http://i.snipboard.io/dKPXOB.jpg

Ah man..... I would love playing one and see how it looked and all http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon7.gif

Was UHS the original name of before VHS? Or was it another name for Umatic?

I didn't think VHS format was unveiled in the US until summer 1977?

I think UHS is a typo. The machines in the ad are a RCA VHS deck and a Sony Beta deck.

Umatic was released in 1971 with aspirations to be a home format, but rapidly flopped in that market while at the same time becoming popular with broadcasters...By the time beta was out in 1975 I can't imagine anyone pitching Umatic to the same market as beta.

Hmmm I hadnt ever heard of Umatic...... I wonder how good the pic/sound was http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon7.gif (I love anything analogue like crazy)

Hmmm I hadnt ever heard of Umatic...... I wonder how good the pic/sound was http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon7.gif (I love anything analogue like crazy)

Ever watch the news after they stopped saying " film at 11*" then most in the field non-live shots you saw were being played in studio off a U-matic.... It was the first format small enough to be portable yet good enough for broadcast so it was most popular for ENG.... some studio use for archiving and other uses began to trickle in as the better quality open reel broadcast decks got older and fewer.

*Kinda want to post a YouTube link to the opening " film at 11" joke of the Kentucky Fried Movie....

What is that thing on top of the "Sony" machine? A mechanical clock?

What is that thing on top of the "Sony" machine? A mechanical clock?

It's a timer. The original Betamax deck didn't have an internal timer because they didn't want consumers to have to turn in the entire unit for service if the timer failed. At least that's the official reasoning. It was also sold as a separate accessory, though, so that may have been part of it.

I don't think that's what the production timer looked like, though. If I recall correctly, it had a round analog clock and a dial timer, but I may be mistaken.

I don't think that's what the production timer looked like, though. If I recall correctly, it had a round analog clock and a dial timer, but I may be mistaken.

No, ignore me. I don't know where I got that from but a quick search is showing that timer design made it to production units. I don't see any of the one I described. I must be thinking of something else.

Yeah the one pictured is the one that was made and sold. I've seen the Sony model in person and I own the Zenith Badge version along with Zenith's first betamax deck is a reskinned version of that song.

I,ve two of those Sony DT-30 timers, one I used with a SL-8200 as in the picture ( that one is long gone) and the second one I have is with my SLO-260 industrial Betamax . The two bear the the same model numbers ( ie. No suffix) but e one with the 260 has a three prong grounded plug, and the other is regular two blade plug . There some trivia for you guys !

Also that is quite the typo in that advertisment :D

Dubis7 , I think you may be thinking of the Quasar VX format "Great Time Machine" vcr timer from around '76 or so. Those had an analogue clock and timer face in a brushed aluminum trimmed housing.

These are the RCA VBT200 and the Sony SL-8200. "UHS" is definitely a typo. :)

I havent ever seen a picture from a beta machine............

Best typo I ever saw was on the front page of the Mpls Star that said in big headline letters: PUBIC NOTICE
This was back when Betamax was still the thing.

Hmmm I hadnt ever heard of Umatic...... I wonder how good the pic/sound was http://www.videokarma.org/images/icons/icon7.gif (I love anything analogue like crazy)

The only reason it was a "professional format" was because Sony added all the needed connectors, timecode, consoles, TBC, etc. But the visual quality itself was as bad as VHS or Beta or 8-mm. It had slightly better S/N and the second or third copy did not look as bad as the second or third VHS copy. Also, audio was much better than linear VHS or Beta audio.

This is 1977.

https://i.ibb.co/dszQvyPw/Umatic-1977-Texas-Universit.jpg

Help yourself: https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/KXAS/browse/?q=umatic&t=metadata&sort=default Granted, these people have not digitized their archive in the best way possible.

