I talked about the Ampex film in the livestream and condensed all that talk here with additional visuals - enjoy!
Ampex Electronic Editor - https://youtu.be/dGWfiHlka3A
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Ampex Electronic Editor - https://youtu.be/dGWfiHlka3A
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- Intro Music by Fran Blanche -
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Fran's Science Blog - http://www.frantone.com/designwritings/design_writings.html
FranArt Website - http://www.contourcorsets.com
I think that was called an "assemble edit." It needed the control track already striped on the tape, thus the erase head had to be modified (or replaced) so as not to erase the control track. This was long before flying erase heads and i think it was only possible with helical scanner heads, not quad.
I'm from the Silicon Valley. The AMPEX sign along Hwy. 280 was deemed a historical landmark and is still preserved to this day. The sign itself is rather large and iconic; you can't miss it if you're around the Mountain View stretch of this highway. I'm not sure which level of local government was involved in with the preservation, but there was also private money involved too, I am presuming. The last company of note I recall occupying the former AMPEX buildings was @Home Networks – which is also now defunct.
3/4" (UMatic) took over the market in the 1970s and became the standard for professional storage when it overtook film for location news recording.
The time base corrector had a more important purpose than editing. In the early days of video tape they shipped the tape with the headwheel because time base errors caused a venitian blind or scalloping effect. Each of the four heads on the headwheel scanned 16 lines of video. If the headwheel wasn't aligned precisely with the vacuum guide that held the tape as it passed the head would dig deeper at the start of its sweep than it did at the end. That meant each recorded sync pulse on the tape was slightly advanced or retarded from the previous one. Then a new head would sweep by, and once again the first sync pulse would be slightly advance from the end of the pulse coming off the previous head.
The Amtec TBC had a voltage variable delay line that looked at the timing errors and slightly advanced or delayed the sync coming off the time so that each sync pulse lined up with the house sync generator. Amtec was actually developed by CBS and licensed to Ampex. A transmission line electrically looks like a series of inductances with capacitors in parallel. In the voltage variable delay line the capacitors were replaced with varactors, basically a diode whose capacitance could be controlled by the bias on the diodes.
It's difficult to explain all this without showing drawing and photos of what the time base error looked like. In any case, the Amtec eliminated interchange problems between machines and headwheels. It was not needed for the editor, because the edit function was basically a record issue. There was no interchange because the playback and record was happening on the same machine.
Not sure if all this makes sense. I started my career during the quad era doing VTR maintenance on Ampex VR2000 machines.
Thanks for this Fran. A "reel" blast from the past. When it came to 1" type C video tape machines, I think Ampex held their own right up until the end. I worked as a video engineer and tape-op in NYC in the 80s and 90s, and post-production houses were defined as to whether they were Sony or Ampex shops. I cut my teeth on Sony, and will always have a soft spot for the BVH-2000 and BFH-3000 machines, but Ampex was right there with their vacuum capstans and amazing tape handling speeds on the VPR-6. (Not to mention the insane VPR-5 Ampex/Nagra portable type C video recorder.
In the mid to late 70's we had 3 quads – all RCA: an ancient TR70, and two 60's of which only one was configured for 'recording'. They were like huge exotic moogs with a wall of dials and liquid cooling on the heads. When the tape jammed it was like a band-saw in the booth. We edited everything live, assembly style, and had a house-clock that phased all 3 + telecine + cameras in sync. The precious precious TBC was for the network feed and / or those cheezy 3/4" sony's… which eventually took over completely. RCA also made a quadruplex spot-reel sequencer TR 100 (?) which took up a mid-sized room and used 2" 'cassettes' for on-air ads. Those were the days!
A episode of Columbus has a murder use tape splicing to set up his aliby
I think that was a monochrome editor. I’ve also read that the tv show Laugh-In was edited using the razor blade method.
In the 1990s i worked at a local TV station WYOU in Scranton PA and I learned how to use all types of analog video tape editing systems and they even had 2 of these old 2" ampex machines with all the bells and whistles. At that time they only used them when they needed some archive footage.
I know everything is digital now (i dont like it) but i found editing with the analog editors more satisfying and engaging especially with all the Jupiter 2 like knobs, switches and buttons. Not the touchscreen swipey stuff used today.
Fran thank you for appreciateing and shareing all the things you do. Just so happens im completely on the same page as you and im so grateful that you are cuz you make me feel like im not alone in this century.
BIGG HUGGS✌ 😎👍
I was born in 1958. Little did I know this was going on. But I remember Ampex being talked about by “lay” people as high end stuff. Then there’s Ampeg who makes amps and it’s easy to get them mixed up. This was a very interesting video. Is a Theremin easy to make? Thanks.
At a 1972 NEA event, Sony unveiled a cassette recorder. After the presentation, I found the latch and peeked under the hood. Had to see how they wrapped tape around a video head. Sony engineers were not happy!
I think the ferrite compound was called Edivue or at least that was one brand. One thing you missed talking about was timers. Edit controllers began to have built in timers that allowed setting in and an out point for when to begin and end your edit. It made for much more accurate editing than the manual punch. Once these timers / clocks were built in timecode came around to make it repeatable. Then you could shoot on 1" in the studio. Take the rushes home and edit on VHS. Then just submit a list of edit points to the "on-line" editor who could quickly conform a master tape to your edits. Made it cheaper and didn't have to tie up the "expensive" machines. I say cheaper, but all this stuff was like car prices kind of expensive, with the professional stuff like house prices kind of expensive.
Ampex VTRs always had a built-in analogue TBC. Later "refined" by Velocity Compensator
Is "punch in" also known as Full Assemble Editing?
Back in about 1980, I had two, Ampex VR-2000's with Colortec and Velcomp and Edititec from a now defunct Z channel (1988 ish). They were scrapping their equipment and I knew the head engineer and he asked me if I wanted the machines… of course (foolishly) I said yes!
Rented a Uhaul truck with lift gate, and got them.
They sat in my garage for a couple of years where I wired them into my electric panel and plumbed my air compressor to them as the quad head used air bearings.
They were gorgeous machines, but BIG and HEAVY.
I had the full set of manuals (VOLUMES of 3 ring binders) and a few reels of tape.
I had to get rid of them because… WHY keep them?????
Scrapped the machines (very sad day), but kept the Tektronix 526 vectorscope. Still have it, but once again.. WHY???
How many people can say that they have TWO Ampex quad machines in their garage??
Fun times back then!
Thanks for the post! It brought back memories!
Bonjour Fran pourrait tu activer les sous titres sur t est vidéo ce serait super merci
Panasonic pro series units also had the ability to turn off the record AGC, so you did not get any line tearing on copies, as they assumed then the incoming video and audio levels were correct, and did not do anything to adjust them. Also would allow you to record text data with some fidelity, though you would lose the beginning of every magazine as the head switching overwrote the data. Handled SMTP time codes a treat though, just adjust the monitor to underscan slightly and you could see them there rock steady in the top lines, andyou got no jitter at all.
In 1974 I was doing drop-in editing with Sony half-inch b/w reel to reel. It was "crash" editing where you had to hit the (inexact) edit point on the fly, and often as not a sync problem caused a visible "crash" between the two images. Gnarly. When I moved to the big city two years later they had a time-base corrector, and all ills were remedied.