[Updated Feb. 26, 2024, with a second story.]
Last week, Gary Weimberg posted a tribute to Robert Dalva, the man who invented the video editing timeline. That sparked a whole series of comments about the early days of editing. Not surprisingly, many were from film editors making the transition to digital.
But I am not a film editor, I began my career working with video tape, starting with a 1/2″ black & white Ampex deck. I then moved into broadcast television and video workhorses of RCA 2″ color quad (quadrature) machines. Then on to Ampex 1″ decks with essentially instant response, to Sony 3/4″ UMatic to, finally, digital.
While digital is amazing, I still have a deep love for those 2″ machines of my youth; though I have no wish to go back to those days.
NOTE: Here are more stories from the days of 2″ video tape.
Two RCA TR-70’s at WHA-TV, Madison, Wis. in 1974. Dave Graham, Chief Engineer, on left. The other engineer is resting his hand on a Sony U-Matic 3/4″ video cassette deck. The U-Matic was used for off-line review and editing. Dave is holding a cassette box.
Each of these behemoths required a rack of equipment to run, a team of highly-trained engineers for maintenance and operations, a raised floor for cabling and a city’s worth of air conditioning. They were heavy, loud and required eight seconds after pushing Play for all that heavy iron to get up to speed and the image to stabilize.
They also cost upwards of $250K (that’s about $1.8 million in today’s dollars), and we needed three of them to edit!
The video tape was 2″ wide, traveled through the system at 15 inches per second, cost more than $300 per reel and each reel weighed 15-20 pounds, depending upon how much tape they contained.
All that gear, yet they could only record an image that was standard definition in size. (Roughly 640 pixels by 480 pixels today; and, no, I don’t want to get into a discussion of the rectangular pixels of NTSC and PAL vs. today’s square pixels.)
Story 1
The day in 1972 that I started as a production assistant at WHA-TV, I was touring through the machine room where the giant film chains and video tape machines were located.
Attached to the top side of one of the video tape decks was a small, slotted, aluminum block with a fingernail polish bottle perched above it. The bottle was filled with a purple solution. I asked one of the operators what this was for.
“Well,” he said holding up the small, fingernail-polish bottle, “up until last week, the only way we could edit video tape was to paint the magnetic side of the tape with this purple solution. The magnetic particles in it were attracted to the magnetic stripes on the tape. By looking closely at the pattern, we could see the frame boundaries between two images which is where to cut the tape with a razor blade to make an edit. Then we scotch-tape the two pieces together.
“It’s like editing film, except we couldn’t see the picture. Rowan & Martin’s ‘Laugh-In’ (a very popular show at the time) is entirely edited this way.”
I had just missed the opportunity to watch video tape edited with a razor blade. The week before I started the station took delivery of a new video tape machine that could do manual assemble edits on the fly… and all the razor blades were retired to the trash.
Story 2
At the time, these machines could record live television and play it back, but they were very poor at editing. These early systems lacked a “flying erase head,” which meant that when you performed an edit, the edit point was accurate plus or minus a second. Once you started the edit you couldn’t stop until the rest of the show was recorded. Insert edits were not yet technically possible, so we couldn’t just cover the edit with a cutaway.
Which brings me to my story. As a young, hot-shot director who had no clear idea of how much he didn’t know, I was directing a lovely holiday music special. Lots of color, candles and music. Except, we had a problem with either the singer or the shot coverage and needed to make an edit long after production had wrapped.
The problem was that these were manual recording decks. They recorded timecode, but were not controlled by timecode. So, we cued up the playback system as best we could, started both machines at the “same” time – as determined by a mechanical counter – and at approximately the correct moment, the tape operator mashed the record button and punched in an assemble edit.
An assemble edit cuts in cleanly but destroys the recording at the out. This meant that we could not see the results of our edit until we finished transferring the remaining 45 minutes of the program.
So, all we could do was hope that our edit was reasonably close.
After waiting the required 45 minutes for the transfer to complete, we checked the edit. We missed the punch by about a second and a half. But production time was – and is – expensive, there was no time to try again and no assurance that it would be any better. So we went to air with an almost-two-second hole in Handel’s Messiah.
There were multiple lessons learned from this, but the biggest was that creative types will always push gear up to and over its limit. Partly because we can and partly because we need to.
– – –
Now, I’m interested in reading your stories. Share them in the comments.
25 Responses to Stories from the Past – 2″ Video Tape [u]
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Jerry Wise says:
February 26, 2024 at 3:25 am
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Larry Jordan says:
February 26, 2024 at 4:22 am
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Warren Nelson says:
February 26, 2024 at 6:28 am
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Larry Jordan says:
February 26, 2024 at 7:13 am
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William Olexy says:
February 26, 2024 at 7:33 am
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Eric F. Scholl says:
February 26, 2024 at 8:35 am
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Lewis Kopp says:
February 26, 2024 at 8:43 am
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Daniel Larson says:
February 26, 2024 at 9:50 am
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Larry says:
February 26, 2024 at 10:16 am
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Michael May says:
February 26, 2024 at 12:58 pm
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Mark Johnson says:
February 26, 2024 at 1:51 pm
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w says:
February 26, 2024 at 3:06 pm
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Warren Nelson says:
February 26, 2024 at 3:30 pm
Newer Comments →My work was with Ampex vr2000’s in the 70’s and 80’s. I edited hundreds of 1/2 hour shows using CMX. All edits were insert edits using timecode. You had to pre-stripe your tapes. That caused additional head wear. My solution was to lay down bars for 1 minute then gently lift the record head away from the tape. You are still recording control track and time-code but not causing head wear. Of course you place the head back in it’s normal position when starting to edit. This worked for me for years. BTW…retiring this March 15 after 53 years in the business.
