The longest lived video cassette format of all time of course, I've had customers bring in Umatic tapes recorded this side of year 2000 and I wouldn't be at all surprised if people somewhere are still recording on it. Built like battleships and really nicely designed for ease of servicing.
When I worked TV operations in the 80's, we aired primarily Umatic, Quad and (yes) 16MM film. Our commercial spots were aired from eight Umatic decks controlled by a Digitrol sequencer. Mono audio was on channel 2, and cue tones were inserted on channel 1. The tones would tell the Digitrol where to set the pre-roll and trigger the next machine for playback. There was an 8-second manual pre-roll on the first sequence event - time for the tape to thread and the servo to lock up. The following events would cue and roll automatically. Pretty good system, except when the video head drums would clog and there was nothing but snow. We would have to clean the heads every 4 hours or so. Went through a lot of freon and Texwipes! The Umatics were replaced with a Sony Betacart 1/2-inch system in 1990, and that was heaven at the time! 1-second pre-roll time and no more laying down cue tones (the new system used barcodes for in/out times). Still had the occasional head-clog though - just par for the course when working with tape.
Absolutely enthralling! It's 'très elegante'; soothing, dignified, but most of all, technological! The mixture of the hairstyles, the overly-ornate set, the pants-suits, the smooth Australian accent, and special-effects solely based on chroma key are just fascinating! (Oh, and don't forget the languid bossa nova music wafting through the background!) They sure don't make promo videos like this anymore! LOL!
Imagine having that in 1971, it would almost be worth the second mortgage on your house and the burnt out receptors in your eyes making you unable to see red anymore
But it was a cassette--no more pesky fiddly threading up of open-reel tapes on VTRs! :) Indeed though, the color red was not a strong suit for U-matics' noisy heterodyned (aka "color-under") composite chroma recording. Red has always been a problematic color for composite-encoded video (NTSC especially).
That's why the actresses who appeared in the video promos were told NOT to wear red so they wouldn't draw attention to the defect the machine had reproducing red.
This is what studios would send finished masters to pressing plants to make CD's from in the early days, before they developed more compact digital mediums. All of the digital audio information would be recordered onto the tape ALL 1s and 0s - back in 1982!!
Yes, the Sony PCM-1600/1610/1630 PCM audio recording systems (aka PCM adaptors) in particular were used to make these "digital audio videotapes" for CD mastering. They all used U-matic-format VCRs specially modified and optimized to record digital audio embedded in an analog video signal, with an outboard processor feeding the VCR to do the A/D and D/A conversion to and from tape. The Wikipedia article for "PCM Adaptor" has quite a bit more detail about this.
Interesting. Very low color noise, vertical edges are nice and stable, colors don't bleed, luminance noise is low, nice clean noise free picture, it preserves the source material rather than destroys it (like SuperBeta and S-VHS do!). Shame about the dropout but with a decent modern tape which isn't 40 years old it should be almost completely dropout free, unlike Beta / VHS. Impressive. I'd rather have less noise than more resolution, e.g. when it comes to the domestic formats, it's a pity that VHS tape speed hadn't of been higher and the cassettes slightly larger, for much better quality...Oh well, that's what we all get for being cheap and wanting smaller more convenient things. Digital changed it all though.
+LiveSteamMad There has been a VHS-based tape format that would run on higher speed with quality almost equal to Umatic/BVU... At least considered professional. Can't remember the name of it atm.
+FBAV The only ones I know of are W-VHS (105 minutes of High Vision HD analog) or D-VHS (240 minutes of HD 720p or 1080i), or Digital-S (D9, 64 minutes of 4:2:2 SD), but they all needed more expensive / metal particle tapes...
@@LiveSteamMad There was also Panasonic's (in collaboration with RCA Broadcast Systems) short-lived professional "M" format introduced in 1982 that used VHS tapes, but at a higher linear speed and with component video recording for much higher pro-grade video quality. It pretty much was a stillborn format, for 2 years after Panasonic introduced M in 1982, RCA Broadcast (who was involved in distributing Panasonic's equipment for the format in the US) went out of business, and the format went nowhere. I've read that it was a pretty decent format quality-wise, with one major TV production, "Benji, Zax, and the Alien Prince" being shot on-location with Panasonic-made RCA "Hawkeye" M-format cameras (possibly the only TV show that was shot using the format), according to a magazine ad RCA published in a broadcast trade magazine from 1983 that I read a while back. M was basically Panasonic/Matsushita's repsonse to Sony's professional Betacam format also introduced in '82, which also used Betamax tapes, but also recorded at a higher linear tape speed using component video encoding.
