To adapt to the true video recording behavior of the time, you have to *zoom all the way in* on something and then just forget that it's recording all together. Just walk around with it with it still *zoomed all the way in.* Ultimately, shaky zoomed in video of the ground was the vertical video of yesteryear.
Remember some early cameras had to have the record button pressed and held, and then others were start/stop buttons. 30 or 35 years ago I was struggling trying to figure out which did what! I had a Fischer or JVC VHS/C "camcorder" that blew everything else out of the water in 1985... I even hooked it up to record NFL games off UHF back then because the slow-motion was so good! What a trip down memory lane. Be well.
You forgot the "READ EVERYTHING" technique my father used. Instead of getting a general view of a sign, he used to zoom to the nth degree and go line by line, from left to right, similarly as how any person reads. Made you dizzy as hell, lol
I saw some of my grandpa's old footage. He just kinda looked around with it, rather than composed shots. But I didn't mind, at the end of the day it was nice to have.
when I was like 12 I recorded some footage for a teacher of a children's event (a race of some kind). I had no idea what I was doing and yeah, that's how it turned out, super zoomed and unwatchable... 8( The lady was not very nice about it unfortunately since she lost having a good record of that event, but it's not like I could have done better. (it was a good lesson though that some things are more complicated than they seem.)
I love how Beta did all sorts of engineering trickery to achieve its things, whereas the VHS solution to pretty much everything was just "MOAR HEAD". And it worked a charm nonetheless. It's like watching an Adeptus Mechanicus get consistently outwitted by an Ork. I love it.
Man I had a really hard time keeping my internal clock in 2020 while watching the recordings at the end. I kept on thinking we were watching a home movie from the 1980s. I think the largest factor was the noises the machine makes (the constant whirring of the motors and the iconic popping made for some reason).
You know, the fact that Marty's then-contemporary video camera can actually be hooked up to Doc's TV in 1955 makes "Back to the Future" quite the period piece now.
in a relatively short amount of time, new video cameras went from being pretty easy to hook up to old TV's to pretty difficult. I assume that's what OP is talking about
@@electrictroy2010 Old comment ik, but out of curiosity I looked it up. That model camera had composite standard which first arrived on TVs in 1956 (so close), but there was a separate RF modulator available for purchase which would allow it to interface with probably just about every TV made in the 50s. I guess its lucky that Marty purchased that extra accessory.
Depending on what tech you have available, you may be able to hook up a ten year old digital camera to Doc's TV. My mom's relatively new point-and-shoot came with an adapter cable for composite video, I believe. So all you'd need is an RF modulator, and it should be a signal that can be passed into the antenna terminals of the 50s tv.
@@JBaughb You can mod any TV that accepts analog RF to display composite video, it's the same signal, just demodulated. But on the older tube sets you need to have it isolated as they usually were hot chassis (ie. no transformer). So it's totally doable in the 1950s, but he'd have to know the signal level and such., but that can be measured with an oscillscope etc.
The first Sony Handycam in 1985 repeated the same mistakes, except even worse. It was also a record-only device, and instead of a through-the-lens viewfinder, its viewfinder was simply a hole you look through, so it gave you no indication of focusing. And Video8 was a new format at the time, so almost no one had an existing VCR for it yet, unlike Beta's eight-year head-start before the BetaMovie arrived. In fact, it's quite remarkable that Video8 didn't become yet another failed format, but I guess after losing the biggest format war in history, Sony was stubborn and unwilling to concede defeat again, so they kept on making Video8, Hi8, and Digital8 camcorders (obviously with much improved functionality over the years) all the way until the very end of the analog video era in 2007.
Regarding 9:27 If you think about it, a movie camera that records on film also can't replay the motion picture. As for 10:14, again, movie cameras don't have electronic viewfinders or an equivalent. The Betamovie viewfinder doesn't seem much different from those of cameras that record on film.
Hey at least it have much better build quality than today's Sony 4K Handycam. There's a reason Japanese rather rent the 4K camera instead of buy one,the price are still too high for what they get. And they actually did sell the CCD-M8 with video 8 player alongside it. And if you want the camcorder with playback features then you have to get the CCD-V8 instead both models' accessories (not all) are interchangeable both released in the same year. V8 is shoulder mounted prosumer model while M8 is for casual uses they have to shrunk M8 down to make it portable "Handycam" even if it meant it lost the playback features. Some people still use V8 model to play their older video 8 tapes since the camcorder itself proved to be built better than its 8mm tape players themselves. I have both models but the tape motors just died on me but its original batteries still hold charge.
The better the equipment used for recording sound electrically onto an analog medium, and the better the playback equipment, the better the quality of the reproduced sound. Is there anyone else here who wishes analog video worked like that?
22:43 best eject mechanism *ever* Edit: Legend says that Sony especially designed them like this so the tape could be damaged, leaving the only choice for the consumer; -switching to VHS- buying more blank tapes.
Oh man those Magnavox camcorders are a classic. My grandpa had one and it was kinda a big deal. "Ask grandpa if he can help you with that project he has a camera you'll get a really good grade if you go all out like that!" Actually he was a genius with that thing. He made power point presentations on VHS before powerpoint was even a thing. He would aim it on a table and put pictures and then hit record and then pause and basically make full blown slide shows with effects and everything by dimming the light. It's so easy now with everything digital we forget to appreciate what things were like before.
Even some of their successes are bad ideas. See PS2, PS3 (Nightmare for game developers) And Vaio P (deluxe netbook that is still as crappy as any netbook)
Just to be clear, here--the issues with the Betamovie aren't really related to the fact that it makes Beta tapes. Most of its flaws have nothing to do with the format and everything to do with its design. I'd come to the same conclusions regarding the BMC-110 even if I were comparing it against a theoretical 4-head Beta camcorder with full-playback capabilities and an electronic viewfinder. The problem isn't that it's Beta, it's everything else. Still, for Sony to release this product with Betamax already struggling is a little puzzling, at least to me.
More recording-heads would certainly have solved the problem (are those flashes across the image the result?), but that would've meant cramming more circuitry inside, & of course higher production costs!
Loved this video! I have a BMC-100 (The PAL version, i love the lower model #) right alongside the JVC (GR-C1U) and both were incredible. I personally think the design itself was rushed to get it to market before VHS made its play. For May 1983, this was incredible. My dad had the video camera with luggable recorder combo back in the early eighties. The VCR itself had to have been several pounds! This one-piece design was pretty substantial innovation. This being the first one in history, it certainly had its limitations, but started a consumer revolution that shouldn't be forgotten. This was pretty awesome tech for 1983. Good video!
RCA has done worse with the CRD Videodisc format... First by holding back development, just to play "wait-&-see" with the success of Phillips far-superior Laserdisc format, then bothering to develop a second-generation machine to be competitive with Laserdisc... after it obviously already lost to both it AND videotape. The latter of which basically helped put the company "under".
Maxx Fordham! Must the whole "royalties for licensing of format" thing come-up again? Or the total recording/play-time difference need discussion as well? How about that most consumers couldn't tell the difference in performance for the cost, which was substantial at the time? Or how most movie studios weren't willing to go with the first point I made?
I'm thinking the executives told the engineers "build it at this size and for this price and have it ready by this date" so they did what they were told.
So true, but still our modern cameras are too bad when dark. Then the zoom is digital in most devices as cellphones. Digital zoom = Crappy image. So 4k camera are not 4k when zooming (if you not have a more expensive device that most people not own).
VHS player head: Your turn - My turn - Your turn - My Turn VHS recorder head: HOT POTATO! HOT POTATO! HOT POTATO! HOT POTATO! That small clip makes me laugh non-stop XD
I think the head time compression trick is much more easily explained with paper. There's this nice gap at the top and bottom and the betamovie mechanism is like a printer that needs some blank space between pages. But instead of clipping out a few lines of each page, they just set the printer to work like the paper was bigger, printing the nothing onto thin air.
Excellent analogy. So basically you have an 8x11 paper. The recording printer operated as if the paper was 8x12. The last inch was printed on nothing, but the paper still looked okay when viewed by the customer.
About 10 years ago, I took a picture of an LCD monitor with an early-60s Polaroid J66 camera that still had some Type 47 film in it. Type 47 hasn't been made since 1991. The film was still good, amazingly enough. The picture was kind of crappy, but it was kind of weird seeing an LCD monitor on a Polaroid image that's mostly associated witht eh 50s and 60s...