Jerry:
Very clever. Thanks.
Larry
Oh, the 2″ stories I could tell! (late 70s) LOLOL
One of my favs was the night (the show I worked for worked the graveyard shift to save money) we were half way through assembling our show and all of the sudden there was a loud BANG in the machine room (we were separated from the machine room by a large window).
The editor, the prod/dir and I jumped and looked up to see the machine room full of 2″ tape confetti! A controller in the BIG Ampex machine had failed and sent the source reel and the take up reel speeding in opposite directions at full speed. As you no doubt remember these machines used compressed air to move these reels and that speed and power, literally, fractured the tape exposed in the machine to little bits.
Suffice it to say, we were done for the evening, well, early morning, anyway.
Warren:
Smile… I remember we created a 6-second delay by stringing 2″ tape from one machine to another. It accumulated in a plastic basket between the two of them.
While it never failed, it was an amazing Rube Goldberg lash-up to watch in action.
Larry
We used the same technique to do a five second delay at WPRI in Providence. There was a device that would supposedly allow programable edits on RCA TR70s, that I believe was called a TEP (Timed Edit Programmer?). We could never get to work on a reliable basis. I also recall that we would occasionally get a clogged head, resulting in banding in the picture…the quick fix: lick your fingertip and press it lightly to the spinning head.
I interned at KVII-TV in the late 70’s as these were being transitioned to 3/4″ Umatic video decks, so my experience is limited.
However, the chief engineer gave me a couple of empty 2″ spools which I used for speaker stands in my home stereo system, for a number fo years.
I never worked with 2” video. We just had 1” B&W gear in college back ’71-’75. I remember my junior year we did a project shooting video on campus. We set up the deck, monitors, and the video switcher in the back of my Vega Kamback (wagon) and I sat in there, changing cameras with the switcher while recording.
But I did work with 2” 16/24-track MCI audio decks. My oldest brother and I had a recording studio in Covina, CA. We closed it down in 1979 just in time, as the business really dried up for a lot of studios in ’79-’80. I did maintenance on the tape decks as well as worked as assistant engineer on some things (Bill Cosby’s last record album – “Bill Cosby Is Not Himself These Days”) and engineered on others. I also did a fair number of ads for radio and TV for Miller’s Outpost.
We had one of the Sony 3/4″ U-Matic decks to use for commercials. It looks like there is one of them on the roll-around cart in the picture above. I still have that U-Matic deck and 48 tapes for it. I don’t know that it works, although it still did the last time I tried it around 15 years ago. 🫤 I need to try it and if it doesn’t work either sell it for parts or junk it. Seems a shame but considering how much one can do with recording and editing 4K video on an iPhone, time has really passed it by. (If anyone would like to buy it, please get in touch! 🥴)
I’m retired now and do very little video work any more. My big problem now is remembering how to use Final Cut Pro! ☹️
We had three old Ampex Quad machines that were always limping along and the four heads were prone to banding. Red colors were the worst. The tape engineers had to continually make head adjustments for playback. For a making a dissolve in a commercial we’d make AB rolls. One machine with the A shots and the other with the B shots. The two machines played back through the switcher for Chyron, camera cards and dissolves and we’d record on the third. If the timing worked, we’d make dub copies as fast as we could before the machines fell out of alignment.
Daniel:
Yeah… sigh. Banding. That was how I first learned how to read video scopes. Nothing like fat streaks running across your beautiful images.
Larry
Learn how to edit Quad tapes with razor cuts/ fluid process then with EditTech process. 1972 at KHON TV, NBC affiliate in Honolulu. Thanks to Milch Miraflor✌️
2” tape reels make very nice outdoor garden hose holders .
Wow! Thanks for reminding me of those old “glory days.” Besides the 2″ tape and film chains, I remember when we got our first ENG video camera: an RCA TK-76 (19lb w/o lens) with separate recording deck (20+lbs), battery belt (10lbs), umbilical cords and all. I recall cautiously standing next to it on its first location shoot thinking, “This thing costs as much as a house! If this tripod tips over, my career is over.” Great memories. Thanks!
…and remembering (after being told several times) to make sure the power supply to the heads was disabled before measuring the head tips so there was no chance of readying it up by accident (Ampex vr2000)
…and even then it did happen, fortunately I was nowhere near the machine at the time. (I still laugh now, mainly because it wasn’t me, even though it was a tragedy for both the engineer and the head).
I wonder if anyone reading this thread actually had their hands on the VR3000, the “portable” quadruplex recorder (for those who had taken the Charles Atlas course). I’d love to see one in the flesh.
Yeah, those early ENG “portable cameras” were a kick! They were portable in the sense that they had handles welded on them!
I once saw a “portable” 2″ recorder. It took at least 2 guys to lift it but it, without any accessories, would just fit in the back of my bosses Oldsmobile station wagon!
We determined it would fit and then determined none of us knew how to set it up when we got to our destination so we abandoned it for a 3/4″ portable deck.
One of my favorite memories was using, for the first time of many, a brand new Betacam! Thought I had died and gone to heaven!
The only downside is that if you wanted to monitor color out of the camera, it took another box, half the size of the camera, to do that.
So many stories, keep em coming, they’re a hoot!