I remember as a kid that SP (faster speed, less play time) prodiced much better videp and sound than the slowest speed Made me not want to watch stuff recorded on the slowest speed (SLP) and we had akot of tapes with 2 movies and a TV show or MTV to fill the ends. This though, makes me want one (Umatic). Lol
I remember seeing one of those in 1972 when I was in junior high school. Those Sony U-Matics had some design issues. I remembered there was something strange about the way they played and copied this from Wikipedia: " Unlike most other cassette-based tape formats, the supply and take-up reels in the cassette turn in opposite directions during playback, fast-forward, and rewind: one reel would run clockwise while the other would run counter-clockwise. A locking mechanism integral to each cassette case secures the tape hubs during transportation to keep the tape wound tightly on the hubs" Wikipedia-. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-matic It also had problems with pause. Leaving the tape on pause too long destroyed that section of the tape.
I don't remember what happened with these, but I do remember grade schools in the early 80's that still got a lot of use out of these for taped programs they would pick up from PBS when they were still airing a lot of school programs during the morning hours.
That is true of any tape-based system, from analog to digital. This is why most home video recorders sold would drop out of pause mode after ten minutes or so, but many rental video tapes would have dropouts at frequently paused moments. 😃
IK HEB DE SONY UMATIC VAN 1970S DE GROTE MODEL heb hem vorig jaar in belgie bij zo een milieupark gevonden hem ook nog betamax en video 2000 alle 3 bij de milieupark! zonde wat er weg gedaan word:( darom ben ik de gene die die plaatsen afga om geschiedeniss te redden
@@buddyclem7328 This is uploaded in 25p, while the original was 25i. Add to this, is that UA-cam does not play resolutions lower than 720 at high frame rate. Hence, you need to have at least 720 to play it at 50p. This video must be deinterlaced to 50p and upconverted to 720 lines for UA-cam to show it at 50 images per second. Regarding 4:3, unlike broadcast HD, UA-cam allows HD to have any aspect ratio, for example 960x720 with PAR 1:1 will result in 4:3 HD.
Here you already see a little how Sony tried to get customers in a different way then Philips. In this (very boring, bad produced) promotional video you see how Sony uses women to attract to their product, instead of Philips showing the practical side of their first VCR system using a kind of humour. In the end there was Philips V2000 and Sony VHS. Though V2000 had better quality, Sony spread porn and sex with VHS, something that "shy" Philips didn't want. Sony won the battle because of porn, that's why VHS became the standard for decades.
+FBAV Sony didn't make VHS they made Betamax. VHS was created by JVC a competitor to Sony. Betamax was also higher quality than VHS but it suffered from higher cost for machines and tapes and shorter recording times eventually dooming it in the market. V2000 was a decent standard but never was capable of HiFi Stereo unlike Betamax and VHS. V2000 was also never sold outside of Europe and parts of South America making it a distant third globally. Since more VHS users existed globally companies made more content for it (porn or either wise) than either v2000 or Betamax and by the end of the eighties both Betamax and Video2000 were no longer being produced for consumers.
For one, this demo was made to appeal to engineers, who were critiquing the dynamic range, color quality, noise, and faithful reproduction of the format in comparison to 1" C and 2" color quad reel-to-reels. Second, Sony lost the Betamax/VHS war and eventually caved in and started producing VHS machines, but yes, it was due to the porn industry.
The whole porn & VHS story is a myth: Sony was far too precious and greedy with their licences so manufacturers baulked at building Betamax machines. While JVC sold their licences cheaply to virtually anyone, in order to get their machines into as many places as poss. The rest is history as they say.
