quote: Bruce McGee

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Too bad BETA took a dive for VHS. I've always thought that Beta was the superior format.[

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Actually, the entire family of "color under" video recorders were all pretty terrible. VHS and Beta both, instead of recording the full composite video signal like professional-grade recorders like quadruplex, Type B, and Type C, separated the chrominance from the luminance. The luminance was recorded FM with 3.5 to 4.8MHz range for Beta and 3.4 to 4.4 MHz range for VHS.

Even if Beta has a slightly higher luminance bandwidth, both formats suffer tremendously from the way the color is recorded. The color (I (limited to about 1.5 MHz in a composite video signal and Q (limited to about 0.6 MHz in a composite video signal) are not recorded directly, but are heterodyned down to a low frequency carrier. It's 0.688 MHz for Beta and 0.629 MHz for VHS. Think about this. Although broadcast composite video supports around 330 lines of resolution for transitions between black and white, 120 lines of resolution for transition between red and cyan, and around 48 lines for transitions between green and magenta, when this signal is recorded on VHS, Beta, U-Matic, SVHS, ED Beta, EIAJ. etc, the color resolution drops considerably to the point that no more than 40 transitions between the above colors are possible, although the luminance component may be 240 or more. With SVHS, the luminance is 440, but the color is still the measly 40 or less. That's why the colors bleed all over the place when these machines are used.

If Beta were better than VHS, it was only marginally so. It's a shame that these "color under" types of machines were popular so long and that so much video was shot with them.
 

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 07-06-2004, 05:49 PM:
 
Marginal or not it was definitely noticeable. And a VHS to VHS dub?

William, if you want a broken Beta I'll make you a deal on a SL-HF450 (IIRC mostly broken because of that model's known problem with the cassette loading); then you'll be back to square one. Maybe Bruce can fix it for you.
 

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Posted by Bruce McGee (Member # 131) on 07-06-2004, 07:34 PM:
 
My machine is a SL-HF900 as is my parts machine. The junker has a bad loading tray. MY deck has the updated replacement tray parts.
What I meant on the merits of Beta over VHS is: Beta is gentler on the tape than VHS is.
The Beta was based on the U-Matic 3/4" system.
I have 4 working U-Matics too. One, a VO-1600 from 1972, was my first home VCR. Got it in 1976, and still have a few recordings from it in the collection. It has a built-in tuner, and will play stereo tapes.
I cant believe how durable this machine has been.
Sure, everything has drifted, but it can still produce color. The tracking can be touchy, and the skew...

Didn't hurt having an endless supply of used 3/4" cassettes from the TV station where I worked, either.

Evans: I hope you enjoy your work. Your knowledge astounds me at times.
 

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 07-06-2004, 08:32 PM:
 
Actually the place Beta shined through was in its lower video noise levels. The average Beta machine had quite a bit lower noise than the best VHS machines out there, Betas smaller head azimuth angles and the larger drum diameter all contributed to its very slightly better quality image. This larger drum diameter allowed about .4mhz wider bandwidth to be recorded and this could easily be seen by recording and playing back a simple multiburst test signal. Keep in mind that all pro formats also recorded FM modulated luminance and color info at differing frequency bandwidths in the spectrum. In the pro systems I repaired which covered many 3/4", 1" type C and 2" Quadruplex machines, the real visual and measurable improvements were all due to the correction that was being applied by both the time base corrector and video dropout/enhancement circuitry that was also normally a part of the TBC unit. You ought to see the output of a BVH-1100 type C without TBC correction. Its awful looking, similar looking to VHS but with less overall video noise and very unstable horizontally on a good color monitor.

What really killed Beta was its shorter recording time which you all seemed to overlook.

Just my 2 cents worth........

Mark
 

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Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 07-06-2004, 09:03 PM:
 

quote: Evans A Criswell

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Actually, the entire family of "color under" video recorders were all pretty terrible.

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quote: Mark Gulbrandsen

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What really killed Beta was its shorter recording time which you all seemed to overlook.

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I agree with Evans and Mark 100%! Right on target!

I would LOVE to get a hold of A RCA TR-60 Hi-Band quad machine! Hubba Hubba!

>>> Phil
 

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 07-06-2004, 11:25 PM:
 
I used to work with a fleet of RCA's TR 66's and later Ampex AVR-2 quad machines. The Ampex's were way better than the RCA's, rock solid and much more reliable. We got all the head blocks rebuilt by Spin Physics as I remember. I think thats a Kodak Company today or some relation. The RCA's were all germnanium semicinductor no less!! Orignally B&W low band machines then converted to low band color then to high band color... Phew! Glad I don't work on those RCA's any longer. Will look for pix's.
Mark
 

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Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 07-06-2004, 11:29 PM:
 
The 60's were silicon based and were MUCH better and had a much SMALLER footprint than the POS Ampex machines.

>>> Phil
 

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 07-06-2004, 11:35 PM:
 
The 60's must have been later machines. The TR-22's(not 66's) that I worked on were very old but ran pretty darn well. The AVR-2 is much smaller than the TR-22 was and about 1/4 as much weight. The Ampex's only weighed about 700 lbs compared to one ton for then TR-22's.


This is one end of the old master control after de-comissioning it. We had two more TR-22's in another room. immediately to my left was a TK-27 with a typical RCA slide/multiplexer system and two LW Athena 16mm projectors.



Old master control just before de-comissioning.



Third TR-22 of the pack, all four TR-22's were left abandoned in place.



New master control across the street. Am on the left still hooking back up the brand new Grass Valley air switcher.

The old studio location was the location of the very first TV station in chicago which was WBKB TV. The 44th floor penthouse of the Civic Opera House in Chicago, 1 North Wacker Drive.
The new location directly across the street, 1 South Wacker Drive, was 20 times larger and was originally the Chicago RCA recording studios.

Mark
 

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Posted by Jeffry L. Johnson (Member # 453) on 07-07-2004, 01:32 PM:
 
It's been a few years, but I have had my Betamax machine repaired by Absolute Beta.
 

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Posted by Ron Yost (Member # 1850) on 07-07-2004, 03:06 PM:
 
Mark,

Fascinating! Thank's for posting the information and the great pictures. Are your pictures at WBBM, by the way?

The history of television is a particular interest of mine, though I've never worked in broadcast TV. Being an almost-seasoned citizen I did grow up with its evolution. I lived in L.A. when KTLA (another Paramount station) was doing a lot of ground-breaking experimentation, too. First live TV broadcast from a helicopter, among others.

It's kind of relevant to film, too, since the "BK" in WBKB stands for Balaban & Katz. Of course, you and Phil know that, but probably many don't.

For those who don't know, Balaban & Katz (and their ties with Paramount) built many of Chicago's grand vaudeville (later film) theatres, before their involvement in early broadcast TV.

There's a fairly good (though short) website of early WBKB television, and a little of the history of B&K, at:

Early WBKB Chicago

My Brenkert BX-80 came out of one of the Chicago B&K theatres, though I don't know which one. Not a big deal, but I think it's kind of neat that it's still going strong after spending all those years entertaining people in one of those beautiful picture palaces. It's in my screening room now so sees light service, the many years of commercial service long over. It's out to pasture, but still runs like a top.

Thanks again!

Ron Yost
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 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.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 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.
 

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Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 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.
 

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Posted by Phil Hill (Member # 371) on 07-07-2004, 06:18 PM:
 

quote: Paul Mayer

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We worked so hard to eliminate those artifacts.

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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
 

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Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 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.
 

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 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
 

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 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.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 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!
 

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Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 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.
 

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Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 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.
 

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 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
 

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