NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Technology History -- Courtesy of the Betamax Videotape Extraction Lab
Technology History -- Courtesy of the Betamax Videotape Extraction Lab
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000768.html
Greetings. It's always fascinating to view technology through the
prism of many years ago. What did we think would happen? What
actually did occur? Which predictions were on the mark? Which
products were heavily hyped, only to go poof?
In the long ago days before the empire, I rather compulsively
videotaped all manner of technology-related (yes, and other) goodies,
on the theory that they might be interesting or useful some day in the
far future.
Unfortunately, as former videotape aficionados know all too well, the
half-life of videotapes (both Beta and VHS) can make CD and DVD
physical decay seem positively charming by comparison.
This was especially true for many of my oldest tapes in Sony Beta
(Betamax) format, many of which are now over three decades old. Over
ten years ago, I discovered that these old tapes were not playable at
all in any equipment available to me at the time, due to the tapes'
long period of deterioration. The situation looked rather hopeless.
However, I very recently obtained a number of ancient Beta decks that
were about to be trashed by their owners, and I decided that if the
tapes were going to be saved for posterity (and my own amusement), now
was the time. Any further delay in this process would likely have
resulted in the tapes being completely unplayable on any equipment
anywhere ever -- without resorting to a pact with Satan that is. And
while I love YouTube, there's only so far I'll go in the name of
content creation.
This is the setup I'm using to extract video from my grizzled Betamax
tapes: http://bit.ly/9fyu7a (Lauren's Blog)
I've hobbled together this nightmare setup from three different Beta
VCRs. The resulting hybrid deck (as shown) includes a number of major
modifications (definitely not in the service manuals and possibly
hazardous to the spacetime continuum) that I've been forced to
improvise, resulting in a mechanism more or less capable of tracking
decayed tapes that no individual VCR deck could track at all -- at
least with manual assistance.
In fact, frequently during the transcription of these tapes, I'm
actually mechanically riding the tape path tracking adjustments with a
long screwdriver throughout playback to maintain tracking sync lock --
the trick to this is both the visual video cues on the monitor screen,
and listening to the sound of the drum rotation servo lock oscillators
as they go in and out of phase. Yeah, the technique is something of a
lost art, to say the least.
Even with all this, while I could then display the videos on a
monitor, my usual video digitizing cards would not reliably sync and
track most of these tapes at all. Can anything else go wrong? So I
switched to feeding the video output to a very stable camcorder A/D
that also provides direct DV data -- rather than trying to encode to
MPEG on the fly. This provides for maximum quality archivals for
later processing. Years ago disk space costs would have made this
prohibitively expensive. Now disk space just isn't an issue.
Interestingly, some of the oldest tapes are in somewhat better
condition (relatively speaking) than newer ones. The reason is that
the former were L-500 tape stock (2 hour tapes) instead of the later,
more popular L-750s (3 hour). The 500s had thicker oxide backings,
and so time/temperature/humidity-related stretching, print-through,
oxide damage, and other effects were somewhat reduced -- a bit at
least. Also the conventional linear audio tracks on all these tapes,
though of comparatively limited fidelity, have held up much better
than the Beta Hi-Fi audio that was encoded on subcarriers via the
video heads. The latter are now much more subject to continuing
dropouts.
If anyone is interested in more information about this entire process,
feel free to drop me a line.
The results of this work should start appearing on YouTube soon. The
collection of technology and other segments likely to materialize is
perhaps somewhat eclectic -- but much of it is now pretty rare or
likely one of a kind. Some will be in pretty poor condition, but at
least should be watchable, and hopefully will be informative and
enjoyable.
I'll notify as interesting items go online. Stay tuned.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)
http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance):
http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz