What Labguy did on his spring break series, first video. John Turner demonstrates the 1969 RCA TR-60 quadruplex broadcast video tape recorder that he has restored to operation.
I was a kid and I got to run Quads, RCA and Ampex machines, at my local TV station. In production, on the air! I am 48 years old now, ready to run these machines to preserve archival video tapes. And while I lack this guy's expertise, I am pretty good at ferreting out that bad capacitor which is making the sync unstable. I love RU-vid, but I miss analog video so much.
The gentleman giving the demo states the TR-60 was a germanium transister machine. It was not. It was a silicon transister machine, very stable. The older TR-4 and TR-22 were germanium transister machines. I am a retired broadcast engineer and spent a lot of time maintaining all of these machines. I love the video. It brings back a lot of fond memories. Techman
If you went back in time when 2 inch tape was standard and showed the television technicians the video servers, HD cameras, editing bays using only a fast PC, broadcast automation software, and digital transfers we have today they would freak out! Great VTR by the way!
I am a lucky old guy, remembering my first day working in TV in June, 1979; I was 16, a junior in high school. I started out running studio cameras for the local stuff, then was entrusted to do Master Control and directing the local stuff. We shot news footage on 16mm film, but eventually got the JVC U-Matic rigs to augment our stable of antique Scoopic film cameras. We had a TR-22 and a TR-4 that were used for most of our spots and syndicated program playback. At 60, I’m still a very lucky old man because I still work in TV, currently at a Network facility in Washington, DC. Obviously, everything has changed since 1979, but I still enjoy this addiction where I get paid ‘to watch TV’. 3-2-1 fade to black
@Boeing744andRCAquad This is the best of four TR-60s we have here. I have spent many hours on all aspects of the machine to make it as stable as possible. With a well formed recording on good tape stock, I can get reliable lockups of under 3 seconds even with the color framer enabled. In a broadcast plant of the time, nobody would have been permitted to spend this time working on a machine or have one out-of-service. Lockup time is a function of the capstan mass. The TR-61 & TR-70C fixed this.
It takes a lot of space, infrastructure, and power to run these VTR machines and related support systems. It also takes a lot of money to be able to buy the replacement parts to keep them going. It also takes a lot of experience and knowledge to maintain and run these machines. I used to work on the VTR machines starting in the early 70's. I am very familiar with what this engineer is doing.
It's amazing how many mechanical and electrical sub-systems had to work together for these machines. Not to mention how skilled operators needed to be just to run them.
I remember as a kid watching network television when machines more often than one would think ate the tape. That "we are experiencing technical difficulties" would repeat over and over. I haven't seen or heard that message in 20 years!
It's amazing and scary how much technology has advanced since then. Now, everything this machine does is basically a standard feature on most any cell phone.
I found this after watching "Hendrix: Live At Woodstock", on blu-ray. There is an extra CV section of the video...They apparently shot video at the show as well. They added it as a nice little extra, although they had to interlace it with film footage, as it dropped out constantly...Searching around for "CV" info......Thank you....
We had four of these at channel 26 in Houston in the 1970's. One shared electronics with one of our two TCR 100 cartridge machines. We got our first 1 inch machines in 1979. The early ones had a compatibility issue, the tapes from the Ampex and Sony machines were not interchangeable. The SMPTE had to establish a standard before many stations would take a chance on them. It was called "type C" 1 inch.
@Boeing744andRCAquad The MBT guys and I were discussing this topic last night. Long story short, it's getting more difficult as time progresses for someone who did not work with this technology because a thorough knowledge of analog broadcast video is a prerequisite and not taught nor mentored anymore. These machines were a tight amalgamation of mechanical engineering, electro-mechanical servo theory and analog/FM signal processing. Mentoring is probably the only path left.
I love it. I trained on a TR 60 at the CBC in the early 90s. We had to learn how to use everything they had in case news needed something from the archives that hadn't been bumped to Dbeta yet. Good times.
+Jasper Van Der Blint Thank you kindly. This is my most popular video. If you want to make a good video, put someone profoundly interesting in front of your camera. You can't fail. I'd like to express my heartfelt thanks to John Turner one more time. The world could use a couple more of him.
I was recently notified that the "music" I used in this video is in violation of copyright. So be warned. I got the riff with my legally purchased Corel Video Studio editing software. I assumed it was generic music to use as I see fit. OBVIOUSLY NOT. Also, now note there is advertising on my video. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE TO ME. If I could, I'd strip the music from this video. Unfortunately, this will reset the view counter back to zero. And being my most popular video, that does not set well with me. So, in conclusion, DO NOT use any stock music or graphics in your personal videos or some leech will attach itself to your hard work. I wonder who is getting the money for the ads I DID NOT authorize being placed in my work? That video cost me personally several thousand dollars in travel, lodging and other expenses to produce.
