Thank you to everyone who's commented, I really appreciate the response! I wanted to mention that I have not yet completed the subtitling for this video because I've been working on it for so long that looking at it makes me sick; as soon as I can stomach it I'll get proper CC in place.
As someone who does have harder time hearing certain sounds, I certainly do appreciate proper CC. However you speak clearly enough that the auto-gen had no trouble I seen understanding you! While no substitute to proper CC, the auto-gen certainly provided to get me through the video with no issue.
Hey man, this is a GREAT documentary and you are doing a fantastic and really important job of preserving the history. If you want some insight into 70's media (and the reasons for distrust in them) I can really recommend you "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
That transition music and blue screen with flying text really does lend this the feel of one of those classic 80s/early 90s documentaries. I applaud your research on the topic, as well as the passion and humour in your narration. I hope you keep producing content like this: it deserves to become required watching in college and university classes on the subject.
As an old dude who used eiaj VTRs and EIAJ connectors when they were new, i really appreciate your fresh enthusiasm for these topics . I never really thought about how people today are unaware of these gaps, because i used all of these cameras and recorders, but you’re absolutely right ht!
Yes when you start breaking it down and realizing initially it took two different devices, plus your wires, the first the camera just to capture the signal and a separate device with your storage tape. Some of those first portable units were only that by name, since you literally had to have a place to set some of it down and even plug it in, because it was not truly mobile, I think that's where the term remote location started being used. It's interesting to see how far the technology has come. Imagine if he had covered the old large reel to reel systems used in professional movie making as well, I think some of the very first were 1920s or earlier. (essentially the same technology seen miniaturized in the very first home video recording systems).
@@benullom2301 You forget about the basic point: Portable meant you could take recordings out on the field, without a generator and a car to give you power and machinery. Of course you could make that before, using a film camera. But that included a constant changing of incredibly expensive to develop reels, waiting for development and time consuming cutting afterwards. So having a portable Video Tape recorder was huge! Of course it was lame, compared to the following camcorders. But as such, we will be loughed at in a decade, with our constant power plug hungry and sunlight shy smartphones that cost a fortune. Remember, there was a time we had portable phones that had a battery that lasted for 2 Weeks. What if a future smartphone generation can do that, including constant use. What will our current 1000 Dollar smartphone be worth then?
@@genius1a touching on the two week battery life. That was back before we even had smartphones and a lot of phones were Nokia, I don't even think they exist anymore, at least I don't see them. Lithium ion does have more capacity but the phones just eat up power, it's surprising they last as long as they do. The screen is the big culprit it takes a lot of the battery power to light it.
@@genius1a Hey, plenty of good budget phones have 5000-6000 mAh batteries! Not everyone wants some $1000 flagship that allocates more priority to performance or features than a battery. [It seems to be increasingly hard to find a budget phone with optical image stabilisation on the camera though. :(]
Same I didn’t know that people were unaware of EIAJ and video camera’s of this era. It’s really not a big deal and saying nobody knows about this or remember it was hyperbolic by this channels creator.
The instant you showed the camera and said that nobody would know what it was made me feel very old, as I definitely used that exact camera as a teenager and had not, in fact, forgotten about the original split camera-recorder systems that camcorders were an improvement over.
LOL, I am OLD. When he was first showed the Camcorders, I thought "Those are camcorders, NOT video cameras. A camcorder is a video CAMera WITH a built in reCORDER." - And then he went on to explain, LOL. PS Your web cam is a "modern" example of a "video camera" -sans recorder.
Please don't forget the system called "VCR" released by Philips and Grundig in 71/72. It used cassettes, offered full frame rate, full resolution, color and even stereo. Quality was like VHS. It was aimed at consumers and it had some commercial success. Video cassettes for consumers did not start with beta. There were portable machines and there was even editing equipment that allowed editing with single frame precision. It was only released in Europe and Africa, PAL only. Tech history tends to forget things not sold in the USA.
This is seriously one of my all time favorite video essays. So much history that never made it into the "mainstream" of youtube tech retrospectives. Thank you for this, I never knew how much I needed to have those gaps filled.
There’s a guy on UA-cam who seemed to record alot of his life starting in the 1980s when he was about 14 and for about 20 years after. Him and his friends on BMX bikes, later his cars and parties etc. I love watching these things and seeing how life was all thanks to these cameras
I picked up an old camera like that at a garage sale, has the same EIAJ connector, and I later picked up a box to power it and convert it to RCA. Never really looked into the connector, never knew how obscure but universal it is!
I'm impressed how every since video I've seen of yours so far has been touching on a topic I thought I knew a lot about, and still manages to drag me through a rabbit hole of history that I didn't even know existed!
Thank you for this. If you're curious, the short film "VTR St-Jacques" documents an early activist exploration of the social possibilities of portable video equipment (specifically those Sony CV-2000s and Video Rovers.) It was produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1969 and can be found on their website to view for free, if you wish.
Aesthetically perfect blue gradient and public school synth. Now I know why my parents basement has plastic tubs of 8mm reel, a Sony VHS camera, and how we got from one to the other.
I'm genuinely shocked that this has only 6k views. That's an absolute _travesty_ for the quality this brings. I've sent this to a few of my tech chats to hopefully get this more traction. Hopefully you'll get your break soon enough.
Great video. It might be good to include "EIAJ connector" or similar in your description or even title just to help with those searching about it in the future!
Well, I don’t think it’d be wise to try and establish “EIAJ connector” to refer to the 10-pin camera connector, because “EIAJ connector” is already firmly established as the term for the EIAJ-defined system of DC barrel plugs. (It not only defines the plug dimensions, but also pairs each size with a specific voltage range, so that devices don’t get damaged by overvoltage.) It seems that “10-pin camera connector” and the like is the most common term, but if it does have an official name, it’s not easy to find.
Just stumbled on your channel, great stuff! I'd love to see more like this, where you dive into the details of forgotten tech history. Since the 90s, I've been fascinated by analog TV descramblers for cable and satellite, and it seems no one has done a full video on how they work and how it started. It would be awesome if you did something like that.