It was really bizarre seeing a modern FedEx truck in a video that looked like it was from the 80's Now I wanna see more modern things recorded on really old cameras
It would be kinda funny if someone took a 80's era camera on the #dearmoon mission just to demonstrate what a moon mission would have looked like in the 80's if the space programs hadn't gotten huge budget cuts, hck, according to some of the stuff from the apollo era we would have been on mars by now
Holy duck, the end clip is literally indistinguishable from an old timey home video! Ah it takes me back. I have used MiniDV tapes so it's all pretty noatalgic.
MiniDV is no different from a memory card or flash drive, other than having slower seek times and a bit higher error rate (but no sudden catastrophical failures like on flash drives). It's just another completely interchangeable digital storage medium. Video quality during MiniDV era was limited by extremely crappy processors which couldn't do complex algorithms in real time. But the tapes themselves were actually comparable to BluRay with regards to capacity and linear read speed. In principle, nothing is stopping anyone from creating a 4k MiniDV camcorder that will be on par with modern ones with regards to quality, other than impracticality.
I like the old Sony 8mm and Hi8 format. I know they are quirky as hell, the playback deck is overpriced, and the whole format lost to VHS-C from JVC. Seems to me though, if there was just a bit more space in that Betacam he showed, it should be possible to design a small digital circuit to capture the incoming feed from the camcorder's lens and recompile the image back to the 15.7Hz for playback via the viewfinder. That makes for a good experiment! Thanks for a great video and hopefully a fruitful experiment!!
The section in the parking lot was making my head hurt for a moment until I realized the problem: The cars didn't look right. *Because they were to new.*
The recording at the end was the highlight for me. It evoked some strange feelings. At first it was like being in a horror movie, but then it was like time traveling to the 80s, but then it was just geeky. Two thumbs up.
I’m surprised sony didn’t just overdrive a mini CRT to show live output from the tape head. It must lose a fair amount of light with the prism setup, too. I am impressed with the video quality though, it’s pretty darn sharp when you focus.
That's a great point! I never even realized that was an option. My guess is that they were concerned about cost and the benefit wouldn't have been too great anyway. You still wouldn't be able to dub tapes with it. In my mind it seems like the one-head ordeal was probably more cost-saving than anything. I see no technical reason why they couldn't have gone with the VHS setup.
later Betamovies, like the BMC-550 from 1985 had an electronic viewfinder, autofocus and a CCD image sensor, they also recorded either SuperBetamax (high Band Beta) or standard Beta. The BMC-1000 form 1986 also added HiFi stereo audio recording as well as Super High Band capability.
The fact that they used a 625 line scan rate makes me suspect they used the same imaging tube in the NTSC version as in the PAL version. However, it does mean the imaging tube had to be overscanned even more if you wanted to record PAL, unless the number of lines on a PAL tape is the same as on an NTSC one.
That's why I suspected a PAL tube or PAL circuitry was somehow used, and perhaps the PAL version of the machine uses the system either without overscan, or at a different field rate. PAL may be 625 lines but I don't know how many actual lines are recorded on a PAL Beta tape. As long as the gap in the tape stays within the vertical blanking interval, the recording should be good.
At NYU in the 80s we used the predecessor to those for our portable video projects. They had a big recorder device and this ridiculously small and light (and hard to control) camera part that was attached via a cable. The camera was truly amazing as it had possibly the first consumer CCDs, so no burn in possible by us novices. They were also good for our purpose as they could record on Beta 1 speed which meant it was actually compatible with the Sony RM-440 and RM-450 off-line editing controllers and thus we could do insert editing (editing over a pre-recorded "black" signal that had a continuous time code making cuts not glitch and allowed separate audio editing). While it was good for school, it also means I haven't see my actually not terrible artsy videos I made when I was 20! I know no one is probably reading this, but if you do, thanks for letting me go on and on. Have a good rest of your day!
I LOVE how in the Beta shot footage the bloom and the scanning artifacts and soft focus everywhere are so recognizably _real_, where when people put them in digitally with Snap or whatever, they look SO FAKE!
Because they overdo it. The way the "VHS effect" (as it's called) was done, is they took VCRs at differing levels of damage, and used a ton of those to create a digital effect. (I'm very much oversimplifying. It's much more complex than that.) There's many options, and most people who use the effect have no idea what they do. So they just crank up the damage slider. There's also options for fully realistic effects for a well taken care of VCR, (I'm very much oversimplifying, but there's so many settings it'd take me hours just to type) but nobody uses those because it doesn't look poor quality enough.
Great video. We still have people argue with us at the store that there was an adapter for Video8 tapes. We tell them that was only for VHS-C yet they still argue. Never gets old.
"Ohh, lens flair! I probably shouln't be looking at the sun..." why, its through the view.... oh ya, its a pass through lens, you where essentially looking at the sun with a telescope....
The entire section explaining the headgap - the graphics, closeups, audio - were all first-rate! Best explanation I’ve ever seen of how that works. Thank you! Also I laughed out loud at “super unique.”
Fun Fact: The Magnavox camcorder in the video is a re-badged Panasonic. Huge giveaway was the part number on top of the video head assembly PCB, the battery pack and the charger. A correction for you: the multi-pin cable does NOT carry an rf signal for the 75 ohm CATV lugs. It has 2 voltages, video and audio and a control signal. The rf is done on the battery charger itself. Like all your videos, you get most of it right and miss other details. I used to repair all but the Beta cam you had there ( goes for a lot of things you show). In most pro cameras, T would stand for Tally, as there is a tally light on all camcorders to indicate it is recording. Most pro video cameras of the day also used Nuvicon tubes as an imager before the CCD chip devices came along, so this cam was designed on the end of that era ( another nail in the coffin for it).
6:12 _[Banjoey country music which abruptly stops each time the head passes the gap]_ This is one of the funnier closed captions I have seen in a while, lol.
@surfitlive And that would be me. I currently use JVC Pro-hd cams and have used SONY and Canon in the past. The tally lamp was just so you could see it was in the record mode/recording.
@@hmartim T is for tally, as in the tally lamp that indicates the unit is recording. These are usually on the front of all cams for this purpose and came from studio cameras so the "talent" would know they were on camera broadcasting.
learned some new stuff there. very informative. As a teenager of the 80s with an interest in photography - camcorders were amazing to me - far too expensive for anyone I knew to have one, then my uncle got one and I remember getting to play with it for a weekend maybe in 1985 - it was awesome. I did all sorts of stupid stuff - dubbing, doing titles on toilet roll and scrolling them by the screen, doing 'special effects' - making things disappear with stop/start - and even some crappy claymation - and I've still got the tape! kids got it too easy these days with their $600 cellphones, PS4s, etc - back in 85 hardly anyone had that sort of money, and technology inspired real appreciation of it. good times.
Yeah, I was amazed that I could see the individual center spike things on that flower. A _1980s camcorder_ was able to produce that exceptional video quality. Too bad it sucks in every other way.
I just spent several weeks piecing together several Sony and NEC machines to make a fully functional FrankenBeta camcorder. Then I did a test recording and saw how terrible the footage was. The picture is okay but for some reason I can only record audio under about 6kHz which makes everything sound muffled. Still fun to use for nostalgia's sake
VHS had two ways to record audio, unless it's labeled HiFi (which uses a head on the drum and sounds like a CD) it'll use a fixed head and record as the tape slowly goes past it. It should sound as good as an audio cassette being they both run about 1.5ips in SP mode but I've never heard good sound from VHS unless it was HiFi.
Also check for: c) audio head fouled with oxide shed or other foreign substance. d) audio head azimuth misalignment. That's tough to check for as you can't compare playback quality on the recorder.. Remember though, the betamovie used the beta II speed, equivalent to VHS LP, approximately half the speed of a compact cassette.
In 1986, my dad bought one of these, from '84 (with autofocus) and it lasted about 15 years. The worst thing they had was the batteries. The autofocus solved many problems of that model that you presented and the image quality was very good. I still have many videos (now in digital) of those recordings where there are so many family memories (you have no idea). I loved it, as much as I love now a handycam with which I record my son's soccer games, in Full HD, obviously. I know this video is 6 years old, but I still congratulate you for the great material you have presented. Regards from Venezuela.