Sir can you tell me who claimed your video ? was it some useless network called Music baby or some other , please give me the name because i feel your pain and they tried several times with me to , until i send Apple on them , that sound you are using belongs to the royalty free collection and these networks are so useless to have contracted everyone that makes a song with Garageband (This sample comes from there to what i could hear) so they can place copyright complains via the Failing Content ID of RU-vid , so get back to me as soon as possible , fantastic video by the way , keep up the good work
O yea sir and get a old MAC PC they are cheap so you can install Garageband all samples are free ,I will make a video about Corel Video editing , will call them to and ask them why they steal from Apple
I got that strike removed (It's The Orchard Music...Sony basically) by pointing out where I found it and that I had and still have no intentions of making a profit over telling the story of building a bicycle I found. Maybe they are more critical about songs than sound effects. But that was several years ago.
Very good job Rich! Now there is a place i would like to spend a day or two. We must keep this kind of thing alive and pass it on to those of us that are younger so that it is not LOST.
We had TR70's in oour tape room and a TR60 in the production truck due to its "compact" size. These machines were complicated servo lock devices. But RCA had it figured out! They were actually pretty reliable considering the complexity. Unlike TR600's and TCR100's! Thank you for posting.
Hi Born in 1990 , is well known that PAL is better than NTSC , no doubt about it but this system was fully compatible with th old black and white sets and forgot the fact that whitout NTSC Telefunken would not have be able to invent PAL because is a system that NTSC based =)
It is interesting that after enabling the line lock, the TV was able to decode the NTSC color information which was not doable before (NTSC color is phase-shift-based, so without exact timebase correction there won't be useful color information the TV could use).
Correct. When we used LL on a dodgy tape, it was precolour here, we started the road to colour in the mid 70s and were fulltime colour (PAL) in 76, but we did a lot of on air testing before then. We were warned that LL was now an absolute last resort as it would remove the colour from the signal.
This thing is so freaking cool- by today's standards its just so needlessly overcomplicated, but all the funky switches, dials, meters, CRT's and spinning tape reels just makes it look so satisfying to use, its like your in the control room of the death star!
Ah the memories - I worked with one of these for 4 years back in the 70's. We had 3 of these and an old 70. 5 second pre-roll, the lockups, banding all of it. You'd be in the control room, this'd be outside with air cooling. All would be well, then the of the heads sawing over a crease in the tape, then splat. Two spools in oposite directions :) If I had a buck for every tape threaded onto this... (instead of the pennies at the time). Those were the days :)
Also, we had a Spanish programming block every evening...the tapes were recorded at half speed. The TR-60's would play them, but needed a special video head, so every night just before the Spanish shows, I would have to remove the head drum on one of the machines, and replace it with the special half-speed heads. Since we only had one playback machine, we would pull off and replace both reels during a station break and rewind the played shows on another machine.
@Sebastian Guevara This was at Channel 26 in Houston from 1976 to 1979. We only did 3 hours a night of Spanish programming, all from tape. We were not part of a network. There was not a full time Spanish station in Houston at that time.
@Sebastian Guevara I worked in TV stations in Texas from 1976 until I retired in 2014. I did radio before that. I saw a great deal of change over those years.
@Sebastian Guevara KWEX was our source for the Spanish tapes. That was the only experience I had with Spanish programming. I left Houston to work for a CBS station and then spent my final 15 years at the ABC station in Austin.
Thanks for this video. Though I never ran a TR60, I did use TR4, TR22 and TR70 (of various configurations). You are reminding me of all the problems. Great Job!
I used 2 tr 60s at my job until 1999 when replaced our 2 TR 60s and 2 1200s with a textronix profile video server , i had to replace tape constantly on our episodic reels due to dropouts , and they hated saturated red colors.. my commercials had pink supers until the digital age, we fed our quads with ampex vpr2b and Panasonic MIIs
How cool it would have been to be in 'on the ground floor' in the development and use of this amazing equipment. I can see a lot of challenge working at a TV station in those days but at the same time you pioneering the use of really novel new tech.
Wow, seems a very complicated machine. But I have no doubts it had to be that way at the time, so full control could be taken of playback. Great video.