@@agfagaevart That's right--the stories about VHS succeeding because of pornography are mostly apocryphal. As you said, Sony was very stingy and miserly on licensing Betamax to other manufacturers (I believe they only licensed the the format to a whopping total of 3 companies: Sanyo, Toshiba, and Zenith (who OEM'ed Sanyo's Betamax decks, IIRC)). JVC would license their VHS format to almost anyone who'd ask (practically the rest of the consumer electronics industry), hence their success. Panasonic/Matsushita was one of JVC's first licensees of VHS, and made decks under their own brands and made OEM decks for RCA shortly after VHS was introduced in 1976 I've also read that VHS was originally developed by Sony, but thought it was an inferior design after completing its design, compared to Betamax (which in itself was a downsized (1/3rd smaller) version of their earlier U-matic 3/4" cassette format which I believe was concurrently developed by another Sony team at the same time), so they sold the designs and intellectual property for it to JVC after they decided to go with the "2/3rds U-matic" design. Can anyone confirm this?
Amazing quality for that time. It must have blown people’s minds back then to see this.
The longest lived video cassette format of all time of course, I've had customers bring in Umatic tapes recorded this side of year 2000 and I wouldn't be at all surprised if people somewhere are still recording on it. Built like battleships and really nicely designed for ease of servicing.
Wow. This looks fantastic considering it's videotape from 1971. Wish I knew the name of this music. It's great!
it was made for the film;then all the musicians were murdered
When I worked TV operations in the 80's, we aired primarily Umatic, Quad and (yes) 16MM film. Our commercial spots were aired from eight Umatic decks controlled by a Digitrol sequencer. Mono audio was on channel 2, and cue tones were inserted on channel 1. The tones would tell the Digitrol where to set the pre-roll and trigger the next machine for playback. There was an 8-second manual pre-roll on the first sequence event - time for the tape to thread and the servo to lock up. The following events would cue and roll automatically. Pretty good system, except when the video head drums would clog and there was nothing but snow. We would have to clean the heads every 4 hours or so. Went through a lot of freon and Texwipes! The Umatics were replaced with a Sony Betacart 1/2-inch system in 1990, and that was heaven at the time! 1-second pre-roll time and no more laying down cue tones (the new system used barcodes for in/out times). Still had the occasional head-clog though - just par for the course when working with tape.
+Dan Drolett Sony U-matic SP or also called BVU also had a short preroll time AND barcodes, digital framelock and other info to be put on the tape.
Absolutely enthralling! It's 'très elegante'; soothing, dignified, but most of all, technological! The mixture of the hairstyles, the overly-ornate set, the pants-suits, the smooth Australian accent, and special-effects solely based on chroma key are just fascinating! (Oh, and don't forget the languid bossa nova music wafting through the background!) They sure don't make promo videos like this anymore! LOL!
*British
First girl was an Australian living in Britain. Guaranteed.
Gold and good times...
Great.. I recognise all these ladies from that 60s into 70s period... think they were in many dramas/series on UK TV.
Lindas garotas! Excelente os efeitos do chroma-key ♥
YEAAAAAAAAAAH
Isso no Br da época devia ser o preço de um Dodge Dart...
Imagine having that in 1971, it would almost be worth the second mortgage on your house and the burnt out receptors in your eyes making you unable to see red anymore
But it was a cassette--no more pesky fiddly threading up of open-reel tapes on VTRs! :)
Indeed though, the color red was not a strong suit for U-matics' noisy heterodyned (aka "color-under") composite chroma recording. Red has always been a problematic color for composite-encoded video (NTSC especially).
Love the key card graphics!
Hermoso sistema, un aparato digno de admirar
So...the long pauses and music make me think this was played in TV stores?
The U-matic had a hard time reproducing red color, because the Chroma carrier was encoded on AM and was very noisy.
That's why the actresses who appeared in the video promos were told NOT to wear red so they wouldn't draw attention to the defect the machine had reproducing red.
ldchappell1 Yep :)
The red lipstick, flowers and the background on the effects part of the video looked fine to me.
It sure gets super-trippy at 4:14...
This is what studios would send finished masters to pressing plants to make CD's from in the early days, before they developed more compact digital mediums. All of the digital audio information would be recordered onto the tape ALL 1s and 0s - back in 1982!!