The visual quality of U-Matic was far better than the 1/2" formats be it Betamax or VHS for a number of factors, that image taken from 1977 appears to be a first generation as it doesn't have the L/C ringing and very little chroma smear. Larger head drum with a higher tip velocity and better mechanical stability gives U-Matic a far better timebase stability. 3/4 U-Matic editors after 1980 had a number of improvements in the processing of the chroma/luma separation that in the real world were able to meet the 250 horizontal line resolution without a cross color contamination.

I am in the process of capturing & digitizing some of my 3/4" archives using my VO-2850A as a source feeding a DVW-A500/1 with the BKDW-505 composite card, the A500 has the ability to digitize the analog input and convert to SDI in realtime without compression. Once everything is edited I will upload a sample to YouTube so you can see for yourself how good U-Matic can be.

The visual quality of U-Matic was far better than the 1/2" formats be it Betamax or VHS
First generation? They were about the same: 250 LWPH in color mode, 320 LWPH in B/W mode.

that image taken from 1977 appears to be a first generation as it doesn't have the L/C ringing and very little chroma smear.

The characteristic color-under chroma smear is right in your face. Although I think the video preservationists could do better if they shifted chroma to the left a bit.

Larger head drum with a higher tip velocity and better mechanical stability gives U-Matic a far better timebase stability.

This is what TBC is for. Umatic became broadcast-legal only after the invention of digital TBC.

Once everything is edited I will upload a sample to YouTube so you can see for yourself how good U-Matic can be.
Please, do. I would like to see. I hope it will be in 60p.

^^^^^^Did this guy invent U-Matic or something???^^^^^^^

^^^^^^Did this guy invent U-Matic or something???^^^^^^^

:lmao::lmao::lmao:
Legend has it Umatic did unspeakable things to his mother in front of him and he's never been the same since...

What annoys me the most is all the conjecture. I'm not the sharpest tool in the box but the one thing I have is experience and just because Wikipedia says one thing or the salesman says another doesn't make it fact and I really grow tired of always being "corrected" by the inexperienced who always has to be "right" because they read something on the internet. Truth is many here including myself have U-Matic experience that goes back before the internet and know what's really "UP"

The fact of the matter is the U-Matic format spawned the Betamax format which beat VHS to the top of the television set two years before VHS did. All were consumer oriented formats aimed at low cost (relatively) while the U-Matic format was a "home" format developed in the 1960's and according to the inventor themselves was launched in 1968 however it didn't do well in the consumer world due to the pricetag the professionals made the best of it during the time when 16MM film and big sideburns dominated the ENG world... along with the little B&W SONY Rover, not everything in the late 60's was color.

The above conclusions in the last follow up quote-fest were once again made in the moment, when I said first generation I was referring to an original tape that wasn't copied several generations down not the generation of the VTR itself but because someone is so bent on being right this was overlooked in haste. The chroma smear is a shortcoming of the NTSC format itself and gets magnified during the subcarrier conversion process. U-Matic was better at the conversion process than the consumer formats and I believe it was the Sony VO-2800 series that had the 1H comb filter instead of the lumped L/C filters to separate the color from the luma. My VO-2860A editor has the comb filter with a much improved separation over the previous generations and a real resolution pattern check confirms this. The 2860 A-suffix was the last word in the top-load U-Matic arena, it was the first to use a real 3-phase servo motor to drive the head drum ditching the wide belt, it also uses a servo for the capstan leaving the AC motor to drive the reel table and a cooling blower, this deck is also the first to tip the scales at a verified 105 lbs crushing any consumer digital format that gets in its way.