I had found one of those video cameras with a separate video recorder in a Savers Thrift Store with cables and batteries for about $25 back in 1995. It was a JVC model (It was almost exactly like the Magnavox version shown). The camera was great. The lens had an 8x optical zoom and a macro close-up that you could focus in on a US quarter that would fill the screen. The only problem was it was not good in low light. A standard 100 watt light bulb would take care of that. The JVC video tape recorder was high quality that you could edit video tapes and add secondary sound tracks. You could set the camera to do time delay recording like record a frame every 1, 5, 10, 30, 60 seconds. Unlike some VCR's, it wouldn't have that annoying start up problems between shots. Those were the days. Then computer video came in and the system became obsolete. You could record with your phone. When you would go out with your big video camera people thought you were professional.
My husband (Spats Bear) and I have three of these :-) As well as one of the original shoulder-strap VCRs. Particularly fond of the ole Fisher-Price PXL-2000s, we have a couple of them (complete with the matching monitors.) Oh, and I must say we LOVE your channel. [edit] Oh and we also have a couple of the JVCs.
Kudos to the 1% of people who got that reference. Then again, there seem to be a lot of old people watching this, so the percentage is probably higher... Matt Frewer would be proud.
I like to think I'm not all that old, just born 20 minutes into the future. Or maybe I'm a digital representation of myself, and a bad pun was the last thing I saw before dying.
I'd love to see a video dedicated to VHS camcorders and VHS-C. I had a version of that JVC camcorder, albeit without the LCD screen on the side, so it's a very interesting topic to me.
It gives you an appreciation of how far we've come technologically. My $600 phone just happens to have a camera that can record 4K video at 60FPS, while also being a powerful pocket computer. We truly are living in the future.
Except we’re still having to deal with bricks of phones, and shitty under-screen cameras (at least on the Galaxy ZFold 3). I hope one day we’ll be watching video on holographic screens made of light (look up the first clip of the Axiom from _WALL-E_ if you don’t know what I’m talking about)
@@williamreid6255 > Shitty under screen cameras Wait, you're telling me, you have a high resolution screen, and no buttons, because the screen can feel your touch, AND ALSO a tiny camera that can produce better quality than VHS, that also is UNDER THE SCREEN? and you're telling me this is an issue?
@@Xnoob545 That isn’t what I was saying, I was just making a comparison between the other person’s comment and mine. I just have trouble explaining things sometimes.
In my view digital phone 4K conviniency do not come for free. 4K needs so much digital data that fast moving objects cannot be followed by eye with comfort . My personal choice with camcorders still is HI8 because in phone with hand operation and zoomed objects 4Kmay be only seldom admired while with Hi8 it is comfortably fluent, Sure in many cases like low light supremacy of digital is obvious. 4K is a must for digital zooming which is is not important while having Hi8 optical zooming. I filmed my trips 30 years ago with standard 8 camcorder technology and now played with better cam it is even better than at time with stereo sound How would I find my movies in phone or cards after 30 years when technology runs forward, cards format changed few times and HD capacity and plugs excluded old ones from use? It requires remebering to make new copies but who cares?
Remember when a neighbor in my small village where I grown up, bought this. He was known as the man who could make "Television" by us village-children.
The head mechanism is no reason to relinquish an electronic view finder. It is true that it cannot produce a compatible TV signal, so you cannot output it from the camera, but there is no reason an integrated display wouldn't be able to show the image after some electronic taking care of the overscanning.
The camera was already pretty expensive, even for that time, if they added an electronic viewfinder along with the additional circuitry needed for playback it would be even more expensive, and it still couldn't show the picture on TV or dubb it to another tape, you only could watch it on the tiny viewfinder, so it definitely doesn't worth it, but if I'm not wrong, later models indeed did have an electronic black and white viewfinder, but just for showing you exactly what you're recording or display information, it could't play back tapes anyway.
@@giragama My comment was purely about the statement about the head mechanism being a reason for relinquishing an electronic view finder. The statement made it look like the mere presence of the special head mechanism made it technically impossible to implement a view finder, which is just wrong. I havn't even questioned that there may have been other reasons which prevented a view finder, like the cost-benefit ratio you mentioned. In fact, I believe that it _usually_ comes down to the cost-benefit ratio which decides whether a feature is implemented or not. I just wanted to point out the wrong conclusion in the video.
My grandfather had bought a "portable" Blaupunkt camera and VCR; and you also often needed an extremely hefty, not-particularly-long-running battery pack as well, plus the lighting fixture and its own battery pack. Those things were *enormous* back then (much larger than the tiny ones from the ads on the video, probably earlier models).
It would be really fun to record a whole short film project with this, to get that really authentic retro feel. Even the modern day fedex truck felt sufficiently retro through the beta max
I would love to get one of those cameras. Yes it may be a failed format but that doesn’t bother me. I have quite a few failed technology formats/products. At the time of release no one knows if something will sell or flop. I am not ashamed to own failed tech. Because at the time we did not know it would fail. And collecting failed tech products is also interesting as you can see or have a piece of what could have been.
It is a bit unfair to pick on the BMC-110 for not have autofucus, very few video cameras at that time had autofocus. The BMC-220 from 1984 had autofocus, also the zoom speed was the same as stand alone cameras from RCA (Hitachi) and Panasonic which also had manual white balance. The Magnavox (Panasonic) VHS camcorder you show is from about 1990 7 years after the BMC-110. Later Betamovies like the BMC-550 from 1985 had an electronic viewfinder 1.25" and recorded in either SuperBeta(High Band) or standard Betamax, it also used a CCD image sensor). In 1986 Sony added BI-SHB (Super High Band) and HiFi stereo audio to the Betamovie in the BMC-1000, the SHB could be turned off for comparability with standard Betamax. In 1984 Sony took the idea of the Betamovie and turned it into a Betacam format camcorder, using the BMC-220 as a base, with XLR connectors for microphone and audio added to a bump out at the back, the camera recorded standard Betacam component video and 2 linear audio tracks. The camera was popular with NHK regional newsrooms over in Japan, but it is practically unknown in the US.
Unless you sell your wares from the back of a van (concrete-filled speakers), or are Beats (nonfunctional metal plating installed to simulate quality)...
one of the advantages of having a weightier, bulkier, shoulder mounted camera, is it's inertia. It's far easier to hold it steady without using a tripod or steadycam type device.
I've watched this video several times and the "time compression" thing still makes no logical sense to me. I'm convinced Sony are secretly dark wizards.
Watching the end... made me feel like I was in the 1980s again...... thank you for that!! I had some family members that had a compact VHS camcorder..... and that grainy, kind washed out look brings back some memories!
Love the side thought shots like "I'm not a idiot,I know its more convent than film" but yet still having a professional presentation. Great in depth but followable video.
Another great production. Fascinating bit of technology, as always. It's amazing what engineers had to figure out a couple/few decades ago, especially mechanically, on portable and semi-portable devices.
11:02 I have and use a BMC500P, the “T” doesn’t stand for Recording, there was no way to know if the recorder was recording unless you could hear it run, or see the spools turn. T Stands for “Tape Run” so if you were Running out of Tape, or if it was flashing, you were running out of Battery. This is for the BMC500P, but I hardly believe the BMC110 was different...
Hey Alec, you're making me really miss what Shorewood/Joliet felt like in the 90s. It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone call a VCR a VCR, and not a "VHS player" because literally NOBODY I grew up with back then called it that. For all I know we may have crossed paths. If I didn't salute you then I definitely salute you now.
I’ve always been fascinated by electronics and mechanics, but what I really love is the ingenuity that goes into creating these and most devices, the brains behind the design and function and the fact the have to be designed to be mass produced and to be somewhat reliable. The elegance of how even the tape is wrapped around the head is incredible!! I’ve been debating with myself to do a basic electronics course to try and really understand how these machines work and how to fix them!! I used to pull everything apart in our house to learn how they work and how to fix them (most of the time) . Anyway, love the channel even though I get lost early on!! All the best, John 🇮🇪
16:25. My grandpa had this camera. It cost like $1,100 in 1987 and started having issues a year after he bought it (it would shut off randomly and spit the tape out).
One thing you can say about Sony. They employed some impressive engineers. To bad they did not do a good job of taking advantage of that in cases like this.
Creating a second recording to send to family!? I find it a pain to share videos with iCloud. I’m glad I never had to deal with that. Learning about the past definitely helps me appreciate the modern age.
I had one of these as a kid, me and my brother shot a film with it, a cowboy shootout, ketchup blood and all, it was absolutely terrible. Good times, good times.
