previous episode

History of Videotape

1981 Kodak 8mm, year of the Camcorder, or the incredible shrinking headwheel.

Both the VHS and Betamax formats were small enough that "tote-able" battery operated recorders were practical. When coupled with the newly perfected single-tube color camera, they quickly became the weapon of choice for young family documentarians. The old guard had used 8mm movie film. While this format had color (since about 1942) it had a number of drawbacks.

• 3 minute reel time
• reels had to be loaded in darkness
• reels had to be flipped halfway through
• Primative viewfinders, shots were often missed framed.
• Any errors in the shooting would not be discovered until after processing.
• Silent
• Poor rendition of moving objects, low frame rate
• Shot film had to be sent out for expensive lab development
• Required an expensive cumbersome projector and screen for viewing
• Jerky projection in dark room
• Not transportable, if you wanted to show it, you had to carry along a projector also.

While "super 8" addressed some of these issues, it also meant buying an expensive new camera and projector, so many passed on these improvements. Everyone already had a VCR which made conversion to video nearly painless. The home movie business floundered. Polaroid even brought out an "instant" version of the movie, which of course bombed big time. Kodak could see the writing on the wall, and if people wouldn't buy film from them, then why not try video?

What made portable video possible at all was a steady progression in the development of helical scan systems~

• Slower tape speeds, meant a little tape would go a long way
• Narrower tapes, coupled with above meant greatly reduced weight for given record time
• Smaller headwheel diameter, the tape paths became shorter and manageable.
• Improved tape formulation and electronics reduced the required writing speed.

Kodak's big idea was to take this to the next level and combine the camera head and tape mechanism into a single box. Enter the Camcorder. First it would narrow the tape from 1/2" (12.5 mm) to 8 mm, which among other things, had a nice familiar ring to it. Then it would slow it down to almost 1/2 ips so that a full cassette could be nearly the same size as the very popular audio cassette and still have 2 hours of video. To fit inside a camera, the headwheel was cut to half the Betamax size. This combination forces the writing speed to be only 12.5 fps, a tenth that of quad. Which of course is too slow to work. But wait, there is a new tape technology called metal evaporate that has an extremely fine magnetic partical size, so now it does work.

There is yet another factor that enables camcorders to produce an even better picture. With portable recorders, there is the cable from the camera to the tape deck. The video carried on that cable is standard encoded NTSC which means the recorder has to decode and seperate luminence and color again. In a camcorder, the luminence and color signals are available internally so the encode/decode/filtering steps are eliminated entirely. A consumer version of the single-tube color camera had such poor response both for luminence and color that this really wasn't a big deal. But second generation design camcorders had that new CCD imager and now home movies had every bit as good a quality as the best commercially pre-recorded Hollywood films!

R-VCR

Unfortunately Kodak didn't wait for CCD imagers and left their plum for Sony to pick. Sony had burned a lot of its video partners in the Betamax fiasco, but just as Kodak needed a replacement for its 8mm motion picture film business, so did a number of Japanese movie camera manufacturers. Thus Canon, Kyocera, Nikon, Olympus, Minolta, Ricoh, et al, brought fresh blood to the videotape marketplace. This onslaught of new competitors greatly concerned JVC and Panasonic, so they brought out VHS-C for camcorder use. In order to get the reduced headwheel to write the same track length, the wrap was extend to 3/4 with four heads and the whole works speeded up. The VHS-C system didn't sell very well, but the smaller heads were a smash hit and now used in many "full-size" home decks.

Finally on October 16, 2001, Eastman Kodak received a technical EMMY from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, in appreciation for the development of the consumer camcorder.

Broadcasters also wanted the advantages of camcorders, especially if they offered improved picture. They had been using the portable U-matic, connected by cable to a large bulky 3-tube color field camera.

RCA had invented the CCD imager (at the time called MOS, an RCA trademark name for transistor products) which could make the camera part very compact. Panasonic offered a recording system that could put a full color broadcast resolution picture onto a standard VHS cassette by using two tracks and boosting tape speed so that the 2 hour VHS size cassette would play only 20 minutes. Ampex offered marketing access to the TV stations. Panasonic called their version "M" for Matsushita, the Japanese name of the company, Ampex called it Recam and RCA called theirs Hawkeye to emphasis the imager.

Helical scan could always produce a decent B/W picture, sub-carrier color was the bug-a-boo. Taking a hint from the early days, RGB components are essentially 3 monochrome channels. Instead of Red-Green-Blue, video can alternatively be expressed as YIQ, Luminence plus 2 color difference channels. The advantage is that the "I" channel only needs to be half the resolution and "Q" only a quarter. So forget NTSC sub-carrier modulation, record full resolution luminence (B/W) on one track. On the second track use one FM carrier for "I" and because less resolution is required, there is room for a second FM carrier for the "Q". From these 3 monochrome channels, perfect color could be generated. Yes but didn't you say that RGB for studios was a bust? Well, because these components are available internally at the camera head for the recorder to use they don't have to be distributed elsewhere by cables. The playback decks generate standard NTSC composite output for studio use.

Most of the service problems with "M" could be traced to a fundemental flaw in the camcorder concept. With seperate pieces, if a camera failed, a backup camera could be cabled to the record deck. Similarly, if a deck got a tape stuck, the working camera could be attached to a different deck. In the hard-knock world of news gathering, all a station needed was one spare recorder, and one backup camera, and its service people could keep up with damage control. With a camcorder, a problem with either side made the entire unit inoperable. Stations were not prepared to buy an extra 50% reserve just for maintenance "float". Stations were also miffed when RCA, the vendor that sold them the $40,000 units, stopped answering service requests.

Sony had a similar idea, also using two tracks and speed, the L500 Betamax cassette would give 20 minutes of near broadcast resolution. For enhanced serviceablility, it was offered as a dockable arrangement. What Sony didn't have was the CCD, so it would have to make do with a miniture 3-tube camera. While it could never get the NBC network business (which was tied to RCA), the other networks and independent stations really felt Sony offered a more reliable product. When RCA failed, Ampex was ready to bail and Sony was eager to rescue its old nemisis, because this way it gained access to the CCD technology Ampex borrowed from RCA. Thus second generation Betacam was CCD, but since the BVV1 deck was dockable, it did not have to be redesigned. In fact the early adaptors could change the camera section and keep on using the original deck. Not being abandoned felt good to station owners.

With the L750 Betamax cassette, Betacam record time became 30 minutes, long enough for mastering complete television programs. (Because of station breaks, even longer format TV programs are still produced in 30 minute segments) So Betacam moved out of the news department and migrated elsewhere in the station. Panasonic, which inherited the NBC accounts, dropped the VHS motif and redesigned around metal tape which allowed slower tape speed. Now its "M2" or "MII" would play 90 minutes for production use. PBS selected MII for generating network program "delay" for various time zones. The rest of the world stayed with Betacam which Sony revamped with metal tape to be BetacamSP and created a new larger-than-Betamax cassette for 60 and 90 minute program lengths.

In a November 2001 news release, Sony announced it had built its last Betacam camcorder. That's because digital format camcorders now have a lower price point and more features.

Which leads us to the last episode, 1986 Digital comes to videotape

history of videotape start page