Regardless of the format be it analog or digital there are always compromises and shortcomings, there are no perfect inventions only perfect intentions. Analog has some signal/noise issues while digital is limited by the bit depth and in the case of a DVD for example that is 8-bits/color giving only 256 shades and the artifact here is the dithering especially in the dark/black areas. In theroy analog has no shade steps being infinite however in practice I seem to recall having to keep things within a few f-stops. Chroma smear is another and in the digital realm there's the compression artifacts of the codec which I believe is MPEG-2 and the color sub-sampling be it 4-2-2 or in the case of the DV/DVCPRO/DVCAM is 4-1-1 in the NTSC world. Horizontal resolution is one of those "sticky" points in that often times a 250 line image can "look" better than something 600 lines by virtue of the edginess or grain and the same is true with the digital world, just because its a 1080P image doesn't mean it's "better" but this again is subjective being scan lines vs detail/frequency response and what the eye perceives. An analog videotape can not record something that is above it's highest carrier frequency, digital is limited to nyquist-shannon sampling theorem and sources like DVD for example don't often exceed 8Mb/s of real video data rates, they just make it look good on that 1920x1080P LCD and in the real world a first generation analog BetacamSP playback in Y/R-Y/B-Y feeding the same monitor is often times going to "look" better to the eye technical gibberish not withstanding but if you insist digital betacam has a video data rate over 10x that of a DVD plus the four 48K/20bit audio channels not to mention the video itself is 10 bits while Blue Ray I believe was something around 36Mb/s for 1080P playback and that was again 8-bit color.

So who wins here? No one. While U-Matic had a number of refinements it was limited to the state of the art of the day. The numbers may be very similar to those of VHS and Betamax however putting the technical gibberish aside U-Matic was "cleaner" in the sense it wasn't riddled with the consumer compromises and it had the advantage of being far more mechanically stable TBC not withstanding. Larger tape with more active recording surface area, higher tip writing speed meaning more magnetic particles are actively used. These would be like having a higher sampling rate in the digital world with less bleed over and better S/N due to the higher generated output from the head during playback requiring less head amp gain and better linearity.

In today's world U-Matic and all of the analog formats have been forced into obsolescence by the advancements in the digital technology, the same happened during the 1960's and 1970's with film when analog was all that we had. Myself I've been around since before the Beatles broke up and started my video career in the early 1980s lugging around a Sony VO-3800 that was tethered to an RCA TK-76B and powered with a 10AH motorcycle battery... I was 12 years old and collectively that entire outfit weighed more than I did. This what we had and we made the best of it. Now with a head full of gray hairs I still use the format knowing what it's capable of not the limitations or shortcomings. I also have digital in the form of digital betacam/HDCAM, blueray and DVD all feeding a last generation Samsung 54" plasma along with a betamax and type-C (BVH-2000) analog formats. Comparing the apples to apples the U-Matic "looks" better than the betamax which looks better than the VHS... there's a reason I don't do video-8 or Hi8. If you want to do another quotefest be my guest but all those corrections with the numbers taken from the sales brochures will never mean nothing when it comes to real experience.

As for my uploaded videos; I will do them in whatever format I want be it 30f/s 60f/s but being at the mercy of YouTube they're going to be compromised anyway. You want to see them in real life bring your own popcorn and be nice to my cats.

I had the "U.H.S' in Dude's first post. Damn that thing was huge and must have weighed about 35 pounds mine had simulated woodgrain sides. I foolishly decided to junk it back in 2004 when I was moving stuff around and already had a dozen or so running VCR's hanging around and it had some serious problems. Many times I have looked back and wished I had of kept it.

That early Panasonic VHS was built like a tank no doubt.

Off-topic: how did the mechanical timers worked on V.C.R.'s? You pressed the record button, let the power on and when the time camed, an relay swithed on the power?

Pretty much yes. Lock the Record & Play keys together and set the dial on the timer clock for the approximate time to start the deck and a set of contacts took things from there. Don't recall seeing any relays in the early timers just a microswitch linked to a mechanism to control the power.

The visual quality of U-Matic was far better than the 1/2" formats be it Betamax or VHS for a number of factors, that image taken from 1977 appears to be a first generation as it doesn't have the L/C ringing and very little chroma smear.I would have loved to see a movie on it!!!!

I love VHS,to me it looks like im watching something on analogue cable :)

I assume Beta looks the same.......