Ah, I remember those video cameras where you had to carry the VCR on your shoulder. It worked, but wow, it makes you appreciate the ability to record 4K with just your phone.
I bought a Sharp Viewcam (Video 8) in the mid 90s, and I feel that retrocompatibiliy with VHS was the ONLY thing VHS-C had going for it. Video-8 had smaller cassettes, with longer record/play time both on standard and long play, and frankly, if you're making a copy to send to rellies somewhere, you're likely to be copying it onto a VHS tape from the camcorder, not sending them the camera tape, no matter which format you went with. But Panasonic dealers showed customers the VHS adaptor for VHS-C cassettes and most of them said "Oh, what a good idea!" without considering the other features.
I totally agree, I had a Sony Hi8 video camera and it was amazing that you could record 2 hours (or even 4 in LP mode sacrificing a little picture quality) in that small cassette tape, and I never had any issues with playing them back because I used to dubb every one of my tapes onto VHS tapes and play them back on my VCR while original tapes were securely stored in case that the copied tape was damaged or lost.
And another feature in what Video 8 was far superior to VHS-C is the audio. In Video 8 the audio is recorded in FM helical scan along with the video with the same two heads, there is no linear audio track, so you'll always get Hi-Fi audio no matter the record speed you use. But in VHS the Hi-Fi audio is recorded with two separate heads in the drum, and in a shrunken head drum like all VHS-C cameras have, they'd need 4 audio heads along with the 4 video heads already there, putting 8 heads with their respective rotary transformer inside of an already small drum wasn't easy, so this feature was exclusively reserved for high end or professional models, leaving consumer models with just the linear Lo-Fi audio track, and due to the short recording capacity of the tape, many people used to record in SLP to extend the recording time up to 1 and a half hours, but significantly reducing not only the picture quality but the audio fidelity as well.
1:20 separate 'portable' VCR, yup I remember that all too painfully. The trick wasn't to carry it on your shoulder, it was to get someone else to help lug it around, or put the VCR on the ground if you weren't moving. The setup I used, the VCR was a normal full size VCR, with the additional weight and size of a battery pack and DC supply. For added fun, it rained so everything had to be carefully covered with plastic to keep the rain out.
My uncle still has his with the original boxes . I remember when he came to our house with it and we were blown away it was so cool seeing yourself on tv
One of your best videos yet: Concise, clear, killer graphics, excellent product close-ups. Learned something today. Thank you, and I'm glad I'm a supporter!
So many memories about my father filming holidays with his big VHS Panasonic camcorder that I still have in its big bag with accessories. I remember also figuring out how to connect it to our VCR to duplicate cassettes via its power adapter with many connections. I was very young (8/10 yo) but I was growing up like a good nerd, my father tried only to put the camera recording the TV screen :)
I worked in broadcast video for over thirty years... (low-band U-matic, Beta and VHS were at the tail end of the post-production process), and I’d never heard about that segmented, smaller drum used in the BetaMovie. Daily, we used one and two inch analog machines, followed by the half-inch and 19mm digital machines, and disk based workstations. Thanks.
Sony had a knack for helping competitors succeed by doing whatever was the opposite approach. Would you consider making a video about how Betacam evolved from Betamax
I love that you made a separate video about this. Reminds me of in film school when I had to use light meters when shooting 16mm and 35mm film. Ah, optical viewfinders.
That little audio gap in the music to help illustrate the over sampling/ tape gap workaround, was absolute genius! Awesome Idea!
Genius indeed...and funny too!
Yeah that was a super cool way to show how it all works!
To adapt to the true video recording behavior of the time, you have to *zoom all the way in* on something and then just forget that it's recording all together. Just walk around with it with it still *zoomed all the way in.* Ultimately, shaky zoomed in video of the ground was the vertical video of yesteryear.
Remember some early cameras had to have the record button pressed and held, and then others were start/stop buttons. 30 or 35 years ago I was struggling trying to figure out which did what! I had a Fischer or JVC VHS/C "camcorder" that blew everything else out of the water in 1985... I even hooked it up to record NFL games off UHF back then because the slow-motion was so good! What a trip down memory lane. Be well.
You forgot the "READ EVERYTHING" technique my father used. Instead of getting a general view of a sign, he used to zoom to the nth degree and go line by line, from left to right, similarly as how any person reads. Made you dizzy as hell, lol
I saw some of my grandpa's old footage. He just kinda looked around with it, rather than composed shots. But I didn't mind, at the end of the day it was nice to have.
when I was like 12 I recorded some footage for a teacher of a children's event (a race of some kind). I had no idea what I was doing and yeah, that's how it turned out, super zoomed and unwatchable... 8( The lady was not very nice about it unfortunately since she lost having a good record of that event, but it's not like I could have done better. (it was a good lesson though that some things are more complicated than they seem.)
You should have zoomed out
I just realized that the Betamovie-recorded footage in this episode is where the bloopers normally go. Almost like Betamovie IS the blooper.
If you think about it we're all the blooper 😳
I love how Beta did all sorts of engineering trickery to achieve its things, whereas the VHS solution to pretty much everything was just "MOAR HEAD". And it worked a charm nonetheless. It's like watching an Adeptus Mechanicus get consistently outwitted by an Ork. I love it.
Man I had a really hard time keeping my internal clock in 2020 while watching the recordings at the end. I kept on thinking we were watching a home movie from the 1980s. I think the largest factor was the noises the machine makes (the constant whirring of the motors and the iconic popping made for some reason).
1980s video but with modern cars ;-) Here’s something trippy: I record high definition television with a VHS VCR. It’s blurry.
Same
Reminds me of the Onion article “Sony releases new piece of s-t product that doesn’t do what it’s f-king supposed to do”
God, that was my favorite onion video all those years back, it's probably the tenth video I ever favorited on UA-cam lol.
"It never ends this s--t"
Motherfu*king time vampire...
Thank you I never saw that one. 😂
"You had 1 job, and yet you fucked it up".
my parents had one of these on a tripod in their bedroom when i was growing up.
And how many therapists did you end up going to?
“Gee, I wonder why...”
Wasn't as easy to figure this stuff out before the Internet
home movies.
I dont think your parents wanted you seeing what was on those tapes
That recording at the end. IT's like a time traveler from the 80's brought his camcorder to record his "trip to 2018!" lols
It really feels like going back in time watching the raw footage at the end. Much more so than any “retro filter” added digitally.
Here’s something trippy: I record high definition television with a VHS VCR. It’s blurry.
You know, the fact that Marty's then-contemporary video camera can actually be hooked up to Doc's TV in 1955 makes "Back to the Future" quite the period piece now.
Why? The videocamera probably had an RF output (standard in 1985) for connecting to TVs
in a relatively short amount of time, new video cameras went from being pretty easy to hook up to old TV's to pretty difficult. I assume that's what OP is talking about
@@electrictroy2010 Old comment ik, but out of curiosity I looked it up. That model camera had composite standard which first arrived on TVs in 1956 (so close), but there was a separate RF modulator available for purchase which would allow it to interface with probably just about every TV made in the 50s. I guess its lucky that Marty purchased that extra accessory.
Depending on what tech you have available, you may be able to hook up a ten year old digital camera to Doc's TV. My mom's relatively new point-and-shoot came with an adapter cable for composite video, I believe. So all you'd need is an RF modulator, and it should be a signal that can be passed into the antenna terminals of the 50s tv.
@@JBaughb You can mod any TV that accepts analog RF to display composite video, it's the same signal, just demodulated. But on the older tube sets you need to have it isolated as they usually were hot chassis (ie. no transformer). So it's totally doable in the 1950s, but he'd have to know the signal level and such., but that can be measured with an oscillscope etc.
The first Sony Handycam in 1985 repeated the same mistakes, except even worse. It was also a record-only device, and instead of a through-the-lens viewfinder, its viewfinder was simply a hole you look through, so it gave you no indication of focusing. And Video8 was a new format at the time, so almost no one had an existing VCR for it yet, unlike Beta's eight-year head-start before the BetaMovie arrived.
In fact, it's quite remarkable that Video8 didn't become yet another failed format, but I guess after losing the biggest format war in history, Sony was stubborn and unwilling to concede defeat again, so they kept on making Video8, Hi8, and Digital8 camcorders (obviously with much improved functionality over the years) all the way until the very end of the analog video era in 2007.
Regarding 9:27 If you think about it, a movie camera that records on film also can't replay the motion picture. As for 10:14, again, movie cameras don't have electronic viewfinders or an equivalent. The Betamovie viewfinder doesn't seem much different from those of cameras that record on film.
