Yep I know U-matic well and have been using it since the late 1970's and still using it today during archival transfers. I'm slowly working through hundreds of Low & High Band tapes some of which are a challenge and can take a day to get digitised 100% perfect. Constant head and guides cleaning, baking...you name it! One tip I have is to also check the inside guides of the cassette itself. Most of that screeching noise can also come from those guides getting clogged up and not necessarily always the machine. I ran the TV Studio at Imperial College London for nearly 45 years and in retirement I'm digitising that archive and an associated one. I also write a 'video archive blog' for Imperial about all of this and have written a lot about the pitfalls of transfers. If you ever come across anyone with access to an AMPEX Type A format, One Inch VTR (1960's - 70's) then do let me know - I have loads of these tapes "suspended in time" with no machine available and that's sad. Getting machines of any type fully serviced is starting to be a problem and who knows how long head-drums will be available as replacements. 🤓
The Tip with the Guides inside the Housing is strong. It´s the same Problem with "VCR"-Format-Cassetes from the Grundig/Philips Format. We always open these kind of Cassettes and clean up everything...😀
this is a flash back to my college years. You haven't lived until you've lugged a umatic portable vtr, dxc3000 camera and tripod around by yourself. Oh and I forgot the light kit and microphones for interviews lol. This was at the very end of umatic in the early.90s. We only had 2 hi8 camcorders and someone else always had them checked out.
I remember during the mid seventies seeing u-matic machines being used by the RAF at air displays to show promotional videos. Over the years, I have occasionally seen some machines for sale but their size is off putting (not much room left in my house) so never really investigated them. Thank you for your video, it has answered the questions I had and some I hadn't thought of yet !
You're right about using the dub connector in tandem with the composite to obtain colour. I have the For.A 330P TBC that has S-video inputs that can be configured via a dip switch to accept dub input via a dub to S-video cable, but the composite cable has to be connected as well. As for ringing, I find that ringing is greatly reduced using dub rather than composite. I avoid composite at all costs.
We use For.A 310Ps and I've not run them in this configuration but the connectors shows the composite and S-Video connector used in tandem with the switch in one position, standard 4.43 SVideo in the other. I guess the idea was to remove two hetrodyning stages when connecting two UMatic machines together for dubbing as it could go baseband-baseband between tapes?
pointing out the umatic ringing whenever you see feels a bit like pointing out tube/valve based cameras (as opposed to CCD sensor based) 😄... that distinctive streaking of bright objects (think studio lights, or bright reflections from mic stands etc) when panning the camera, often (but not always) with a red afterglow/ghost. very common in music videos from the 70s and into the 80s
Wow, U-Matic takes me back... I remember working on the Sony & JVC's way back then... I recall back here in Australia when there were modified U-Matics that would use Hi-Band; they were notorious to keep them aligned so they were compatible with Hi-Band. Starting to feel old now :( Still have nightmares of repairing the old J-Standard reel to reels when they were monochrome.
Well the effect with the sharpness control makes perfect sense. It's probably a digital filter. Digital filters of higher orders can have a notch characterristic at certain frequencies. It's likely that at a certain setting that notch is exactly at the right position to eliminate ringing. Essentially what you want would be a de-convolution filter which counteracts the filtering effects of the VCR. However honestly I'd get the raw signal from the heads to do that. AFAIK, U-Matic didn't yet do any of those fancy "Detail Enhancer" systems where they apply more preemphasis for lower signals. Well U-Matic, like all "colour under" formats has weird chroma formats. One problem, for example, is that the FM modulated luma acts as the bias for the shifted down chroma. So the frequency response and level of your chroma signal will change with your luma signal.
Still have found memories when studying TV, in the very early 90s, all students in the beginning still had to work on U-MaticSP. Sony in outside ENG and JVCs in the studio. Only after lugging that heavy metal for a few months, showing skills and grades, could anyone evolve to BetacamSP. I did became an independent TV Director, since then it has been my profession. That Digital audio U-Matic, for early CD mastering, is a real jaw dropper. Cheers 🇵🇹
Here's one other issue to mention about U-Matic tapes which I've only started to experience recently. The splice that holds the magnetic tape to the leader tape on older U-matic tapes (say, pre-1985) have a tendency to break apart if you rewind them to the beginning. For tapes of this age, I will rewind them to somewhere near the beginning, and then use the shuttle control to move them to the start of the recorded material.