I want you to stay motivated. I see your videos as being like Technology Connections or Techmoan, but with your own unique style and look, which I hope you continue to refine. The first video of yours I came across, I enjoyed - and it was surprising to see that you only had ~8k subs given the level of information and research that went into it, as well as the production quality. I'm sure that if you keep it up, you'll be as well known as the aforementioned. Keep it up, mate. You're doing beautifully!
I watch one youtube video a year and I'm really glad it was this one, great work!! I am always glad to watch your latest documentary about technology I've never heard of
That JVC commercial at 19:54 is a big yikes. Great work! I'd definitely watch any follow up rabbit hole you jumped down around this, or likely any other subject
What a video! The way you have demonstrated the mass forgetting of such a ubiquitous device (the "half-inch") and related technology is certainly something I am going to keep thinking about as I continue to learn about all the many things we keep forgetting.
Watching this video makes me realize how fortunate I was to come across a working Sony AVC-3400 with it's portable recorder 10 years ago. When I turned it on for the first time I was hooked on how the quality of the image looked and enjoyed its limited quality atheistic. Thank-you for putting together this history and it was really cool to see how the device that I have fits into it!
I should note that I became a Patreon supporter based on this video. I know this can't happen every time, but I appreciate the piece at the end discussing what people actually tried to do with this tech.
Just a few remarks: I don't see the Philips VCR series on your timeline, being one of the first colour cassette home video system (N1500, N1700). In Europe the VCR system was quite important, but I'm not sure about the USA. Marketing of consumer video to women (TC 19:14) is a little misinterpretation of the picture material. In the 70's, women were still pictured in ads to make the product more attractive to men; just like car ads with women, leaning against the newest models, hanging over hoods of the newest models (women being 'the newest models' at all for sure). Although women's lib was a movement not to miss in this decade, technical stuff wasn't that much of their interest (there might be some exceptions to that rule, but still...). At that point, you're correct saying that women didn't seem to be interested that much in consumer video, but from the advertisers angle it was a little different, although I can imagine that the thought of more women using their products can't be wiped out completely. A little third one: please try to speak just a little slower. Sometimes you're going so fast to non native speakers, just like me. At some points, you're losing me as a listener and that's a pity because you've got a lot of interesting things to tell. Enjoyed your video very much. Tnx for posting.
This video is an absolute blessing and I had no idea about almost any of the camcorder history, as my family was mostly involved in production broadcasting so I only really knew the professional side until my uncle showed up with his fancy VHS camcorder many years later. Very well put together and very worth it. However, I have one thing to add to the timeline, and I don't fault you for not including it as I only found out about it through a series of strange coincidences. The first home video cassette format, i.e. something actually aimed at consumers and not U-matic, was made by an American company, the format called Cartrivision, released in 1972. This system allowed not only for timeshifting on a cassette-based system, but also allowed for home movie recording (provided it happened within your home, as you needed to plug the camera into the unit). The problem, and why you've never heard of it, is that it was only sold integrated into certain television sets, which were really expensive, and most of the tapes were rentals with a "rental-only" switch on them, a historical predecessor of the self-erasing DVDs the MPAA tried to push for in the early 2000s. I personally found out about it via the fact that the only taping of the last time the New York Knicks won the championship was on a home-recorded Cartrivision tape, as the broadcast videotape had turned to mush. Here's a source on the Knicks: www.creativecontentwire.com/duart-relies-on-nucoda-to-get-lost-and-found/ And here's videolabguy's transfers of original Cartrivision material, including a video "manual" for the device: ua-cam.com/video/bClJ12fHl5A/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/pXEiJ1e6Iqk/v-deo.html His website is quite informative on the development of the device as well: www.labguysworld.com/Museum017.htm (his site is also full of references to some of the VTRs you noted!) On a final note - really, U-matic came out in 1969? My dad had some archive videotape from a live performance that went on TV in 1984 that was recorded on U-Matic, and a couple other U-Matic broadcast tapes from that time...that's quite a lifetime for that technology; they were still using it very actively for archive work in Venezuelan TV through the 80s.
Thank you for this video a few years ago i worked in my high school theatre and there was a 10 pin in the tech booth that nobody knew what it was for (this theatre was built in the mid 70s) and now i realize how cutting edge that mustve been to have wired in video capability with the recorder being in the booth and the camera being wherever the director wanted considering the flexibility of the overhead wiring network. I'm now the only one who knows what that connector was for
I had one of those rover cams with the goofy plug back in the late 80s/early 90s. It had a power brick/some kind of signal processor. Never got ahold of the tape/recorder unit for it as i picked it up at a yardsale. I managed to adapt it to my little black and white tv and i could see a live feed of whatever the camera saw on my tv. My buddy managed to find another one in his grandparents' attic but again no recorder. We ended up stringing a bunch of coax cables together with barrel connecters from radioshack to connect the feed from my camera to the tv in his room and vice versa.....strung the cables out my window, thru a tree, and into his window. Viola video conferencing. ....then our parents got pissed off that we'd swiped every unused coax cable from both our houses to create what they thought would be a nice lightning rod and made us take the whole thing down. Still, 12 year old me thought this was the raddest thing ever. The picture quality sucked, but man, we thought we were the jetsons.
I just found your channel here on UA-cam and have been power watching dozens of you programs for 2 or 3 days now. My gosh my man, so good. You're just great -- keep it up!
Your transition screen music gives me PTSD from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on NES. The beginning of the music from the underwater section of the Dam, that transition music must have been what inspired that music. Awesome production quality by the way.
so well done! big thanks for crediting all of your sources, this is a goldmine of research that was as entertaining as it was intensely interesting to watch! also gotta appreciate the network shoutout, one of my favorite movies.
I'm so glad I found your channel. Its exactly the type of content I like and usually consume but with loads of info I've never seen before. Thank you for putting so much effort into this videos.