U-Matic looked better than Betamax and even better than VHS but it was limited to 60 minutes of record time, Fuji did have 75 min tapes but they sometimes rubbed inside the cases. Where U-Matic really shines is the reliability and longevity of the format and medium itself. I have hundreds of U-Matic tapes going back to the 1980's that still play just as well as the day I made them, during the 80's I had this obsession of recording MTV videos using a Sony VO-2600 taking the video from a generic cable box and the stereo audio from my Fisher receiver... seemed like a great idea at the time. Now 40 years later they still play perfectly albeit they look like 80's analog CATV but without the VHS smear or dropouts. It's been suggested that I do digital caps of all my tapes, back then I was a teenager with unlimited time today in my mid-50's spare time is a little hard to come by.

You're right about longevity. I've got a 1971 VO-1600 (Sony's first Umatic) and it came with several boxes of tapes...There are many from the early 70s and the handful I have skimmed still play like new.

I have hundreds of U-Matic tapes going back to the 1980's that still play just as well as the day I made them. ... It's been suggested that I do digital caps of all my tapes, back then I was a teenager with unlimited time today in my mid-50's spare time is a little hard to come by.
You can do at least one.

This is the oldest newscast that I have: Channel 21 Youngstown, Ohio (WFMJ-TV) newscast (May 02, 1988) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui52BX-05gE). The quality of this VHS EP recording is quite bad.

You're right about longevity. I've got a 1971 VO-1600 (Sony's first Umatic) and it came with several boxes of tapes...There are many from the early 70s and the handful I have skimmed still play like new.Oh my....I would love to come over buddy and we can enjoy beautiful analogue!!

I have plenty of vintage professional analog around here, U-Matic, Type-C and Betacam-SP all available on a Panasonic CT34WX54 widescreen CRT. Movies include Dirty Harry 1971, Magnum Force from 1973, got Goldfinger and Dr. No along with French Connection and 7-Ups. If it's hard rockin' you want there's a pristine dup of Streets of Fire in it's original format that came from a duplication house on Type-C. Nothing digitally processed or molested just pure analog at its best with 600 watts of audio amplifier to back it up. If you want vacuum tubes they're also available on a 1970 Magnavox 23" Astro Sonic combo with a Zenith pix tube.

Thanks to Trump and DOGE I'm now working nights in the private sector as a process technician at a plastics molding firm, at least I don't have to make up excuses for why the mail is late.

Hehe no you dont huh?

Bring some popcorn and see for yourself ��

Ill be right over buddy!!

Do you have these?

Bullitt - 1968

Closest I have is an official 1980 release (WCI HOME VIDEO) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

You only Live twice - 1967

Closest I have is an official 1983 release (20th Century fox) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

Casablanca - 1942

Closest I have is an official 1981 release (Magnetic video) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

Willy wonka and the chocolate factory - 1971

Closest I have is an official 1984 release (Warner home video) but im wondering how much better it could look then this?

I would love seeing the original paramount release!!

Only have Bullitt from 68 on Type-C and it came from a dup house, it's the first release original that didn't get the jazz ensemble overdub'd during the dinner scene. The reel is marked digital audio but I don't have the 2801 module for this. Overall the tape looks far better than a DVD given the gamma, no digital artifacts or enhancements. My prized reel.

You can see the deck on the sister site https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/show-us-your-sonys.52651/page-267#post-17628737 and there's a screen shot of the Thunderbolt Hotel parking lot if you scroll down.

Is that the music playing with the lady with that flute when Bullitt goes into that restaurant??

I have that in mine.... If that was there in a 1980 release,when was that added??

I assume the original 1968 movie didnt have it??

Wow......... I would have thought the 1980 release would be no changes.......

EDIT:

I found this

In the restaurant scene with McQueen and Bissett, the live band playing in the background is Meridian West , a jazz quartet that McQueen had seen performing at The Trident, a famous restaurant in Sausalito.

What was added??

Yes, it was "sweetened" for the later DVD & BlueRay releases but present on the original which has more of the background sound. During the scene cut the background is muted on the later release and if you watch the timing closely the finger strikes on the bass and hits of the drum are out of sound sync.