I bow to your technical expertise, but ONE SECOND for a TR-60!? I've had experience with much more beat up RCA Quad TVRs, I guess. THANKS for this video. It's unreal to see an HD video of an old quad machine...makes my brain disconnect a bit.
Like all great "inventions", the rotary head video tape recorder is a condensation of the work of dozens of previous people. The team at Ampex was made of six fellows and the ideas of at least a dozen others. But, like yeah. Totally mind boggling. Especially given the era.
@@videolabguy Yes plural men involved ;) I still find it fascinating that as a team they could design the system as a whole. I come from the audio production side as a studio owner and producer so I am familiar with the use of tape in reel to reel machines. Still have a 16 trk unit here. Just as a visual piece though.
PAL has better spatial resolution (100 extra lines) and decent control over chroma (there was no "hue" dial on PAL sets.) But it had poorer temporal resolution (25 fps vs 29.97 fps) which made PAL flicker to an eye used to NTSC. at least for the few minutes it took for my eyes to adjust. It did make telecine easier - no need for pull down.
Great video we had one of these in the TV station I worked at in the 80s. Ours never looked that good. Anytime there was a large section of solid color in the screen we got sort of banding effect. For example red would like it had yellow lines running through it. Sometimes you could get rid of it, sometimes not.
I saw Cap'n Gus (the show on the first part of the reel) on KENS, Ch. 5 in San Antonio, in the early 60s. It was a typical early afternoon children's cartoon show. The rest seems to be an interview of the host not in his ships captain's costume, which curiously appeared to be made of satin.
You needed to be an engineer to operate this. The world has changed, in so many ways, since 1969. Now TV reporters, in the field, are their own camera man/woman. This is the case at CTV Atlantic.
Thank you for your comment. An advanced technician is adequate. My very first job in silicon valley was aligning head assemblies for both Ampex and RCA machines. It is complex and precise. But, very doable with the proper tools. Operating the machines themselves, though highly detailed, isn't so difficult with proper training.
I never worked with the 2 inch quad, some people I worked with did and they told me how complex they were. I mostly worked with the 1 inch C format: Ampex VPR 6, an VPR 80 and the king of 1 inch formats, the VPR 3. It was really sad to see these machines go by the wayside.
Used to drive a couple of these at GTS 4 in Port Pirie, South Australia in the early to mid 70s. Later they added a TCR100 Quad Cart machine that 'borrowed' some of the TR60's onboard electronics to do much of the work. The TCR100 was kinda twitchy but the 60s were fairly reliable, if the tape was up to it (some that had done the rounds of Australian TV stations over a number of years weren't, (World Championship Wrestling was a common offender) we'd have to drop it from Pixlock to Linelock to get it (relatively) stable enough to air. In extreme cases of oxide shedding, we had to hold a pad of alcohol soaked linen against the heads while it was running every minute or two when the pic threatened to breakup completely. We used a 7 second preroll to give it time to lock up, sometimes it needed every second, but new tapes were more likely to be rock solid after 2 or 3.
Do you perform transfers for people who have rare 2" videotapes in their possession, before those tapes deteriorate? There ought to be a grant to have these videos copied before the video is lost forever.
I did a calculation of the pixels per square inch for quad vs pixels per square inch for HD digital video on a micro SD card. Quad was 15 in/sec and 2" wide = 30 in^2 / sec = 1 frame per in^2. It was SD, not HD, so 720x480 px / frame = 345.6 Kpx / in^2. Consider HD video encoded with H.264 at 10 Mb/s, and a 512 GByte = 4096 Gbit micro SD card. Micro SD cards are 25 in^2, so 4096 / 25 = 164 Gb/in^2. At 10 Mb/s we consume 164G/10M = 16777 sec / in^2. At 30 fps, that's 559 frames / in^2. Each frame is 1920x1080, so that's 1.2 Gpx / in^2. We considered a PACKAGED memory chip. If we consider just the naked chip, the density goes from 164 Gb/in^2 to the current 1 Tb/in^2, a 6.24 factor increase. Now the pixel density is 1.2 Gpx * 6.24 = 7.5 Gpx / in^2. Quad: 346 Kpx / in^2 H.264 on micro SD: 7.5 Gpx/in^2 A 22707 factor improvement in areal pixel storage density.