You’ve got a great thing going! I love the nostalgia and forgotten information. From one creative to another, don’t be afraid to venture out of your comfort zone, I believe you have real knack for informative content and could make interesting works on anything your interested in. Way to go!!
22:30 Ad for the Sears C131. A peeve of mine: When discussing home movie cameras: People who call 8mm or 16mm FILM cameras "video cameras" or "camcorders".(not uncommon on Craigslist and eBay, LOL!) UGHH. "Video" is an ELECTRONIC form of motion picture. Film cameras do NOT make "video". While it IS perfectly OK to call a film camera or an analog (or digital) video camera or camcorder a "movie" camera, (as "movie" is slang for "motion picture") it's NOT ok to call a film camera a video camera.
Good information! Another company involved in home video recording in the early 70s was Cartrivision in San Jose, CA. Their machines used ½” video tape in a stacked reel cartridge format and recorded in full color using a skip field recording technique. The machines were too expensive and not packaged or marketed well (along with a host of other problems) and the company went bankrupt. A lot of unsold machines (along with a black & white camera AND microphone) were sold in the mid 70s for dirt cheap. I got one then and still have it. After a few years of use it sat idle for about 40 years. I replaced a belt and did some other minor repairs and got it working again.
I grew up with my grandfather having a camcorder. I want to say it was a National branded VCR that had these great big NiCad or sealed lead acid batteries that slotted in the front. It had a faux leather over the shoulder case that held the VCR, with a clear vinyl window so you could see the buttons and protect it from the elements. He always had the neatest gadgets.
When I was a little kid and first heard the word I thought it was "camquarter" because they were about a quarter size of the professional cameras at the time. Then I saw it spelled out.
There was an attempt by Bosch to sell a news camera called the QuarterCam. It used quarter inch tapes. The prototypes were tested by ABC at the 1984 Olympics but Betacam had already established an unbeatable lock on the broadcast camcorder market for another 12 years.
Great video - I really do appreciate all the work that you must have put into editing this - not to mention the research - top notch! It just shows that great TV programs can be made completely independently. I have a few 80s JVC cameras, also really into the Panasonic switchers - its a great hobby as stuff can picked up so cheap on ebay still. Keep it up!
I'm re-watching this again in January 2022. Your videos are always great quality, and keeps me glued to the monitor the whole time. Please keep up the good work! Your channel is vastly underrated!
This is it! This is great! Thanks for collating all of this information into one place. "Typical" in that title provides a lot of tension. Also, excellent points about how home film vs home video were recorded.
let me tell you , in re: "typical", i had to back off my verbiage like 4 times to make sure i wasn't inadvertently insulting anyone. the original script was basically me going "everyone just lies about all this!" when that isn't true at all!! but yeah, "typical" is carrying a LOT of weight here, and I much prefer it as implicit rather than an explicit callout, heh. thanks for watching!
Thank you for teaching me about the history of home video (and a whole bunch of other stuff)! This is so wonderfully produced, the amount of effort and love that went into it is palpable.
love seeing those acid-inspired diagrams. im sure they seemed at the time like they needed to be communicated to others!!! reminds me of the mspaint scribbles in jordan peterson’s “maps of meaning” LOL
This was an excellent timeline that produced a fair bit of fodder for chatter for me and my friends, and it's information I can keep tucked in my pocket as I dig through the myriad bygone junk my father has collected over his long life. Still, excellent framing of the video and good job keeping it interesting and moving forward throughout the whole length. I really do miss this era, when technology was something you could see and touch.
Fantastic video, thanks for making it! Nice to see yet another person on YT sharing the interest in vintage video equipment. I knew most of the stuff you mentioned, but it was still a pleasure to watch. Never heard of the Videofreex - definitely a topic I have to dive into.
Not sure how I stumbled onto your channel but I have spent the past 2 hours watching your work. It's obvious you have a strong passion for what you do, and a awesome ability to tell stories about it in a well thought out way. Your doing a superb job and earned another subscriber. Keep it up.
Thanks for filling in the gaps that most had forgotten. I, being in my middle aged times, knew about a lot of this but even I learned something today. Keep up the great work.
Excellent episode. I just discovered your channel and you're making some great content. I'm a big fan of both Techmoan and Technology Connections, and you distinguish yourself with this wonderful, original research and your own unique style and humour. It's a pleasure to share your fascination with old tech. Love it.
Been following you on twitter for a while and I've always enjoyed when you'd post about some weird thing you noticed, dug into and found all these unseen details of, so it's great to see that but with a little more polish. Hope you'll have time to make something like this again
Your video holds true for 525 line NTSC areas and is all well and good, but Phillips had their N1500 video cassette for the domestic market in 1972 with a under/over spool layout and a horizontal as opposed to slanted azimuth drum similar in operation to to the Sony 3400but in a cassette format. This predates both Betamax and vhs by a few years. They were not released in the states as they had been set up for 625 line 50hz of Europe, uk, South Africa and Australia. To adapt them for the higher 60hz frequency (but lower 525 line resolution) meant increasing the tape speed and the tapes became unusably short in playback time.
Have you ever heard about the Telcan, also sold as the VKR-500. I'm pretty sure it was the first ever home video recorder, going on sale in 1963. It was made by two british guys, and it ran on 1/4 inch tape. It used a longitudinal recording method so the tape ran really fast, I think it only had 20 minutes recording time per side. They sold it for £60 as a kit! Unfortunately they weren't very successful and it soon faded into obscurity, but it's pretty interesting and notable for being a first.
Great video! Thanks for taking the time to document this. We have a video transfer business (digitizing old tapes) and had a few of those early Sony 1/2" VTRs - never had a lot of demand - maybe once every few months someone would inquire about that format. Umatic was definitely an industrial & commercial format but we do get an occasional early adopter who spent a ton of money to film his family on Umatic. The 10 pin camera connector is cool - had one on our first VHS VCR in the early 80's - I remember my dad would rent a camera from the local video rental store for the weekend if we were having a party. I've gotten involved in amateur radio the past few years and I'm fascinated by what hams were doing in the 1980s and 1990s with fast-scan TV. I'd like to eventually set up a station with some of the old equipment we've acquired over the years.