23:04 around 1970 Agfa made a videotape, that disintegrated later. For the TV station does it mean, they lost the shows from this time and for Agfa, that they had to pay and so they went bankrupt. I heard from a case, where a home movie hobbyist was allowed, to film the show, his family recorded the sound from television to tape and later they used modern computer technology to reconstruct few of the lost shows, also filling the gaps by photos or the record cover. I watched the video, it was interesting to see the show from the live audience's perspective and also to see, what the host does while the live performance, smiling, listening, smoking and drinking some beer. Was 1970 and television showed cigarette advertisements and beer drinking while work was usual.
Great video I have two umatic machines so your your video’s are very interesting and helpful. I have overhauled both my umatic machines by watching your videos Thank you Colin Melville west Australia
I absolutely love your channel. Thanks so much for posting stuff like this, my brain just takes in all this info and it helps to make my capture systems so much better!
During the first five years of my career and broadcast television, three-quarter inch was the default format that we shot all our field tapes on. We used a RCATK 76C camera that weighed about 25 pounds, and a Sony BVU 110 Field recorder that was about 30 pounds. Add to that batteries, lights, other peripheries and I usually walked around with about 120 pounds of gear. If you can compare the quality of the image I recorded to my current iPhone 14 Pro Max, let's just say no way.
Haha, my first edit suite was based around a 2 machine lo-band U-matic Sony 2630 or similar with an RM88U controller plus a VO4800 and Sony M3 camera. I later replaced it with a 3 machine SVHS Panasonic suite AG7750 with TBC and a 2 chip SVHS WV-F70 camera/recorder. Still using Panasonic cameras to this day :-)
Our high school had a 'new' U-Matic top-loader for doing AV presentations as part of English and Socials classes, and an older 1/2" portable reel-to-reel one as well. Lots of military, educational and industrial users had vast instructional libraries transferred from 16mm film to U-Matic which hung around for eons until transfers were done to VHS. I've got a really early U-Matic JVC top-loader donated to me by one of the local video production houses trying to make some room, and bought a military surplus Sony top-loader years ago which unfortunately didn't make it through the trials and tribulations of changing lodgings.
Never seen a top-loader U-matic because they are less useful than the later models, but it would be fun to play with one. Don't have the space for any more big video recorders though.
These For.A 300 series TBCs (and Panasonic rebranded ones) have leaky capacitors in the power supply (as in physically leaky). I got three of these for repair, one was dead (because bad capacitors), the other two worked fine but the caps started to leak already and one started acting up a few months ago, which was then given to me to fix and here too the caps have leaked enough to impair functionality. So if you get one of these and it works, recap the PSU. I'm pretty sure the primary cap is still good, but all the secondary caps have leaked.
Aha, I've also noticed the ringing pattern on Umatic tapes as well. I also agree with the AMPEX and 3M/Scotch opinions where those tapes don't seem to be holding up as well as the Sony ones.
In PAL countries, there are 3 types of U-matic videotape. Low-Band, High-Band, and U-matic SP. In NTSC, there are only two, which were low-band and U-matic SP.
@@video99couk Yep. Anyway, U-matic Low-band offered 250 lines of resolution (much like Betamax) and formulated in oxide, and both high-band (only for PAL) and SP variants are oxide (again) and chromdioxid respectively, but all have 330 lines of horizontal resolution.
I find a dramatic irony in Ampex tapes being unreliable given without Ampex and the spinning head drum videotape wouldn't even exist. I believe poor magnetic retention on Scotch tapes exist on all formats (so that stop motion skeleton was full of crap), although saying that I have some pre recorded cassettes that come on Scotch stock which date back as early as the mid 80s which still play fine.
24:17 So one could call it tape dementia? I heard about this about audio tapes. So some music comes to CD by using a record, because this sounds better, than the audio tape, that lost treble. Or sometimes they have to restore the sound by applying exciter or comparable AI based restoration tools and also remove noise by frequency selective expansion or also AI based tools. When the plug ins can split the recording into a multi track and without the effects, that it sounds like noise reduction or weak telephone connection, they can also turn something, where above 10 kHz you hear only some hiss into something, that possibly could stand an A B comparison (if it would possible to find a tape with proper sound) or could sound better than the original ever could sound.
