[url=http://www.labguysworld.com/IVC-9000.htm]

This is the type of VTR I edited on when I first got into Post Production. It is an IVC 9000. Used vacuum capstan so it made a very loud thump when stopping or starting.

[I]"i remember when we had to carve pictures on the cave wall and walk past them very quickly ;P)"[/I]

Then we 'ad to go lick road clean and off to work for 30 hour shift in coal mine - ah them were the days.

boy geebax, you 'ad a cushy life then didn't ya....

opps, trouble up the mill.....

Wwaag, referring to us as a bunch of old farss, I don't think farss would appreciate that. Also, my second job was working at Burroughs Corporation where I had to clean those vertical vacuum columns in the tape drives. Their purpose of course was to control the big motors on the tape reels. It was a challenge keeping up with the high speed forwards/backwards capstans.

if i had half the knowledge of 'old farss' i'd be a very happy vegemite ;-)

[url=http://www.labguysworld.com/Cat_Sony002.htm]

[url=http://www.smecc.org/sony_videoflight.htm]

This looks like the VTR they are using in the TV show. But it is a helical scan.

I don't go back quite so far in regards to using some of those older machines mentioned. But I did edit in the analog tape days, starting in the early 90's. Shot on Hi8, and edited on SVHS. The generational loss was the biggest negative. You just wished that those nasty VHS copies you handed to the client at least looked as good as the Hi8 source tape. But it never did.

That's why I love the advances in what we have now. Shooting HD on tiny memory cards, shooting in low light with a nice image, delivering BD's that look as good as the acquisition source. These are good times indeed.

@ riredale "Also, my second job was working at Burroughs Corporation ...

Geeze you did well getting a job there - they offered me one, but wanted me to cut my hair and wear a suit .... so I accepted a job at Panasonic instead, where they didn't give a rats about such details .... Burroughs went bust soon after ....

Looks like a Sony (appropriate for this forum!) PV120 - helical 2" around 1964. And no, you couldn't cut it the way Greg Morris was doing in that clip! Oh yes, I started with Ampex VR-1000s and used to edit on a VR-1200. It was the hitting of the record button 0.6 seconds before the edit point that was the trick.

ChristoC:

I was a kid in high school, did day shift the first month of summer, then swing shift the second month, then graveyard the third.

Burroughs built a control console philosophically the opposite of the IBM 360's: rather than thousands of flashing lights and switches, all the Burroughs swoopy control desk had was a typewriter (by which the operator interacted with the computer) and two flashing lights. One was lit when the client's code was running, the other when the computer was bound with I/O or some other function. The idea was to mix up the multiple running programs so that just the first lamp was lit. The OS was called MCP, for "Master Control Program." Core memory (little ferrite cores strung on a lattice), physically gigantic disk drives, and the aforementioned tape drives.

Regarding the quad perpendicular-scan machines, I once had a beer at a SMPTE conference with a guy who founded a company the did nothing but maintain and restore the old 2" quad machines, so that archived material would remain accessible. I recall they were called quad because there were four heads in the spinning drum and a field was comprised of one rotation of the drum. That's why one sees "glitches" at the switch-over point about one-fourth, one-half, or three-quarters the height of an image on a mis-adjusted machine.

Never knew there were helical-scan 2" machines also. One can see the tape wrapping around the head at an angle; also the reels are at different heights.

Ah, memories. Now back to reality.

I used to create 3-d animations using a video Toaster. No digital recorder. Toaster would render a frame and then automatically lay the frame off to tape. My poor old VO-9800 3/4 deck would sit there and wait for each frame to render, many times over an hour for each frame and then record the one single frame. Hurts to think about it even now.

j

@riredale, in 2" quad an NTSC field is 4 rotations of the drum, not 1. A field is 16 transverse tracks.