A brilliant telling of the history by someone who obviously was not there first hand. My experience almost goes back to the EIAJ era as I saw one in grade school. But my first VCR that I owned was a VHS Portable with separate camera, with you guessed it an EIAJ connector. I was today's years old when I learned that's what it's called. I knew it had been standardized but had no idea what it was called. Keep up the good work.
My dad started an editing studio out of our house in 1990, when I was 10, so I grew up around prosumer grade equipment... Hi-8 camcorders, big SVHS and 3/4"SP decks, Toaster/Flyer, and so on... but it blew my mind when I saw corporate video footage being recorded circa 1995 at my mom's workplace with a portapak-style betacam setup. Even that late in the game, footage was still being captured with discrete video cameras and battery-powered VTRs. Any time since that I've seen equipment like this, I always assumed it was high end studio gear, so It's remarkable that it was a consumer-oriented technology that far back. Thanks for presenting this history of it here.
Fascinating! Enjoy the reference to Tech Connections. Kudos for finding the early video news advocates. The offbeat uses of technology are often the forgotten starts for later trends and you stitched that together wonderfully.
I became an instant fan when you did that shout out to Technology Connections, not just because I like that channel, but because it is awesome that you are not trying to copy others, rather potentially fill in gaps and flesh out other areas of similar topics presented elsewhere.
I'm so glad you took the time and care to do this, I had always had this kind of nebulous idea that there had been home movie cameras with separate recorders, but I had never followed up on, or imagined, that the market was so competitive and innovative up until the first camcorders.
Thank you! Yeah, this is something that I think we could arrive on by thinking real hard about it, but nobody ever seems to (including myself) until it's right in front of them. I felt I had a duty to help!
So glad to finally see you having some success. I sent technology connections a tweet about this video and it looks like it worked! Also love the PUP shirt! Once things settle down you should come up to Vancouver BC for one of their shows.
Thanks! Think he followed me on twitter after my last video, but I appreciate the effort. I'd love to see PUP again, I missed their last couple Seattle shows.
Thank you for this amazing documentary. It was wonderful and provided little-known information that is fascinating and interesting. Now I feel like I should try filming on one of those cameras.
I appreciate that you made this short documentary. I was in a frendly dispute with a buddy of mine on this very topic. terns out I was right we knew what the 1/2 in plug was but we couldn't find any good info on what it was called. Thank you and keep up the good work
This is the second thing I have seen on your channel. I have enjoyed both quite a lot. Good still, information and entertaining. Keep up the good work and I hope you have a lot of success.
my parents have been recording weddings since the 70's. They had a recorder, or a battery pack and audio set up, in a messenger bag well into the early 00's. Nice to learn about the predecessors.
thank you! i worked REALLY hard to pack it into 30 minutes without sounding *completely* rushed and I'm surprised everyone else is actually keeping up with it - to my ears it sounds like a maddening flurry of information far too fast to digest, but my test audience all said it was perfect as-is so I stopped fighting with myself and released it.
![Uncovering a Cancelled 90s "Metaverse" [Cyberpark]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/6q6SXzmcqPY/mqdefault.jpg)
![Uncovering a Cancelled 90s "Metaverse" [Cyberpark]](/img/tr.png)
![I bet YOUR photo printer couldn't do this! [Olympus P330]](/img/n.gif)
Thank you to everyone who's commented, I really appreciate the response! I wanted to mention that I have not yet completed the subtitling for this video because I've been working on it for so long that looking at it makes me sick; as soon as I can stomach it I'll get proper CC in place.
As someone who does have harder time hearing certain sounds, I certainly do appreciate proper CC. However you speak clearly enough that the auto-gen had no trouble I seen understanding you! While no substitute to proper CC, the auto-gen certainly provided to get me through the video with no issue.
Adding my comment to feed the almighty algorithm! This video is great, keep up the good work friend, you've earned a sub.
Hey man, this is a GREAT documentary and you are doing a fantastic and really important job of preserving the history. If you want some insight into 70's media (and the reasons for distrust in them) I can really recommend you "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
❤
Whelp... you sir have just joined LGR, TechMoan, Technology Connections, and 8-bit guy as some of my favorite UA-cam channels... thanks!
i follow them all❤😊
Me too! 😜
Check out Nostalgia Nerd as well, his documentaries are excellent
@@KrisDouglas thanks for the suggestion will do!
he sure has. the effort put into these vids is astounding
That transition music and blue screen with flying text really does lend this the feel of one of those classic 80s/early 90s documentaries.
I applaud your research on the topic, as well as the passion and humour in your narration. I hope you keep producing content like this: it deserves to become required watching in college and university classes on the subject.
thank you so much! wow this is such a compliment
Crap another blue screen, damn you Windows 95...
@@CathodeRayDude where did you get this music? Im sure I recognise it from somewhere and it's driving me mad
@@JamieEC96 it's from a xerox training tape
@@CathodeRayDude it made me think of the laserdiscs we used to watch in my middle and high school classes 😂
The total gap in communal knowledge about the EIAJ plug is *mindblowing*
As an old dude who used eiaj VTRs and EIAJ connectors when they were new, i really appreciate your fresh enthusiasm for these topics . I never really thought about how people today are unaware of these gaps, because i used all of these cameras and recorders, but you’re absolutely right ht!
Yes when you start breaking it down and realizing initially it took two different devices, plus your wires, the first the camera just to capture the signal and a separate device with your storage tape. Some of those first portable units were only that by name, since you literally had to have a place to set some of it down and even plug it in, because it was not truly mobile, I think that's where the term remote location started being used. It's interesting to see how far the technology has come. Imagine if he had covered the old large reel to reel systems used in professional movie making as well, I think some of the very first were 1920s or earlier. (essentially the same technology seen miniaturized in the very first home video recording systems).