My reel has several dates ranging from 1986 to 1989 but I don't know what they're for, I do know it is marked digital audio which was a very rare option for the Type-C format and used mostly for Laserdisc mastering and requires an outboard interface (2801 which makes the 2830 package) to take advantage of this... a something I will never afford.

Wouldnt it be nice to find one cheap on ebay or even better Salvation army??

Thats sad they muted the background sound..... It makes it more natural sounding.......

Last time I saw a 2801 on eBay it was over a grand, not something I'd find at the salvation army.

I wonder how hard it would be to duplicate that decoder with an SDR and some signal decoding algorithms...

Don't know, there's a few mods that would need to be done to get the FM subcarrier from the head amplifier but it's a standard PCM digital format.

ARC Tech-109:

I have a Sony VO 2600 and a VO 2850 that I occasionally use for transfers. I actually just repaired the 2850; a real chore wrestling 83 pounds of U-matic on my counter. The 2600 is tucked neatly in the bottom of a wooden TV stand in my living room; it also serves as a stabilizing weight as I have 30” Toshiba wide screen CRT TV on top.
I used to have a VO 3800 portable, but still have a VO 4800 and a JVC CR 4400 portable.
I really do appreciate the performance of this format

There was a time before climate change when I had one of those VO-3800's strapped to my side and a TK-76 on my shoulder... all powered with a motorcycle battery that lasted maybe half hour. I was an A/V nerd in school and made the mistake of volunteering for camera duty during a school event at 12 years old, I was no match for this but I managed to keep it steady. We also had those Sony open-reel porta-pack's with the big camera and this long lens but being B&W wasn't good enough for me... lesson learned. Back then everything was clunky and heavy, we had a number of those Setchell Carlson "Educator" TV/monitors on tall carts with either a VP-2000 U-Matic or Sony 8600s feeding them. Problem here was the school floors were that terrazzo from the 1930's and the big carts had 4-wheel swivel steering meaning they would go in any direction and being top heavy would crush an A/V nerd flat. We didn't get VHS until the mid-80's and those were top load hand-me-down's from a larger school district that went front load and the big Setchell Carlson's survived into the early 90's.
There were a number of Panasonic NV-3160's in the A/V lab along with two of the "new" VO-5858's and Panasonic SEG which I always hated because everyone wanted to get EFX happy and make everyone sick. I ended up with the 3160's and a number of other decks when the district auctioned them off paying $20/lot but passed on the big sets. The 3160's died years later from the head chips coming off the little mounts. Just the centrifugal force of running at 1800 is enough to pull them loose so do be mindful of yours as both Sony and Panasonic used that urethane glue of the day and it gives out over time.

Okay so an update on my 3/4 U-Matic caps project.
Been spending some time recently on putting together this little clips project and I'm at the point of uploading to YouTube however each time I do the end result looks like... don't step in it. My capture chain starts with a Sony VO-2860A U-Matic feeding a NOVA 800 TBC and that feeds the composite input of my DVW-A500 DigiBeta which then does the conversion to SDI which I capture as an .avi using a Blackmagic Decklink SDI card in my Tricaster TC550. From there I do the cuts using kdenlive under Fedora then export the entire project as a high rate mp4 and upload to YouTube which waters things down to basically garbage. What I'm fighting is the interlacing which is really making things look rough and coarse so my question is does anyone have suggestions on how to either interpolate the scan lines to a progressive format or somehow smooth things down? I've tried capturing direct from the composite using the Tricaster's own capture but this makes no improvement and uses a hardware mjpeg-2 compression which is great but the bit rate suffers as it's designed for web streaming.

The purpose of this is to demonstrate the ancient capabilities of the format itself and the camera I used to capture with which was a Sony DXC-M3a, these were recorded during the early 90's when the best we had was color-under for the home. Right now the modern tech is making things look far worse than what we had and with over 30 years of my own experience I'm at my wits end.

This is the results I'm getting right now, this was shot last weekend using a Sony DVW-790 DigiBeta camera, edited using kdenlive in Linux then exported as mp4 and uploaded to YouTube... https://youtu.be/4aiuFKTzbTA and it looks worse than VHS.