Yes, the Sony PCM-1600/1610/1630 PCM audio recording systems (aka PCM adaptors) in particular were used to make these "digital audio videotapes" for CD mastering. They all used U-matic-format VCRs specially modified and optimized to record digital audio embedded in an analog video signal, with an outboard processor feeding the VCR to do the A/D and D/A conversion to and from tape. The Wikipedia article for "PCM Adaptor" has quite a bit more detail about this.
Digital recording and CDs in 1982?! Err...we used 1/4" analog tape as master in the 1980s until we got DAT around 1990
2:55. Could their system produce frame-accurate edits that seamlessly or was a 2" master edited with razor blade and microscope to get that effect?
I wonder how many of the male station employees who had access to this tape watched 3:03 - 3:10 over and over…
It will have been the most worn part of the tape.
Is that the original tape sound track? It sounds fantastic.
Full stereo and higher speed than VHS
4:43 trippin ballzzzzzzzz
reminds me of a Tim and Eric skit.
Interesting. Very low color noise, vertical edges are nice and stable, colors don't bleed, luminance noise is low, nice clean noise free picture, it preserves the source material rather than destroys it (like SuperBeta and S-VHS do!). Shame about the dropout but with a decent modern tape which isn't 40 years old it should be almost completely dropout free, unlike Beta / VHS. Impressive. I'd rather have less noise than more resolution, e.g. when it comes to the domestic formats, it's a pity that VHS tape speed hadn't of been higher and the cassettes slightly larger, for much better quality...Oh well, that's what we all get for being cheap and wanting smaller more convenient things. Digital changed it all though.
+LiveSteamMad There has been a VHS-based tape format that would run on higher speed with quality almost equal to Umatic/BVU... At least considered professional. Can't remember the name of it atm.
+FBAV The only ones I know of are W-VHS (105 minutes of High Vision HD analog) or D-VHS (240 minutes of HD 720p or 1080i), or Digital-S (D9, 64 minutes of 4:2:2 SD), but they all needed more expensive / metal particle tapes...
@@LiveSteamMad There was also Panasonic's (in collaboration with RCA Broadcast Systems) short-lived professional "M" format introduced in 1982 that used VHS tapes, but at a higher linear speed and with component video recording for much higher pro-grade video quality. It pretty much was a stillborn format, for 2 years after Panasonic introduced M in 1982, RCA Broadcast (who was involved in distributing Panasonic's equipment for the format in the US) went out of business, and the format went nowhere.
I've read that it was a pretty decent format quality-wise, with one major TV production, "Benji, Zax, and the Alien Prince" being shot on-location with Panasonic-made RCA "Hawkeye" M-format cameras (possibly the only TV show that was shot using the format), according to a magazine ad RCA published in a broadcast trade magazine from 1983 that I read a while back.
M was basically Panasonic/Matsushita's repsonse to Sony's professional Betacam format also introduced in '82, which also used Betamax tapes, but also recorded at a higher linear tape speed using component video encoding.
I remember as a kid that SP (faster speed, less play time) prodiced much better videp and sound than the slowest speed Made me not want to watch stuff recorded on the slowest speed (SLP) and we had akot of tapes with 2 movies and a TV show or MTV to fill the ends. This though, makes me want one (Umatic). Lol
Some of the later U-matic low band recorders were much worse then this. I like that "yes I'm wearing platform cloggs and bell bottoms too" moment.
One of these ladies looks like one of the astronauts on "UFO"! - sounds like her too.
I remember seeing one of those in 1972 when I was in junior high school. Those Sony U-Matics had some design issues. I remembered there was something strange about the way they played and copied this from Wikipedia:
" Unlike most other cassette-based tape formats, the supply and take-up reels in the cassette turn in opposite directions during playback, fast-forward, and rewind: one reel would run clockwise while the other would run counter-clockwise. A locking mechanism integral to each cassette case secures the tape hubs during transportation to keep the tape wound tightly on the hubs"
Wikipedia-.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-matic
It also had problems with pause. Leaving the tape on pause too long destroyed that section of the tape.
I don't remember what happened with these, but I do remember grade schools in the early 80's that still got a lot of use out of these for taped programs they would pick up from PBS when they were still airing a lot of school programs during the morning hours.