@@benullom2301 You forget about the basic point: Portable meant you could take recordings out on the field, without a generator and a car to give you power and machinery. Of course you could make that before, using a film camera. But that included a constant changing of incredibly expensive to develop reels, waiting for development and time consuming cutting afterwards. So having a portable Video Tape recorder was huge!
Of course it was lame, compared to the following camcorders. But as such, we will be loughed at in a decade, with our constant power plug hungry and sunlight shy smartphones that cost a fortune. Remember, there was a time we had portable phones that had a battery that lasted for 2 Weeks. What if a future smartphone generation can do that, including constant use. What will our current 1000 Dollar smartphone be worth then?
@@genius1a touching on the two week battery life. That was back before we even had smartphones and a lot of phones were Nokia, I don't even think they exist anymore, at least I don't see them. Lithium ion does have more capacity but the phones just eat up power, it's surprising they last as long as they do. The screen is the big culprit it takes a lot of the battery power to light it.
@@genius1a Hey, plenty of good budget phones have 5000-6000 mAh batteries! Not everyone wants some $1000 flagship that allocates more priority to performance or features than a battery. [It seems to be increasingly hard to find a budget phone with optical image stabilisation on the camera though. :(]
Same I didn’t know that people were unaware of EIAJ and video camera’s of this era. It’s really not a big deal and saying nobody knows about this or remember it was hyperbolic by this channels creator.
The instant you showed the camera and said that nobody would know what it was made me feel very old, as I definitely used that exact camera as a teenager and had not, in fact, forgotten about the original split camera-recorder systems that camcorders were an improvement over.
LOL, I am OLD. When he was first showed the Camcorders, I thought "Those are camcorders, NOT video cameras. A camcorder is a video CAMera WITH a built in reCORDER." - And then he went on to explain, LOL. PS Your web cam is a "modern" example of a "video camera" -sans recorder.
This better get blessed by the algorithm
Better, kinda, the channel has been blessed by Technology Connections.
Spread the good news ! 👍✨
It’s been blessed - by Technology Connections! 😁
It did. For me at least. Don’t worry. :)
A blast to hear from this guy!
Please don't forget the system called "VCR" released by Philips and Grundig in 71/72.
It used cassettes, offered full frame rate, full resolution, color and even stereo. Quality was like VHS. It was aimed at consumers and it had some commercial success. Video cassettes for consumers did not start with beta.
There were portable machines and there was even editing equipment that allowed editing with single frame precision.
It was only released in Europe and Africa, PAL only. Tech history tends to forget things not sold in the USA.
it feels like every single advertisement before like, 1995 was just some variation on "ey have you guys seen these broads, amirite fellas?"
this video is dry but you keep it in your mouth a while and it melts
This is seriously one of my all time favorite video essays. So much history that never made it into the "mainstream" of youtube tech retrospectives. Thank you for this, I never knew how much I needed to have those gaps filled.
And thank you for watching!
There’s a guy on UA-cam who seemed to record alot of his life starting in the 1980s when he was about 14 and for about
20 years after. Him and his friends on BMX bikes, later his cars and parties etc. I love watching these things and seeing how life was all thanks to these cameras
I picked up an old camera like that at a garage sale, has the same EIAJ connector, and I later picked up a box to power it and convert it to RCA. Never really looked into the connector, never knew how obscure but universal it is!
I love this. It went from a history lesson on tape to making me want to take down “the man”.
I'm impressed how every since video I've seen of yours so far has been touching on a topic I thought I knew a lot about, and still manages to drag me through a rabbit hole of history that I didn't even know existed!
Thank you for this. If you're curious, the short film "VTR St-Jacques" documents an early activist exploration of the social possibilities of portable video equipment (specifically those Sony CV-2000s and Video Rovers.) It was produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1969 and can be found on their website to view for free, if you wish.
wow, thank you! i'll check this out!
Ok but that intro tag is fucking rad also the production quality on this is absolutely wild
Aesthetically perfect blue gradient and public school synth. Now I know why my parents basement has plastic tubs of 8mm reel, a Sony VHS camera, and how we got from one to the other.
This is Technology Connexions-level quality. And yeah, it's high praise.
At least... I can't believe I only found this channel last week.
@@fisqual the algorithm decided it was time
ah, a fellow fan of alec. i see you are a man of culture as well.
@@fisqual Agree!
I'm genuinely shocked that this has only 6k views. That's an absolute _travesty_ for the quality this brings. I've sent this to a few of my tech chats to hopefully get this more traction. Hopefully you'll get your break soon enough.
As an A/V enthusiast, this video is an absolute blessing! Amazing work!
thank you! I'm here for my fellow Enthusiasts
Great video. It might be good to include "EIAJ connector" or similar in your description or even title just to help with those searching about it in the future!
you're right, this reminds me that I completely forgot to create any keywords! whoops! thank you!
Well, I don’t think it’d be wise to try and establish “EIAJ connector” to refer to the 10-pin camera connector, because “EIAJ connector” is already firmly established as the term for the EIAJ-defined system of DC barrel plugs. (It not only defines the plug dimensions, but also pairs each size with a specific voltage range, so that devices don’t get damaged by overvoltage.)
It seems that “10-pin camera connector” and the like is the most common term, but if it does have an official name, it’s not easy to find.
Sony introduced a 14 pin connector, (HVC3000), to plug it into a VHS portable (with the J10 plug) you needed an adapter (this was in 1981).
Just stumbled on your channel, great stuff! I'd love to see more like this, where you dive into the details of forgotten tech history.
Since the 90s, I've been fascinated by analog TV descramblers for cable and satellite, and it seems no one has done a full video on how they work and how it started. It would be awesome if you did something like that.
This video was outstanding! I feel like I just visited the best Home Video Museum ever - Thank You for all the hard work and research, wow!
08:08 the clip seen here is an old ad from WSOC 9 in Charlotte, NC!