Now just for the sake of comparison these videos were also shot using Digital Betacam https://youtu.be/YDu7YpkkfJE and https://youtu.be/AUWMDCUofUg but with no editing, just captured using the SDI input of the camera bus of the Tricaster and watered down to mpeg-2.

The video frequency response (horizontal resolution) doesn't look bad.

The following may be repeating what you already know, but let me know if that's right:

The vertical has something wrong, either the interlaced fields are in the wrong order, or (I think more likely) you are only getting one field in the output, causing stairstepping on diagonal edges and gaps on diagonal lines.
When you run just the vintage gear into an analog monitor, are both fields present?

Can you tell if the final result posted to YouTube has only half NTSC vertical resolution? When I look at settings, it says 480P, so I think somewhere in your processing chain it is dropping one field (leaving 240 lines) and somewhere it is interpolating each retained field to 480P.

I will look deeper into this. On my end I'm using all CRT's on the analog side and Dell S-2409 LCD @ 1920x1080-75Hz refresh. Now that you mention it the vertical detail does look like its missing one field on the final.

Going to basically start over from scratch with default settings and see how that works out.

Thanks for the insight.

brett

Okay so the moment everyone (almost no one) has been waiting for; Old-school U-Matic video captures from the early 1990's. Yes I have finally got everything captured and uploaded to YouTube in its native low-def 4:3 glory. Everything is direct from my old U-Matic tapes that were recorded using a JVC CR-4900U portable and captured on the Sony DXC-M3A when it had good tubes, only the night scenes were shot using a DXC-3000 and they look ghastly.

The signal chain starts with my VO-2860A feeding a NOVA 800 full frame TBC and this was run into my Sony DVW-A500 DigiBeta and chop & paste edited running the decks as a master & slave pair with all the signalling SDI then captured using a NewTek Tricaster Broadcast TC-550 which uses a mild hardware mpeg-2 then uploaded to YouTube and watered down even more. No the end video is not 4K or even 1080P but rather a testament to the resiliency of the U-Matic format. This was state-of-the-art before DVD's and I'm sure the critics will have plenty to say, don't expect an apology from me.

The issues I was having earlier were the result of multiple codecs and a timing issue with my one TBC that wasn't apparent as I use all CRT's. A complete recapture and direct upload in the mpeg-2 format eliminated all of this and for a 30-something year old video it doesn't look terrible.

Anyway check it out tell me what you think, flames will be ignored... or laughed at.

https://youtu.be/2HlJLsBXHxQ

Looks good to me.

So how this all came about is I got a set of new satacon tubes for the M3A thanks to a friend at a local station and spent an evening setting everything up as best I could with the what I had, Hitachi V-089 vectorscope, V-099 waveform monitor and Sony multi standard monitor with the intent of getting some really good video to put on the Mpls cable access channel-35... that was the intent anyway. I ended up setting the green ped at 0 ire with the red & blue at 7.5 and didn't do a diff check or go over my work, all looked good on the scopes and I went with that. Next day in the car I do a quick auto black balance and everything does what it should and balanced against the green that it assumed was at 7.5 and set the levels accordingly, I didn't know this at the moment and assumed all was well until I did the playback that evening and saw my error and ended up chucking all 6 tapes into a drawer hoping they'd disappear forever... I was pi-- well you get the picture of why everything has a slight green cast.

The night shots were sometime later when I tried out a DXC-3000. I wanted to see what the night sensitivity was like, it was alright but the camera was too sparkly in normal light and edgy with proper lighting so I went back over the M3A and got it right but it ended up on the back burner in favor of a DXC-325/CA-325 package with a deep educational discount of $3500.

I was originally going for an urban documentary using the angles for a more in the moment feel, actually it worked well with the fast clips and motion thirty-some years later.

:thmbsp:

I might have a few more tapes shot on the M3A using the CR-4900U but the pennies were put away for a betacam and that ended up being an AMPEX branded BVW-35, if I can find them I will put something together.