Hey at least it have much better build quality than today's Sony 4K Handycam.
There's a reason Japanese rather rent the 4K camera instead of buy one,the price are still too high for what they get.
And they actually did sell the CCD-M8 with video 8 player alongside it.
And if you want the camcorder with playback features then you have to get the CCD-V8 instead both models' accessories (not all) are interchangeable both released in the same year.
V8 is shoulder mounted prosumer model while M8 is for casual uses they have to shrunk M8 down to make it portable "Handycam" even if it meant it lost the playback features.
Some people still use V8 model to play their older video 8 tapes since the camcorder itself proved to be built better than its 8mm tape players themselves.
I have both models but the tape motors just died on me but its original batteries still hold charge.
Analog video! Long may it rust!
The better the equipment used for recording sound electrically onto an analog medium, and the better the playback equipment, the better the quality of the reproduced sound. Is there anyone else here who wishes analog video worked like that?
The analog era ended in 2009
22:43 best eject mechanism *ever*
Edit: Legend says that Sony especially designed them like this so the tape could be damaged, leaving the only choice for the consumer; -switching to VHS- buying more blank tapes.
ya yeeeeeeeeeeeet
Only seriously bad when there is a T reel fault.
"Take your damn video and get the hell outta here"
I mean, it's good on Sony to make their systems help you get a VHS VCR.
Oh man those Magnavox camcorders are a classic. My grandpa had one and it was kinda a big deal. "Ask grandpa if he can help you with that project he has a camera you'll get a really good grade if you go all out like that!" Actually he was a genius with that thing. He made power point presentations on VHS before powerpoint was even a thing. He would aim it on a table and put pictures and then hit record and then pause and basically make full blown slide shows with effects and everything by dimming the light. It's so easy now with everything digital we forget to appreciate what things were like before.
Just want to point out that PowerPoint is just a digital slideshow, and slideshows were around *long* before VHS.
"it's really well made and executed, but also a bad idea"
That pretty much describes every Sony flop ever.
PS Vita would like to have a word with you.
@@ark_knight well made flop describes the Vita perfectly
@@LawrenceJohnYoung But Vita was not a bad idea. that's the point. It was better in every way. Just not supported.
@@ark_knight Yep. That's the thing flops are made of...
Even some of their successes are bad ideas.
See PS2, PS3 (Nightmare for game developers)
And Vaio P (deluxe netbook that is still as crappy as any netbook)
Damn that VHS-C loading into the larger cassette was satisfying
Just to be clear, here--the issues with the Betamovie aren't really related to the fact that it makes Beta tapes. Most of its flaws have nothing to do with the format and everything to do with its design. I'd come to the same conclusions regarding the BMC-110 even if I were comparing it against a theoretical 4-head Beta camcorder with full-playback capabilities and an electronic viewfinder. The problem isn't that it's Beta, it's everything else. Still, for Sony to release this product with Betamax already struggling is a little puzzling, at least to me.
More recording-heads would certainly have solved the problem (are those flashes across the image the result?), but that would've meant cramming more circuitry inside, & of course higher production costs!
Loved this video! I have a BMC-100 (The PAL version, i love the lower model #) right alongside the JVC (GR-C1U) and both were incredible. I personally think the design itself was rushed to get it to market before VHS made its play. For May 1983, this was incredible. My dad had the video camera with luggable recorder combo back in the early eighties. The VCR itself had to have been several pounds! This one-piece design was pretty substantial innovation. This being the first one in history, it certainly had its limitations, but started a consumer revolution that shouldn't be forgotten. This was pretty awesome tech for 1983. Good video!
RCA has done worse with the CRD Videodisc format... First by holding back development, just to play "wait-&-see" with the success of Phillips far-superior Laserdisc format, then bothering to develop a second-generation machine to be competitive with Laserdisc... after it obviously already lost to both it AND videotape. The latter of which basically helped put the company "under".
Maxx Fordham! Must the whole "royalties for licensing of format" thing come-up again? Or the total recording/play-time difference need discussion as well? How about that most consumers couldn't tell the difference in performance for the cost, which was substantial at the time? Or how most movie studios weren't willing to go with the first point I made?
I'm thinking the executives told the engineers "build it at this size and for this price and have it ready by this date" so they did what they were told.
So that's what everyone uses to record UFOs and Bigfoot sightings. I get it now. *:-)*
Nah, they used Super 8 film.
Bigfoot IS blurry
The blurrier, the more believable! In-focus trash-can lids suspended by fishing line would be ruled as fake for some reason.
don't forget ghosts and demons. Hey people we have 10 mega pixel cameras now, why aren't you using them :P
So true, but still our modern cameras are too bad when dark. Then the zoom is digital in most devices as cellphones. Digital zoom = Crappy image.
So 4k camera are not 4k when zooming (if you not have a more expensive device that most people not own).
"Let's get a closeup on those flowers" WHHHHHZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
lol
@Zak Giffgaff c'mon man. That's not nice.
@@thephoenixedits7213 yeah, thats clearly koko
Plant dies as we wait for the zoom to get done...
Classic zooming sounds
Good thing, it has a record time of 3 Hours.
VHS player head: Your turn - My turn - Your turn - My Turn
VHS recorder head: HOT POTATO! HOT POTATO! HOT POTATO! HOT POTATO!
That small clip makes me laugh non-stop XD
The player head & recorder head are the same thing. Perhaps you meant VCR head and Camcorder head
I think the head time compression trick is much more easily explained with paper. There's this nice gap at the top and bottom and the betamovie mechanism is like a printer that needs some blank space between pages. But instead of clipping out a few lines of each page, they just set the printer to work like the paper was bigger, printing the nothing onto thin air.
Excellent analogy. So basically you have an 8x11 paper. The recording printer operated as if the paper was 8x12. The last inch was printed on nothing, but the paper still looked okay when viewed by the customer.
It's amazing how you can shoot footage in 2018 and it looks like it was shot in the 80s just because of the camera you chose!
Quentin Smith
no shit sherlock!
And when you watch restored and regraded 35mm film in HD... It looks like it was filmed yesterday but the world has lost the lust of its tech.
About 10 years ago, I took a picture of an LCD monitor with an early-60s Polaroid J66 camera that still had some Type 47 film in it. Type 47 hasn't been made since 1991. The film was still good, amazingly enough. The picture was kind of crappy, but it was kind of weird seeing an LCD monitor on a Polaroid image that's mostly associated witht eh 50s and 60s...
It was really bizarre seeing a modern FedEx truck in a video that looked like it was from the 80's
Now I wanna see more modern things recorded on really old cameras
It would be kinda funny if someone took a 80's era camera on the #dearmoon mission just to demonstrate what a moon mission would have looked like in the 80's if the space programs hadn't gotten huge budget cuts, hck, according to some of the stuff from the apollo era we would have been on mars by now
Why didn't people just use their phones to film?
Experimental Fun why didn't they use wood gas powered cameras?
Either you're making a bad joke or you're really, really dumb.
The cord wasn't long enough for anything other than home movies.
Because they had less memory than a Commodore 64
38911bytefree mobile phones hadn't even been invented when this camera was made!
Holy duck, the end clip is literally indistinguishable from an old timey home video! Ah it takes me back. I have used MiniDV tapes so it's all pretty noatalgic.
MiniDV? more like, Hi8 and VHS-C! Still it does feel like old home movies alright. It sure brought back a smile.
MiniDV is no different from a memory card or flash drive, other than having slower seek times and a bit higher error rate (but no sudden catastrophical failures like on flash drives).
It's just another completely interchangeable digital storage medium.
Video quality during MiniDV era was limited by extremely crappy processors which couldn't do complex algorithms in real time.
But the tapes themselves were actually comparable to BluRay with regards to capacity and linear read speed.
In principle, nothing is stopping anyone from creating a 4k MiniDV camcorder that will be on par with modern ones with regards to quality, other than impracticality.
I like the old Sony 8mm and Hi8 format. I know they are quirky as hell, the playback deck is overpriced, and the whole format lost to VHS-C from JVC. Seems to me though, if there was just a bit more space in that Betacam he showed, it should be possible to design a small digital circuit to capture the incoming feed from the camcorder's lens and recompile the image back to the 15.7Hz for playback via the viewfinder. That makes for a good experiment! Thanks for a great video and hopefully a fruitful experiment!!