I want you to stay motivated. I see your videos as being like Technology Connections or Techmoan, but with your own unique style and look, which I hope you continue to refine. The first video of yours I came across, I enjoyed - and it was surprising to see that you only had ~8k subs given the level of information and research that went into it, as well as the production quality.
I'm sure that if you keep it up, you'll be as well known as the aforementioned.
Keep it up, mate. You're doing beautifully!
This is my favorite video on UA-cam. Thank you, Gravis, for making it.
I've been curious about those early home-friendly open reel video machines. Thank you for FINALLY putting them in some sort of historical context!
I watch one youtube video a year and I'm really glad it was this one, great work!! I am always glad to watch your latest documentary about technology I've never heard of
That JVC commercial at 19:54 is a big yikes. Great work! I'd definitely watch any follow up rabbit hole you jumped down around this, or likely any other subject
subscribe if you haven't and keep an eye out! at a minimum i'll be doing videos eventually about my army of old tube based cameras!
No that’s awesome, come on. It was the 80s, dude.
@@brantisonfire The guy's being a creep, but that's the joke. He just ends up with video of bikini girls telling him to buzz-off.
What a video! The way you have demonstrated the mass forgetting of such a ubiquitous device (the "half-inch") and related technology is certainly something I am going to keep thinking about as I continue to learn about all the many things we keep forgetting.
Watching this video makes me realize how fortunate I was to come across a working Sony AVC-3400 with it's portable recorder 10 years ago. When I turned it on for the first time I was hooked on how the quality of the image looked and enjoyed its limited quality atheistic. Thank-you for putting together this history and it was really cool to see how the device that I have fits into it!
Love how densely packed this video is and the pace maintained throughout. Never gets dull or waffley!
I should note that I became a Patreon supporter based on this video. I know this can't happen every time, but I appreciate the piece at the end discussing what people actually tried to do with this tech.
Just a few remarks:
I don't see the Philips VCR series on your timeline, being one of the first colour cassette home video system (N1500, N1700). In Europe the VCR system was quite important, but I'm not sure about the USA.
Marketing of consumer video to women (TC 19:14) is a little misinterpretation of the picture material. In the 70's, women were still pictured in ads to make the product more attractive to men; just like car ads with women, leaning against the newest models, hanging over hoods of the newest models (women being 'the newest models' at all for sure). Although women's lib was a movement not to miss in this decade, technical stuff wasn't that much of their interest (there might be some exceptions to that rule, but still...). At that point, you're correct saying that women didn't seem to be interested that much in consumer video, but from the advertisers angle it was a little different, although I can imagine that the thought of more women using their products can't be wiped out completely.
A little third one: please try to speak just a little slower. Sometimes you're going so fast to non native speakers, just like me. At some points, you're losing me as a listener and that's a pity because you've got a lot of interesting things to tell.
Enjoyed your video very much. Tnx for posting.
Seriously though, you should become UA-cam famous and rich because you are producing incredible content. Subscribed.
This video is an absolute blessing and I had no idea about almost any of the camcorder history, as my family was mostly involved in production broadcasting so I only really knew the professional side until my uncle showed up with his fancy VHS camcorder many years later. Very well put together and very worth it.
However, I have one thing to add to the timeline, and I don't fault you for not including it as I only found out about it through a series of strange coincidences. The first home video cassette format, i.e. something actually aimed at consumers and not U-matic, was made by an American company, the format called Cartrivision, released in 1972. This system allowed not only for timeshifting on a cassette-based system, but also allowed for home movie recording (provided it happened within your home, as you needed to plug the camera into the unit). The problem, and why you've never heard of it, is that it was only sold integrated into certain television sets, which were really expensive, and most of the tapes were rentals with a "rental-only" switch on them, a historical predecessor of the self-erasing DVDs the MPAA tried to push for in the early 2000s. I personally found out about it via the fact that the only taping of the last time the New York Knicks won the championship was on a home-recorded Cartrivision tape, as the broadcast videotape had turned to mush.
Here's a source on the Knicks: www.creativecontentwire.com/duart-relies-on-nucoda-to-get-lost-and-found/
And here's videolabguy's transfers of original Cartrivision material, including a video "manual" for the device: ua-cam.com/video/bClJ12fHl5A/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/pXEiJ1e6Iqk/v-deo.html
His website is quite informative on the development of the device as well: www.labguysworld.com/Museum017.htm (his site is also full of references to some of the VTRs you noted!)
On a final note - really, U-matic came out in 1969? My dad had some archive videotape from a live performance that went on TV in 1984 that was recorded on U-Matic, and a couple other U-Matic broadcast tapes from that time...that's quite a lifetime for that technology; they were still using it very actively for archive work in Venezuelan TV through the 80s.
Thank you for this video a few years ago i worked in my high school theatre and there was a 10 pin in the tech booth that nobody knew what it was for (this theatre was built in the mid 70s) and now i realize how cutting edge that mustve been to have wired in video capability with the recorder being in the booth and the camera being wherever the director wanted considering the flexibility of the overhead wiring network. I'm now the only one who knows what that connector was for
I had one of those rover cams with the goofy plug back in the late 80s/early 90s. It had a power brick/some kind of signal processor. Never got ahold of the tape/recorder unit for it as i picked it up at a yardsale. I managed to adapt it to my little black and white tv and i could see a live feed of whatever the camera saw on my tv. My buddy managed to find another one in his grandparents' attic but again no recorder. We ended up stringing a bunch of coax cables together with barrel connecters from radioshack to connect the feed from my camera to the tv in his room and vice versa.....strung the cables out my window, thru a tree, and into his window. Viola video conferencing. ....then our parents got pissed off that we'd swiped every unused coax cable from both our houses to create what they thought would be a nice lightning rod and made us take the whole thing down. Still, 12 year old me thought this was the raddest thing ever. The picture quality sucked, but man, we thought we were the jetsons.
Wow, I was amazed to see so few subscribers since this felt like content produced in 500k subs channel. Subbed
This channel is criminally underrated, your content is top tier man
This is honestly astonishing, everything about this video is so damn good.