+Norm Hurst In the 1973 publication, "Petersen's guide to Video Tape Recording", the author, Charles Bensinger, looked forward to the far future and accurately predicted the combination camera/recorder or camcorder. But, most importantly, he predicted that solid state memories would eventually be the recording medium. As a teen back then, and like teenagers today, I scoffed at such a notion. Today, my camcorders fit in a pants pocket and records gorgeous 1080p for over 16 hours on one 64GB memory card! In about 1960, or so, Richard Feynamn wrote the seminal article in the coming age of miniaturization. Now that I see the error of my ways, it makes me wonder how dense data recording will ultimately get before we hit the next barrier? Original quad video tape specs were based upon getting about 1,000 magnetic reversal per linear inch of recorded track. The usual measure for analog video recording densities was expressed in square inches per hour.
i feel like the odd man out, ok just saying. but really,this stuff is so facinating i cant stop wathing . i've been interested in this type stuff for as long as i can remember thank you for posting this and all the others. and i'm in total agreement with the youngster [qahtani] who states he would hang out and not miss a thing for just for some insight on the subject
I believe All in the Family was the 1st sitcom to use iso format during production - 4 cameras, each being separately recorded by a dedicated 1" helical machine. Final master tape was edited from those 4 separate 1" tapes.
The pictures are not moving. Just like film, its a bunch of still images flashed at your eye faster than you can perceive. Also, because a TV signal is 210 times more information than a hi fidelity audio signal, you need to write and read it from the tape that much faster too. That's why the four heads spin at 14,400 RPM and write tracks sideways across the tape, each head records about 18 TV lines and it takes 8 rotations of the head wheel to record one frame of video. The to tape speed is just over 1,000 inches per second or 56.8 MPH. Pretty cool that they thought that up in the 1950s.
I love all this old tech. I've always had a fascination with old and new tech for a very long time now. I even own a vic 20, atari 600xl, and a commodore 64. I would like to get an texas instruments computer i also once considered building a DOS machine , since i'm not really satisfied with the imperfections of emulation . But space is a problem for me.
In the mid80's I was broadcasing one or two.tapes a day with tr-60 .thay gave graet quality picture once the 4 heads allighned douring that year they startad transfering to umstic
If I had the money and space, I'd record a lot of my material on one of these bad boys, then upscale it. The quadruplex look is beautiful, in my humble opinion.
My favorite part is the loss of audio, proving to me that audio has always been the red haired step son of video, 2 sentences and the hell with it. Far as I can tell you huys never gave it a second thought so typical. Johnny Carson started stereo recording his show BEFORE the advent of stereo broadcast. Some have it some don't.
@TwinMillMC True. However, you could not hide inside your cellphone in the event of a nuclear blast and be protected... On a more serious note, where is this warehouse?
Question. Was this video tape recorder also used to record a TV station's programming throughout the day or was it only used to record a certain TV program to playback on the station?
This tape format was used for all programming for over thirty years in the network centers and right down to the local small station level. These were the work horses of the television broadcast industry.
eyeh8nbc you are soooooooo right! Most TV shows today are trash. I miss the days of Dragnet and the Ed Sullivan Show as well as Emergency. Why has TV changed so much?
That was pure American craftsmanship and beauty those machines had to do thousands of passes a month and kept on now your 3000 dollar p.o.s hd tv might last 4 years because of crap Chinese manufacturing how disgusting.
turn on the monochromator... colimator... detonator... alternator...motor...motorgenerator...flux capacitor...reactor...inductor like a retro scifi movie
@TwinMillMC what!? do you mean to say that all this equipment is in China? For what reason? Was this the equipment that the Chinese used thirty-forty years ago?
That is actually one of the more compact models. The size was determined by the available 1953 technology and by the recording format itself. A one hour tape is two inches wide and 54,000 inches (.85 miles) long. It travels through the deck at 15 inches per second. In one second, there are thirty frames of video which takes one half inch of tape. Width times length (2 x .5) gives us 1 square inch per frame. One hour (2 x 54,000) works out to 108,000 square inches per hour or 375 square feet of tape. The reel of tape is massive and heavy. They require very large motors to spin them and these, in turn, require battleship plate steel for support so the motor torque doesn't twist the deck into a pretzel when placed into fast forward. The capstan motor could do your laundry! All of these big motors need huge motor controller units plus all the video and audio electronics. The TR-60 is a late 60s unit. Compared to the original, this is pocket size. The smallest these machines, Ampex VR-3000, could be carried by one strong person. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yE4XJM7BLXs.html
videolabguy and the vr-3000 was a record only machine. They only had confidence playback. They ask had no erase stack, so the tapes needed to be bulk erased before use
And AVR-3s which were an outgrowth of the ACR-25 technology. Air column tensioning, vacuum capstan and color picture about 6 frames (200 msec) after you hit play
