At long last: Betacam

Analogue video is still a marvel of engineering, and nice to see the different ways they solved it back then with limitations in bandwidth!

MrHammond

It's got a diffuser and everything!

Robert Cooper

I love this. Hope you do that follow-up on color (under) encoding on VHS.

David Larsen

Fun and excellent. I still have Beta and VHS tapes in a box somewhere. I think I have that same Betamax tape machine in storage. I wonder if it still will work. I'll let you know someday.

Donald J Arndt

Huh! I'm sorry about that - I thought it was a slow enough frequency to not be bothersome (and quite honestly I didn't think the brightness changed to a problematic degree). I'm learning new stuff all the time! Do you think it's worth a re-render, or would you count this is flukey?

Technology Connections

I dip my pb&j in PBR, you know, get two birds stoned at once.

Heads up the bit where it swaps back and forth between formats as you talk is oddly strobey & triggered a sezuire Not sure it’s a common issue tho. I messed up and was doing all the stupid things (watching in a dark room, when tired, shortly after meds etc) so I’d sorta put myself at risk there. Doh Figured I’d share incase anyone else had an issue too.

Thanks so much! I never even knew BetaCAM existed. I was an early adopter of VCR and chose the Betamax on the advice of a more video savvy friend. Thanks to my young son's obsession with the Back to the Future movie I soon had to buy another VCR (he literally wore out the Beta machine!) and went with VHS at that time.

HarveyB

How much playback speed variance was there between your original digital recording and the VHS and Betamac?

Will G.

What a fantastic video!!!

Marcin Wichary

Glad I was able to help you settle the argument between Beta and Beta. :D

The_Tiberius

What was that interview of the guy decked out in Tennessee gear about?

Yeah, it's still processing. I actually rendered this at 60mbps which is much higher than I usually do - it's likely that takes YouTube longer to crunch through.

Technology Connections

This video appears less sharp and colorful than what I'm used to seeing here. I suppose it's because you just uploaded it and YouTube isn't done "cooking it to delicious golden [BROWN] perfection." My first assumption for the low quality video was that you were shooting the video on tape to highlight the quality delta between VHS, Beta and digital video while showing off your mad editing skills/z to boot. Anyway, YAY for our dear friend, A/V tech history!!

Mark Hesse

Betacam is not Betamax Betacam is not Betamax Betacam is not Betamax I think i've got it now.

Jon Adams

As much as I enjoy and appreciate the relevant-to-today videos on things like electrification and efficiency, my favorite videos of yours have always been the ones on technology from days gone by. I guess it's because much of these topics (such as the VHS/Betamax format war) was before my time, or was when I wasn't old enough to appreciate or understand it. Super hyped to finish watching this (just getting to the format war recap). I know I've said this once or twice before, so sorry for beating a dead drum about it, but would you ever consider doing a video on the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war? I think your style would make it thoroughly hilarious as well as informative. Thanks for all your hard work on these videos!

Nick Loh

My favorite topics are things that annoy you. You make such entertaining videos out of them.

Benjamin Maslow (BEM684)

Stoked to watch this one. I still have boxes of Betacam tapes from when I worked in local news. I did get them transferred to digital at one point, but I can't bear to get rid of them.

Sean Harding