The section in the parking lot was making my head hurt for a moment until I realized the problem: The cars didn't look right. *Because they were to new.*
Here’s something trippy: I record high definition television with a VHS VCR. It’s blurry.
The recording at the end was the highlight for me. It evoked some strange feelings. At first it was like being in a horror movie, but then it was like time traveling to the 80s, but then it was just geeky. Two thumbs up.
I honestly love the "patina" that these videos have to them. Feels like being in the past, watching them.
It would actually be cool to use one in 2020 to film something with a retro vibe to it.
Which of course Hollywood directors do
You can recreate the VHS look simply be feeding a Bluray output through a Composite or RF cable. Those cables add blur & analog interference
@@electrictroy2010 You would get roughly DVD quality by doing this, and VHS/Beta was actually *way worse* than even that.
I’m surprised sony didn’t just overdrive a mini CRT to show live output from the tape head.
It must lose a fair amount of light with the prism setup, too.
I am impressed with the video quality though, it’s pretty darn sharp when you focus.
That's a great point! I never even realized that was an option. My guess is that they were concerned about cost and the benefit wouldn't have been too great anyway. You still wouldn't be able to dub tapes with it.
In my mind it seems like the one-head ordeal was probably more cost-saving than anything. I see no technical reason why they couldn't have gone with the VHS setup.
later Betamovies, like the BMC-550 from 1985 had an electronic viewfinder, autofocus and a CCD image sensor, they also recorded either SuperBetamax (high Band Beta) or standard Beta. The BMC-1000 form 1986 also added HiFi stereo audio recording as well as Super High Band capability.
The fact that they used a 625 line scan rate makes me suspect they used the same imaging tube in the NTSC version as in the PAL version. However, it does mean the imaging tube had to be overscanned even more if you wanted to record PAL, unless the number of lines on a PAL tape is the same as on an NTSC one.
Stoney3K
it isn't, PAL is 625 lines whether it's broadcast, VHS or discovision and its successors
EDIT: reworded
That's why I suspected a PAL tube or PAL circuitry was somehow used, and perhaps the PAL version of the machine uses the system either without overscan, or at a different field rate.
PAL may be 625 lines but I don't know how many actual lines are recorded on a PAL Beta tape. As long as the gap in the tape stays within the vertical blanking interval, the recording should be good.
That gap-speed trick is actually ingenious, even if limited in use (only recording). Amazing the ingenuity of people.
I love your "80s Home Movie" voice!
"Let's go this way...." ha!
veggiet2009 just missing uncle Terry at Jimmy’s birthday party
Yeah, he was dead-on with that. The roaring 645 or whatever Metra has in those things was pretty great, too
At NYU in the 80s we used the predecessor to those for our portable video projects. They had a big recorder device and this ridiculously small and light (and hard to control) camera part that was attached via a cable. The camera was truly amazing as it had possibly the first consumer CCDs, so no burn in possible by us novices. They were also good for our purpose as they could record on Beta 1 speed which meant it was actually compatible with the Sony RM-440 and RM-450 off-line editing controllers and thus we could do insert editing (editing over a pre-recorded "black" signal that had a continuous time code making cuts not glitch and allowed separate audio editing). While it was good for school, it also means I haven't see my actually not terrible artsy videos I made when I was 20! I know no one is probably reading this, but if you do, thanks for letting me go on and on. Have a good rest of your day!
I LOVE how in the Beta shot footage the bloom and the scanning artifacts and soft focus everywhere are so recognizably _real_, where when people put them in digitally with Snap or whatever, they look SO FAKE!
Because they overdo it. The way the "VHS effect" (as it's called) was done, is they took VCRs at differing levels of damage, and used a ton of those to create a digital effect. (I'm very much oversimplifying. It's much more complex than that.) There's many options, and most people who use the effect have no idea what they do. So they just crank up the damage slider. There's also options for fully realistic effects for a well taken care of VCR, (I'm very much oversimplifying, but there's so many settings it'd take me hours just to type) but nobody uses those because it doesn't look poor quality enough.
Great video. We still have people argue with us at the store that there was an adapter for Video8 tapes. We tell them that was only for VHS-C yet they still argue. Never gets old.
DDVF - Same here!
What store is this?
It seems like the days of a chemical in the VHS have not disappeared yet, but I am still talked about in earnest or outside sources
I remember customers asking for it. I still had to advise customers Video 8 and Hi-8 were better formats than VHS-C and S-VHS-C.
"Ohh, lens flair! I probably shouln't be looking at the sun..."
why, its through the view.... oh ya, its a pass through lens, you where essentially looking at the sun with a telescope....
I didn’t even think of that! I thought he was just worried about burning out a sensor.
Tyler Peterson He was, but it's a really expensive one to replace, even though he got the old one for free.
*flare
@@Anvilshock **flail.
Like a sunfish.
And it's a Vidicon tube, so he's lucky he didn't damage the tube by doing that.
Sorry to hear about your softball game, Jimmy.
Little Jimmy switched to soccer, scored a goal for the other team, and swore off sports for the rest of his life.
That part sounded kind of personal lol
Don't worry, I'll try to improve for the next one😉
@@Jimmyjsegram please do, we're getting real tired of your underwhelming prowess.
The entire section explaining the headgap - the graphics, closeups, audio - were all first-rate! Best explanation I’ve ever seen of how that works. Thank you!
Also I laughed out loud at “super unique.”
Fun Fact: The Magnavox camcorder in the video is a re-badged Panasonic. Huge giveaway was the part number on top of the video head assembly PCB, the battery pack and the charger. A correction for you: the multi-pin cable does NOT carry an rf signal for the 75 ohm CATV lugs. It has 2 voltages, video and audio and a control signal. The rf is done on the battery charger itself. Like all your videos, you get most of it right and miss other details. I used to repair all but the Beta cam you had there ( goes for a lot of things you show). In most pro cameras, T would stand for Tally, as there is a tally light on all camcorders to indicate it is recording. Most pro video cameras of the day also used Nuvicon tubes as an imager before the CCD chip devices came along, so this cam was designed on the end of that era ( another nail in the coffin for it).
6:12 _[Banjoey country music which abruptly stops each time the head passes the gap]_
This is one of the funnier closed captions I have seen in a while, lol.
I think it would be fun to walk around in public with a Beta recorder. People would think you were a hipster.
should be a meetup of fans in some city to just walk around with old "portable" gear
Although if u wore 80s clothes.. They'd still call u a hipster
@@deadsi fashion sense already went back to 80s.
All of us are hipsters
TBF you would have to be.
You know... "T" for Record. Heheheh. Thanks for this in depth video!
nice, you can hear the zoom-motors go *WRRRRRRRRR* in that end-section :) great video. thanks again.
T stands for Tally, as in Tally lamp. This indicates it is recording.
It means "tape run", according to 11:04
@surfitlive And that would be me. I currently use JVC Pro-hd cams and have used SONY and Canon in the past. The tally lamp was just so you could see it was in the record mode/recording.
@@hmartim T is for tally, as in the tally lamp that indicates the unit is recording. These are usually on the front of all cams for this purpose and came from studio cameras so the "talent" would know they were on camera broadcasting.
I'm really enjoying these videos.
Hey look! Its Mike, the CEO of the useless duck company!
@hi there I didn't express any opinions, I was just noting his presence.
BUY A RIPSTIK PLEASE
Ok
@@brockknox3287 what does that have to do with anything?
And I'm reporting you
"""You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
- Wayne Gretsky"
- Michael Scott"
- Sony
so this is what shot all those amateur pornos of the 90s
And also the professional ones, just with more lighting and audio equipment.
And really good wide angle lenses !
You mean ‘80s.
5Rounds Rapid nope 90s..their prices had gone down by then and were easy to get hold of
Kay Mutua Yeah, but those were VHS, which looked a lot different.
Your videos are deep and clear and awesome, thank you so much!
learned some new stuff there. very informative. As a teenager of the 80s with an interest in photography - camcorders were amazing to me - far too expensive for anyone I knew to have one, then my uncle got one and I remember getting to play with it for a weekend maybe in 1985 - it was awesome. I did all sorts of stupid stuff - dubbing, doing titles on toilet roll and scrolling them by the screen, doing 'special effects' - making things disappear with stop/start - and even some crappy claymation - and I've still got the tape! kids got it too easy these days with their $600 cellphones, PS4s, etc - back in 85 hardly anyone had that sort of money, and technology inspired real appreciation of it. good times.