I just found your channel here on UA-cam and have been power watching dozens of you programs for 2 or 3 days now. My gosh my man, so good. You're just great -- keep it up!
thank you for this! lately i've been interested in learning about home videos, and technology from when i grew up/even before me. this was very cool.
Dude, great work on filling in those gaps, any info from the 60's on video tech is largly unsaid or forgotten, thank you.
thank you for *appreciating* it!
Your narration and the general structure of this is Aces man! Really enjoyable.
Your transition screen music gives me PTSD from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on NES. The beginning of the music from the underwater section of the Dam, that transition music must have been what inspired that music.
Awesome production quality by the way.
I am old enough to have witnessed the advent of home VTRs firsthand, so this video was quite nostalgic. 😁
so well done! big thanks for crediting all of your sources, this is a goldmine of research that was as entertaining as it was intensely interesting to watch! also gotta appreciate the network shoutout, one of my favorite movies.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Good gravy, that JVC advertisement...
Great video!
I'm so glad I found your channel. Its exactly the type of content I like and usually consume but with loads of info I've never seen before. Thank you for putting so much effort into this videos.
This is historical internet Gold!! Great work!
You’ve got a great thing going! I love the nostalgia and forgotten information. From one creative to another, don’t be afraid to venture out of your comfort zone, I believe you have real knack for informative content and could make interesting works on anything your interested in. Way to go!!
22:30 Ad for the Sears C131. A peeve of mine: When discussing home movie cameras: People who call 8mm or 16mm FILM cameras "video cameras" or "camcorders".(not uncommon on Craigslist and eBay, LOL!) UGHH. "Video" is an ELECTRONIC form of motion picture. Film cameras do NOT make "video". While it IS perfectly OK to call a film camera or an analog (or digital) video camera or camcorder a "movie" camera, (as "movie" is slang for "motion picture") it's NOT ok to call a film camera a video camera.
Good information! Another company involved in home video recording in the early 70s was Cartrivision in San Jose, CA. Their machines used ½” video tape in a stacked reel cartridge format and recorded in full color using a skip field recording technique. The machines were too expensive and not packaged or marketed well (along with a host of other problems) and the company went bankrupt. A lot of unsold machines (along with a black & white camera AND microphone) were sold in the mid 70s for dirt cheap. I got one then and still have it. After a few years of use it sat idle for about 40 years. I replaced a belt and did some other minor repairs and got it working again.
I'd be very interested in talking to you about your CV player, especially if it does still work.
I grew up with my grandfather having a camcorder. I want to say it was a National branded VCR that had these great big NiCad or sealed lead acid batteries that slotted in the front. It had a faux leather over the shoulder case that held the VCR, with a clear vinyl window so you could see the buttons and protect it from the elements. He always had the neatest gadgets.
Geez my grandfather had a Brownie box camera...
Amazing video dude. God-tier level I swear.
When I was a little kid and first heard the word I thought it was "camquarter" because they were about a quarter size of the professional cameras at the time. Then I saw it spelled out.
There was an attempt by Bosch to sell a news camera called the QuarterCam. It used quarter inch tapes. The prototypes were tested by ABC at the 1984 Olympics but Betacam had already established an unbeatable lock on the broadcast camcorder market for another 12 years.
Great video - I really do appreciate all the work that you must have put into editing this - not to mention the research - top notch! It just shows that great TV programs can be made completely independently. I have a few 80s JVC cameras, also really into the Panasonic switchers - its a great hobby as stuff can picked up so cheap on ebay still. Keep it up!
That was really enjoyable. Very good production value, too!
You deserve way more subs! :)
I'm re-watching this again in January 2022. Your videos are always great quality, and keeps me glued to the monitor the whole time. Please keep up the good work! Your channel is vastly underrated!
This is it! This is great!
Thanks for collating all of this information into one place.
"Typical" in that title provides a lot of tension. Also, excellent points about how home film vs home video were recorded.
let me tell you , in re: "typical", i had to back off my verbiage like 4 times to make sure i wasn't inadvertently insulting anyone. the original script was basically me going "everyone just lies about all this!" when that isn't true at all!! but yeah, "typical" is carrying a LOT of weight here, and I much prefer it as implicit rather than an explicit callout, heh. thanks for watching!
This is unreal. Thanks for putting all the work into it!
It’s like you’ve discovered a lost civilization
Thank you for teaching me about the history of home video (and a whole bunch of other stuff)! This is so wonderfully produced, the amount of effort and love that went into it is palpable.
love seeing those acid-inspired diagrams. im sure they seemed at the time like they needed to be communicated to others!!! reminds me of the mspaint scribbles in jordan peterson’s “maps of meaning” LOL
This was an excellent timeline that produced a fair bit of fodder for chatter for me and my friends, and it's information I can keep tucked in my pocket as I dig through the myriad bygone junk my father has collected over his long life. Still, excellent framing of the video and good job keeping it interesting and moving forward throughout the whole length. I really do miss this era, when technology was something you could see and touch.
"Great sound too~"
Keep it in your pants mate.
Fantastic video, thanks for making it! Nice to see yet another person on YT sharing the interest in vintage video equipment. I knew most of the stuff you mentioned, but it was still a pleasure to watch. Never heard of the Videofreex - definitely a topic I have to dive into.
Kind of dissapointed that it was all from a North American perspective, no V2000 and "VCR" formats, but the video was still very informative.
I love how in depth this all goes. I found it fascinating! thanks for your hard work!
anything else? any other,, details?
really though, great story, thanks for telling it!
ANYTHING ELSE??? ANY OTHER < < < DETAILS ?
Not sure how I stumbled onto your channel but I have spent the past 2 hours watching your work. It's obvious you have a strong passion for what you do, and a awesome ability to tell stories about it in a well thought out way. Your doing a superb job and earned another subscriber. Keep it up.
That video freeks stuff is ameteur, sure, but it has a sort of charm to it. It just looks very genuine and heart-warming
Thanks for filling in the gaps that most had forgotten. I, being in my middle aged times, knew about a lot of this but even I learned something today. Keep up the great work.