That is true of any tape-based system, from analog to digital. This is why most home video recorders sold would drop out of pause mode after ten minutes or so, but many rental video tapes would have dropouts at frequently paused moments. 😃
4:13 groovaaaaaaaayyyyyy
Can you deinterlace and upscale to 720p50 and re-upload?
IK HEB DE SONY UMATIC VAN 1970S DE GROTE MODEL heb hem vorig jaar in belgie bij zo een milieupark gevonden hem ook nog betamax en video 2000 alle 3 bij de milieupark! zonde wat er weg gedaan word:( darom ben ik de gene die die plaatsen afga om geschiedeniss te redden
Is there a way we could get this in a higher resolution like 720 or 1080? thanks
This was a standard definition format, so the best you can get is standard definition. (4:3 SD 480i analog) I really hope you were joking!
@@buddyclem7328 This is uploaded in 25p, while the original was 25i. Add to this, is that UA-cam does not play resolutions lower than 720 at high frame rate. Hence, you need to have at least 720 to play it at 50p. This video must be deinterlaced to 50p and upconverted to 720 lines for UA-cam to show it at 50 images per second. Regarding 4:3, unlike broadcast HD, UA-cam allows HD to have any aspect ratio, for example 960x720 with PAR 1:1 will result in 4:3 HD.
That must be Paradise Island where Wonder Woman came from - inhabited by women only
Video look like AHD camera video.
cuando sony hacia las cosas bien
Looks like 80s than 70s...
VHS - My Life ..
In the UK, it's "colour" with a "u". In the USA, it's "color". We invented the Boontling dialect to screw with people!
Hell - eeeeeuuuuuwwwwwww
Here you already see a little how Sony tried to get customers in a different way then Philips. In this (very boring, bad produced) promotional video you see how Sony uses women to attract to their product, instead of Philips showing the practical side of their first VCR system using a kind of humour. In the end there was Philips V2000 and Sony VHS. Though V2000 had better quality, Sony spread porn and sex with VHS, something that "shy" Philips didn't want. Sony won the battle because of porn, that's why VHS became the standard for decades.
+FBAV Sony didn't make VHS they made Betamax. VHS was created by JVC a competitor to Sony. Betamax was also higher quality than VHS but it suffered from higher cost for machines and tapes and shorter recording times eventually dooming it in the market. V2000 was a decent standard but never was capable of HiFi Stereo unlike Betamax and VHS. V2000 was also never sold outside of Europe and parts of South America making it a distant third globally. Since more VHS users existed globally companies made more content for it (porn or either wise) than either v2000 or Betamax and by the end of the eighties both Betamax and Video2000 were no longer being produced for consumers.
I was surprised when I learned that Sony were still manufacturing Beta machines into 2002.
For one, this demo was made to appeal to engineers, who were critiquing the dynamic range, color quality, noise, and faithful reproduction of the format in comparison to 1" C and 2" color quad reel-to-reels.
Second, Sony lost the Betamax/VHS war and eventually caved in and started producing VHS machines, but yes, it was due to the porn industry.
The whole porn & VHS story is a myth: Sony was far too precious and greedy with their licences so manufacturers baulked at building Betamax machines. While JVC sold their licences cheaply to virtually anyone, in order to get their machines into as many places as poss. The rest is history as they say.
@@agfagaevart That's right--the stories about VHS succeeding because of pornography are mostly apocryphal. As you said, Sony was very stingy and miserly on licensing Betamax to other manufacturers (I believe they only licensed the the format to a whopping total of 3 companies: Sanyo, Toshiba, and Zenith (who OEM'ed Sanyo's Betamax decks, IIRC)). JVC would license their VHS format to almost anyone who'd ask (practically the rest of the consumer electronics industry), hence their success. Panasonic/Matsushita was one of JVC's first licensees of VHS, and made decks under their own brands and made OEM decks for RCA shortly after VHS was introduced in 1976
I've also read that VHS was originally developed by Sony, but thought it was an inferior design after completing its design, compared to Betamax (which in itself was a downsized (1/3rd smaller) version of their earlier U-matic 3/4" cassette format which I believe was concurrently developed by another Sony team at the same time), so they sold the designs and intellectual property for it to JVC after they decided to go with the "2/3rds U-matic" design. Can anyone confirm this?
Somebody's great granny was sure looking hot.