BaCK iN My dAy-
1:29 check out the “3D” rig at #4. Can you imagine crappy 3D video. It would be awesome.
That macro shot is plenty Ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ though.
Yeah, I was amazed that I could see the individual center spike things on that flower. A _1980s camcorder_ was able to produce that exceptional video quality. Too bad it sucks in every other way.
*Macintosh Plus plays softly in the background*
I expected Pierre Chang from the Dharma initiative to give a video introduction if you know what I mean.
hot potato hot potato hot potato
boobies
Yep
Waaaaaaaaa I read the comment exactly when he said it. I'm amazed 😂
I just spent several weeks piecing together several Sony and NEC machines to make a fully functional FrankenBeta camcorder.
Then I did a test recording and saw how terrible the footage was. The picture is okay but for some reason I can only record audio under about 6kHz which makes everything sound muffled. Still fun to use for nostalgia's sake
Sure! I'll upload it by saturday
Technology is fun to play with. That sounds like it was a fun project.
i'd check for two things:
a) old, bulged caps in the audio processing region
b) bad mic
anyways, cool!
VHS had two ways to record audio, unless it's labeled HiFi (which uses a head on the drum and sounds like a CD) it'll use a fixed head and record as the tape slowly goes past it. It should sound as good as an audio cassette being they both run about 1.5ips in SP mode but I've never heard good sound from VHS unless it was HiFi.
Also check for:
c) audio head fouled with oxide shed or other foreign substance.
d) audio head azimuth misalignment. That's tough to check for as you can't compare playback quality on the recorder..
Remember though, the betamovie used the beta II speed, equivalent to VHS LP, approximately half the speed of a compact cassette.
Oh my god I remember that tape adapter 😂 this is hard core 90's baby memory lane.
Where memory sticks go to die
Alec Ver Bunker I've still got one of those vhs adapters somewhere, it had it own battery and motorised gears to wind the tape into the mechanism!
Alec Ver Bunker I still use my vhs-c camcoder from 2003 and I love it
Conspirazy They didn’t die there, they served as a decent memory card format for the PSP under the “Memory Stick Pro Duo” variant.
In 1986, my dad bought one of these, from '84 (with autofocus) and it lasted about 15 years. The worst thing they had was the batteries. The autofocus solved many problems of that model that you presented and the image quality was very good. I still have many videos (now in digital) of those recordings where there are so many family memories (you have no idea). I loved it, as much as I love now a handycam with which I record my son's soccer games, in Full HD, obviously. I know this video is 6 years old, but I still congratulate you for the great material you have presented. Regards from Venezuela.
I had found one of those video cameras with a separate video recorder in a Savers Thrift Store with cables and batteries for about $25 back in 1995. It was a JVC model (It was almost exactly like the Magnavox version shown). The camera was great. The lens had an 8x optical zoom and a macro close-up that you could focus in on a US quarter that would fill the screen. The only problem was it was not good in low light. A standard 100 watt light bulb would take care of that. The JVC video tape recorder was high quality that you could edit video tapes and add secondary sound tracks. You could set the camera to do time delay recording like record a frame every 1, 5, 10, 30, 60 seconds. Unlike some VCR's, it wouldn't have that annoying start up problems between shots. Those were the days. Then computer video came in and the system became obsolete. You could record with your phone. When you would go out with your big video camera people thought you were professional.
My husband (Spats Bear) and I have three of these :-) As well as one of the original shoulder-strap VCRs. Particularly fond of the ole Fisher-Price PXL-2000s, we have a couple of them (complete with the matching monitors.) Oh, and I must say we LOVE your channel. [edit] Oh and we also have a couple of the JVCs.
Harley Badger yall must have a library of ya'll sextapes then
Nope, we don't do that kinda thing.
then what where all the gadgets for back in the day?
crap! I was gonna try to find them on LifeOut LOL....just kidding ;)
Kay Mutua Could you be any more of a creeper?
14:03 Not sure if comedy, repressed memories or both. :D
Another great video.
We were all little Jimmy at some point...
Love the vid! So much talk of head drums on this one, though. I feel like we might have reached...
...MAX head drum. (I'm sorry)
Kudos to the 1% of people who got that reference. Then again, there seem to be a lot of old people watching this, so the percentage is probably higher... Matt Frewer would be proud.
I like to think I'm not all that old, just born 20 minutes into the future.
Or maybe I'm a digital representation of myself, and a bad pun was the last thing I saw before dying.
"a lot of old people watching this"
Thanks... :/ I'm just a few months shy of 45.
I'll go back to my retirement home now. GET OFF MY LAWN!
Turning 40 tomorrow, we're all getting old :)
Happy Birthday! It's all downhill from here though. :)
I'd love to see a video dedicated to VHS camcorders and VHS-C. I had a version of that JVC camcorder, albeit without the LCD screen on the side, so it's a very interesting topic to me.
It gives you an appreciation of how far we've come technologically. My $600 phone just happens to have a camera that can record 4K video at 60FPS, while also being a powerful pocket computer. We truly are living in the future.
Except we’re still having to deal with bricks of phones, and shitty under-screen cameras (at least on the Galaxy ZFold 3). I hope one day we’ll be watching video on holographic screens made of light (look up the first clip of the Axiom from _WALL-E_ if you don’t know what I’m talking about)
@@williamreid6255
> Shitty under screen cameras
Wait, you're telling me, you have a high resolution screen, and no buttons, because the screen can feel your touch, AND ALSO a tiny camera that can produce better quality than VHS, that also is UNDER THE SCREEN?
and you're telling me this is an issue?
@@Xnoob545 That isn’t what I was saying, I was just making a comparison between the other person’s comment and mine. I just have trouble explaining things sometimes.
In my view digital phone 4K conviniency do not come for free. 4K needs so much digital data that fast moving objects cannot be followed by eye with comfort . My personal choice with camcorders still is HI8 because in phone with hand operation and zoomed objects 4Kmay be only seldom admired while with Hi8 it is comfortably fluent, Sure in many cases like low light supremacy of digital is obvious. 4K is a must for digital zooming which is is not important while having Hi8 optical zooming.
I filmed my trips 30 years ago with standard 8 camcorder technology and now played with better cam it is even better than at time with stereo sound How would I find my movies in phone or cards after 30 years when technology runs forward, cards format changed few times and HD capacity and plugs excluded old ones from use? It requires remebering to make new copies but who cares?
I jus lve he fact everything you filmed with it looks like it's from the '80s :D
ihadatroke
@@zsin128 ihadastroke
Lol
Good comment Larry thanks
Remember when a neighbor in my small village where I grown up, bought this. He was known as the man who could make "Television" by us village-children.
And...riiiiiiiiiight
Did he ask you if you like to watch gladiator movies?
The head mechanism is no reason to relinquish an electronic view finder. It is true that it cannot produce a compatible TV signal, so you cannot output it from the camera, but there is no reason an integrated display wouldn't be able to show the image after some electronic taking care of the overscanning.
The camera was already pretty expensive, even for that time, if they added an electronic viewfinder along with the additional circuitry needed for playback it would be even more expensive, and it still couldn't show the picture on TV or dubb it to another tape, you only could watch it on the tiny viewfinder, so it definitely doesn't worth it, but if I'm not wrong, later models indeed did have an electronic black and white viewfinder, but just for showing you exactly what you're recording or display information, it could't play back tapes anyway.
@@giragama My comment was purely about the statement about the head mechanism being a reason for relinquishing an electronic view finder. The statement made it look like the mere presence of the special head mechanism made it technically impossible to implement a view finder, which is just wrong. I havn't even questioned that there may have been other reasons which prevented a view finder, like the cost-benefit ratio you mentioned. In fact, I believe that it _usually_ comes down to the cost-benefit ratio which decides whether a feature is implemented or not. I just wanted to point out the wrong conclusion in the video.
My grandfather had bought a "portable" Blaupunkt camera and VCR; and you also often needed an extremely hefty, not-particularly-long-running battery pack as well, plus the lighting fixture and its own battery pack. Those things were *enormous* back then (much larger than the tiny ones from the ads on the video, probably earlier models).
It would be really fun to record a whole short film project with this, to get that really authentic retro feel. Even the modern day fedex truck felt sufficiently retro through the beta max
I would love to get one of those cameras. Yes it may be a failed format but that doesn’t bother me. I have quite a few failed technology formats/products. At the time of release no one knows if something will sell or flop. I am not ashamed to own failed tech. Because at the time we did not know it would fail. And collecting failed tech products is also interesting as you can see or have a piece of what could have been.