This is a PBS quality documentary. Impressed. Great work :-)
Excellent episode. I just discovered your channel and you're making some great content. I'm a big fan of both Techmoan and Technology Connections, and you distinguish yourself with this wonderful, original research and your own unique style and humour. It's a pleasure to share your fascination with old tech. Love it.
Been following you on twitter for a while and I've always enjoyed when you'd post about some weird thing you noticed, dug into and found all these unseen details of, so it's great to see that but with a little more polish. Hope you'll have time to make something like this again
Fantastic review. Love all these old machines. My favorite part is the ad, you can't beat "Buzz off, buster!" thanks for including that gem
Your video holds true for 525 line NTSC areas and is all well and good, but Phillips had their N1500 video cassette for the domestic market in 1972 with a under/over spool layout and a horizontal as opposed to slanted azimuth drum similar in operation to to the Sony 3400but in a cassette format.
This predates both Betamax and vhs by a few years. They were not released in the states as they had been set up for 625 line 50hz of Europe, uk, South Africa and Australia. To adapt them for the higher 60hz frequency (but lower 525 line resolution) meant increasing the tape speed and the tapes became unusably short in playback time.
Have you ever heard about the Telcan, also sold as the VKR-500. I'm pretty sure it was the first ever home video recorder, going on sale in 1963. It was made by two british guys, and it ran on 1/4 inch tape. It used a longitudinal recording method so the tape ran really fast, I think it only had 20 minutes recording time per side. They sold it for £60 as a kit! Unfortunately they weren't very successful and it soon faded into obscurity, but it's pretty interesting and notable for being a first.
I'm glad you released this against the odds.
Great video! Thanks for taking the time to document this. We have a video transfer business (digitizing old tapes) and had a few of those early Sony 1/2" VTRs - never had a lot of demand - maybe once every few months someone would inquire about that format. Umatic was definitely an industrial & commercial format but we do get an occasional early adopter who spent a ton of money to film his family on Umatic. The 10 pin camera connector is cool - had one on our first VHS VCR in the early 80's - I remember my dad would rent a camera from the local video rental store for the weekend if we were having a party. I've gotten involved in amateur radio the past few years and I'm fascinated by what hams were doing in the 1980s and 1990s with fast-scan TV. I'd like to eventually set up a station with some of the old equipment we've acquired over the years.
A brilliant telling of the history by someone who obviously was not there first hand.
My experience almost goes back to the EIAJ era as I saw one in grade school. But my first VCR that I owned was a VHS Portable with separate camera, with you guessed it an EIAJ connector. I was today's years old when I learned that's what it's called. I knew it had been standardized but had no idea what it was called.
Keep up the good work.
My dad started an editing studio out of our house in 1990, when I was 10, so I grew up around prosumer grade equipment... Hi-8 camcorders, big SVHS and 3/4"SP decks, Toaster/Flyer, and so on... but it blew my mind when I saw corporate video footage being recorded circa 1995 at my mom's workplace with a portapak-style betacam setup. Even that late in the game, footage was still being captured with discrete video cameras and battery-powered VTRs. Any time since that I've seen equipment like this, I always assumed it was high end studio gear, so It's remarkable that it was a consumer-oriented technology that far back. Thanks for presenting this history of it here.
Fascinating! Enjoy the reference to Tech Connections. Kudos for finding the early video news advocates. The offbeat uses of technology are often the forgotten starts for later trends and you stitched that together wonderfully.
I became an instant fan when you did that shout out to Technology Connections, not just because I like that channel, but because it is awesome that you are not trying to copy others, rather potentially fill in gaps and flesh out other areas of similar topics presented elsewhere.
I'm so glad you took the time and care to do this, I had always had this kind of nebulous idea that there had been home movie cameras with separate recorders, but I had never followed up on, or imagined, that the market was so competitive and innovative up until the first camcorders.
Thank you! Yeah, this is something that I think we could arrive on by thinking real hard about it, but nobody ever seems to (including myself) until it's right in front of them. I felt I had a duty to help!
So glad to finally see you having some success. I sent technology connections a tweet about this video and it looks like it worked! Also love the PUP shirt! Once things settle down you should come up to Vancouver BC for one of their shows.
Thanks! Think he followed me on twitter after my last video, but I appreciate the effort. I'd love to see PUP again, I missed their last couple Seattle shows.
Thank you for this amazing documentary. It was wonderful and provided little-known information that is fascinating and interesting. Now I feel like I should try filming on one of those cameras.
they're great fun to collect, lots of them used! thank you for watchign!
I appreciate that you made this short documentary. I was in a frendly dispute with a buddy of mine on this very topic. terns out I was right we knew what the 1/2 in plug was but we couldn't find any good info on what it was called.
Thank you and keep up the good work
That was an insanely great rundown of video history, and I loved that revolutionaries got some coverage, too.
The conclusions were great, thank you. You are not only a consumer electronic historian but a good media culture commentator as well.
This channel is a hidden gem and I will share and promote your content as it deserves more eyes on it.
This is the second thing I have seen on your channel. I have enjoyed both quite a lot. Good still, information and entertaining. Keep up the good work and I hope you have a lot of success.
my parents have been recording weddings since the 70's. They had a recorder, or a battery pack and audio set up, in a messenger bag well into the early 00's. Nice to learn about the predecessors.
Finally got time to watch the whole thing. Subscribed and hit the bell. Lots of interesting stuff in here. Thanks for making this!
Thank you for subscribing!!!
I loved every bit of this. Not only the 90's era visuals, but the thoroughness, care, and even jokes.
I'm always glad to see an update from you and this one is incredible, especially packed in to only 30 minutes.
thank you! i worked REALLY hard to pack it into 30 minutes without sounding *completely* rushed and I'm surprised everyone else is actually keeping up with it - to my ears it sounds like a maddening flurry of information far too fast to digest, but my test audience all said it was perfect as-is so I stopped fighting with myself and released it.