tapes that are 50 years old, some of it looks dam good too. Here are a few more photos of stuff I used to work on...... Master control nearing completion a couple of weeks after the move. TK-45 CCU's. There were 5 along this wall, 4 are visible in the pix. Me tweeking the Blue preamp in a TK-45 after installing new plumbicons. These cameras used 1" Plumbs and looked incredible after they were set up properly. My main job there was maintaining 5 TK45's, 3 TK760's, an Ikegami HL79, and an RCA TK76, and 2 TK28 film islands. Sometimes I was literally the only tech at the station!! Ahh, the good ole days of Broadcast TV at channel 38 (WCFC TV). Mark  |  IP: Logged Evans A Criswell Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1579 From: Huntsville, AL, USA Registered: Mar 2000 posted 07-07-2004 11:15 PM                        Yes, I read where it used to be common in the early days of quad to send not only the tape, but the heads that recorded the tape, to guarantee that the tape could be played back where it was sent.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 07-08-2004 01:59 AM                     I have to say small market TV stations are The Shit. And I mean that kind of in a good way. I worked at WALB-TV in Albany, GA. It is an NBC affliate, channel 10. That station had so much old equipment that the Smithsonian Institution bought one of their old cameras to put into their broadcast museum (an old 1950's model). Ikegami tube cameras were pretty good (but the ones I liked were the Sony BVP-70 Betacam SP field cameras). We had engineers that were even better. One fellow in the news department dumped a portable Ikegami field camera over a boat (by accident) into the Okefenokee Swamp. This was one of those cameras that came with a big and separate U-matic tape deck you had to cart around like a piece of luggage. The engineers were able to revive the thing. I wasn't too much of a fan of the HK series studio cameras. I'm sure they were nice when they were new. But it was HELL trying to use that rotational zoom handle to go from wide shots to a single shot. Jerky as hell! I'd have people on headset heckling me doing creaking noises as I would move from one shot to the next. Not smooth at all. Yarrrghghhh!  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 07-08-2004 02:04 AM                        Mark, were you ever cursed with a set of IVC plumbicon cameras? We had some at a smaller market UHF I worked at. Absolute crap... you had to register those things 3 times a day, minimum. Later, I had to deal with two at a cable channel in Washington. They hadn't improved. I wonder if that was just how they were made, or if I just got a few lemons. The other station in town had RCA's. We'd have killed for those cameras.  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 07-08-2004 10:46 AM                        From what I saw, IVC cameras were cheap crap. In 1974 we bought three IVC-500's for the studio and remote truck at channel 10. Wasn't impressed when we unboxed and mounted up the first one. Opened up the side door to begin backfocusing, and the beam board fell out--no screws. Good stuff. The station was also beginning to experiment with helical tape to replace the quads. Accordingly we had an IVC-825 in the tape room, though during the time I was there they couldn't use it legally on the air due to continuing problems with its time base corrector. Of course now, all video tape uses some form of helical scan and quad is but a distant memory. Channel 10's camera history was kind of fun: Opened in 1968 in B&W with three TK-60's (4-1/2" IO's!) in the studio and three TK-10's (!) in the truck. Then moved the TK-60's to the truck and the studio went color with a pair of TK-41C's. Then we went with the three IVC-500's for both the studio and the truck. Don't know what they went with after that; I think they're an all Ikegami shop now.  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 07-08-2004 07:48 PM                     Never had any experience with any IVC cameras but did with a few IVC helical vtr's. Pure crap... right up there with General Electric TV equipment and Transmittes... also pure crap! Those TK-60's were the very best B&W I-O camera ever produced. I have one of those I-O's on my tube shelf. The TK-41 needed tons of light, at least 1000 fc just on a news set. A guy I worked with at Chan 38 workled at a station that used them in Missouri somewhere. He mentioned that the sets became literally sweltering after a short time! I-O's always had that burn out spot though when ever a hot spot of light was in the image... kinda wierd characteristics. WGN used TK-41's at Wrigley Field for Cubs Baseball till the mid 80's. Those cameras really looked great on the air. There was one right behind home plate that looked though a small opening in the back net. Sat right next to that camera several times at games with my dad. I'd love to find an old Quad head panel for my display cabinet in the den sometime. They are a marvel of precision. Mark  |  IP: Logged

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