It is a bit unfair to pick on the BMC-110 for not have autofucus, very few video cameras at that time had autofocus. The BMC-220 from 1984 had autofocus, also the zoom speed was the same as stand alone cameras from RCA (Hitachi) and Panasonic which also had manual white balance. The Magnavox (Panasonic) VHS camcorder you show is from about 1990 7 years after the BMC-110.
Later Betamovies like the BMC-550 from 1985 had an electronic viewfinder 1.25" and recorded in either SuperBeta(High Band) or standard Betamax, it also used a CCD image sensor). In 1986 Sony added BI-SHB (Super High Band) and HiFi stereo audio to the Betamovie in the BMC-1000, the SHB could be turned off for comparability with standard Betamax.
In 1984 Sony took the idea of the Betamovie and turned it into a Betacam format camcorder, using the BMC-220 as a base, with XLR connectors for microphone and audio added to a bump out at the back, the camera recorded standard Betacam component video and 2 linear audio tracks. The camera was popular with NHK regional newsrooms over in Japan, but it is practically unknown in the US.
dang! I love big clunky camcorders! they look.. professional! :D
"weight is a sign of reliability" ...
Unless you sell your wares from the back of a van (concrete-filled speakers), or are Beats (nonfunctional metal plating installed to simulate quality)...
one of the advantages of having a weightier, bulkier, shoulder mounted camera, is it's inertia. It's far easier to hold it steady without using a tripod or steadycam type device.
I've watched this video several times and the "time compression" thing still makes no logical sense to me. I'm convinced Sony are secretly dark wizards.
Watching the end... made me feel like I was in the 1980s again...... thank you for that!! I had some family members that had a compact VHS camcorder..... and that grainy, kind washed out look brings back some memories!
Love the side thought shots like "I'm not a idiot,I know its more convent than film" but yet still having a professional presentation. Great in depth but followable video.
Gz.utddxح
مت
Another great production.
Fascinating bit of technology, as always. It's amazing what engineers had to figure out a couple/few decades ago, especially mechanically, on portable and semi-portable devices.
And another reminder of how brilliant Sony was back then with their new technologies and adaption thereof.
11:02 I have and use a BMC500P, the “T” doesn’t stand for Recording, there was no way to know if the recorder was recording unless you could hear it run, or see the spools turn.
T Stands for “Tape Run” so if you were Running out of Tape, or if it was flashing, you were running out of Battery.
This is for the BMC500P, but I hardly believe the BMC110 was different...
Hey Alec, you're making me really miss what Shorewood/Joliet felt like in the 90s. It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone call a VCR a VCR, and not a "VHS player" because literally NOBODY I grew up with back then called it that. For all I know we may have crossed paths. If I didn't salute you then I definitely salute you now.
Ah, the sound of the power zoom. Brings back memories!
"Am I in Macro Mode?... I don't really get it."
20:30 - with the slowwww zoom controls you got a subtle dolly zoom effect!
"Little Jimmy: Screwing up softball games since 1984"
I’ve always been fascinated by electronics and mechanics, but what I really love is the ingenuity that goes into creating these and most devices, the brains behind the design and function and the fact the have to be designed to be mass produced and to be somewhat reliable. The elegance of how even the tape is wrapped around the head is incredible!! I’ve been debating with myself to do a basic electronics course to try and really understand how these machines work and how to fix them!! I used to pull everything apart in our house to learn how they work and how to fix them (most of the time) . Anyway, love the channel even though I get lost early on!! All the best, John 🇮🇪
16:25. My grandpa had this camera. It cost like $1,100 in 1987 and started having issues a year after he bought it (it would shut off randomly and spit the tape out).
One thing you can say about Sony. They employed some impressive engineers. To bad they did not do a good job of taking advantage of that in cases like this.
20:00 "sound of locomotive"
Me: "Haha yeah that thing is loud."
*sees locomotive in background*
Me: "Oh that wasn't a joke."
Creating a second recording to send to family!? I find it a pain to share videos with iCloud. I’m glad I never had to deal with that.
Learning about the past definitely helps me appreciate the modern age.
6:18 that's an awesome way to demonstrate the effect, very, very good!
I had one of these as a kid, me and my brother shot a film with it, a cowboy shootout, ketchup blood and all, it was absolutely terrible. Good times, good times.
Ah, I remember those video cameras where you had to carry the VCR on your shoulder. It worked, but wow, it makes you appreciate the ability to record 4K with just your phone.
That part about softball sounded a little too involved to be a joke! Nice video and sorry abou the childhood sports trauma!
@12:35
I am assuming that the Betamovie tape could be re-used, whereas 8mm film is a record-once medium.
I bought a Sharp Viewcam (Video 8) in the mid 90s, and I feel that retrocompatibiliy with VHS was the ONLY thing VHS-C had going for it. Video-8 had smaller cassettes, with longer record/play time both on standard and long play, and frankly, if you're making a copy to send to rellies somewhere, you're likely to be copying it onto a VHS tape from the camcorder, not sending them the camera tape, no matter which format you went with. But Panasonic dealers showed customers the VHS adaptor for VHS-C cassettes and most of them said "Oh, what a good idea!" without considering the other features.
I totally agree, I had a Sony Hi8 video camera and it was amazing that you could record 2 hours (or even 4 in LP mode sacrificing a little picture quality) in that small cassette tape, and I never had any issues with playing them back because I used to dubb every one of my tapes onto VHS tapes and play them back on my VCR while original tapes were securely stored in case that the copied tape was damaged or lost.
And another feature in what Video 8 was far superior to VHS-C is the audio. In Video 8 the audio is recorded in FM helical scan along with the video with the same two heads, there is no linear audio track, so you'll always get Hi-Fi audio no matter the record speed you use. But in VHS the Hi-Fi audio is recorded with two separate heads in the drum, and in a shrunken head drum like all VHS-C cameras have, they'd need 4 audio heads along with the 4 video heads already there, putting 8 heads with their respective rotary transformer inside of an already small drum wasn't easy, so this feature was exclusively reserved for high end or professional models, leaving consumer models with just the linear Lo-Fi audio track, and due to the short recording capacity of the tape, many people used to record in SLP to extend the recording time up to 1 and a half hours, but significantly reducing not only the picture quality but the audio fidelity as well.
1:20 separate 'portable' VCR, yup I remember that all too painfully.
The trick wasn't to carry it on your shoulder, it was to get someone else to help lug it around, or put the VCR on the ground if you weren't moving.
The setup I used, the VCR was a normal full size VCR, with the additional weight and size of a battery pack and DC supply. For added fun, it rained so everything had to be carefully covered with plastic to keep the rain out.
You can almost hear the 80's synth on that Beta Footage, woah! Good show sir!
14:07 was epic. Well played, sir!
That tape popout and "T, for record" had me dying lmao.
My uncle still has his with the original boxes . I remember when he came to our house with it and we were blown away it was so cool seeing yourself on tv
One of your best videos yet: Concise, clear, killer graphics, excellent product close-ups. Learned something today. Thank you, and I'm glad I'm a supporter!
The outro!
Congratulations for the end footage, it is awesome in so many levels!
[Struggling with camera]
[Struggling intensifies]
Thanks subtitles @ 22:45
So many memories about my father filming holidays with his big VHS Panasonic camcorder that I still have in its big bag with accessories. I remember also figuring out how to connect it to our VCR to duplicate cassettes via its power adapter with many connections. I was very young (8/10 yo) but I was growing up like a good nerd, my father tried only to put the camera recording the TV screen :)
I worked in broadcast video for over thirty years... (low-band U-matic, Beta and VHS were at the tail end of the post-production process), and I’d never heard about that segmented, smaller drum used in the BetaMovie. Daily, we used one and two inch analog machines, followed by the half-inch and 19mm digital machines, and disk based workstations. Thanks.
Kid: "Look mom! a vlogger! wow his camera is so big!"
Sony had a knack for helping competitors succeed by doing whatever was the opposite approach. Would you consider making a video about how Betacam evolved from Betamax
The T stands for "Time to record". Ingenious, really.
No no no its "Tape go now"
I guess it stands for Tape
I love that you made a separate video about this. Reminds me of in film school when I had to use light meters when shooting 16mm and 35mm film. Ah, optical viewfinders.