By the way, when tape dementia makes it impossible to play the video tape, possibly somebody recorded it on home video. I'm from Germany and many content from the television history isn't lost, because East Germany watched West German television and recorded it onto film and the same the opposite way. After the unification they put both libraries together. Some shows would be lost, because it would have been too expensive to record them or to store them instead the re-use of video tape. Before the availability of consumer video formats with 120 minutes non stop, to record a feature movie, only few people had two video tape machines to let the wife record some interesting movies or shows. At this time, the tapes were extremely expensive, also too expensive for people, who could afford reel to reel tapes.
On 3/4", is the capstan used during fast forward and fast rewind? I've got two BVU-110 models that will thread a tape, fast forward and fast rewind, but as soon as you go into play, there is no tape movement and the servo LED lights up. Accessing the belts looks like a massive pain in the rear since I have to remove the system control board. The capstan motor uses a belt, a flywheel and a pulley, and there's also a "FWD belt" according to the service manual, which I assume drives the reels? Or is there just a fault on the servo circuit? I've got an analog oscilloscope so I can't imagine troubleshooting the circuit should be that hard with a service manual and schematic. Also I should mention there is no threading motor, it's done by the capstan motor and since that section works, so the capstan motor itself is okay I guess. But I'm not sure if it's driving the actual capstan.
I don't remember anything that's related to U-matic, especially the TV broadcasts from Ukraine (our home country). Many Ukrainian broadcasters never used anythying related to the U-matic format to get the material broadcastedon the air. I remember seeing something from a Betacam SP videotape, being broadcasted on Ukrainian TV back then, but Betacam SP, since then, has become an obsolete format for broadcasting programs on TV.
21:40 Why was that, even on BetaED? You think it would be easy to improve the color too. Also does anyone know the luminance resolution for the various Quad formats? Can't find that anywhere.
ED-Beta has a normal S-Video Output, which avoids Interference between Luma and Chroma during Playback. Quadruplex Machines must be able to record at least 5.43 Mhz for a Frequency-modulated PAL CVBS Signal, since Sidebands form around the 4.43 Mhz Color Carrier that reach at least as far as the Color change Speed (1 Mhz typ). The SONY BVH-3000 User Manual says 5 Mhz (+- 0.5 dB) and 5.5 Mhz (-3 dB).
My experience of Umatic? If I recall correctly I bought a lovely pair of machines in 2003 or 2004. I even drove all the way to Lymington with the Mrs. Nice day out. After a few tapes I just thought "Sod this for a game of soldiers!" Then I think I sold them to you and we have been firm friends (I hope) ever since. I just decided the upkeep of the machines like Umatic / Beta / V2000 / N1500 was too high, fragile and difficult. I was really getting to grips with cine films and one awkward format type was as much as I wanted to focus one...
I thought I bought just one machine from you, back in the day. It's not one of the machines I'm presently using but is still in good working order and available for occasional use. By the way, you donated a monitor/TV to me a few years back and it broke down over the weekend, so you can watch me tearing my fingers to pieces getting it apart to repair it in my next RU-vid video.
I really want to have a U-matic equipment or a 2'' quadruplex VT, but in Brazil, where I live, it's extremely difficult to find it. It's a shame the memories of our country are being erased in these media.
You can probably get hold of a U-matic machine from USA for sensible money. Make sure that you get an Umatic-SP capable machine if any of your tapes may be SP. A 2" Quad machine is not likely to be so easy to find.
21:40 - "500 lines of resolution, which is like, DVD quality" DVD is digital video, and if its resolution were measured the same way that analog video is ("TV lines") then its TVL would inherently be the same as its horizontal pixel count, i.e., 720 TVL. If you put up a test pattern on a DVD and you only come up with 500 TVL, then it's due to a limitation of your monitor and/or the video connection you're using. It's easy to demonstrate that DVD is inherently 720 TVL. Simply make a 720 x 480 bitmap in MS Paint or whatever, containing 720 vertical lines (360 black lines separated by 360 white lines, each line being 1 pixel wide). You should be able to distinguish each line on your computer monitor, which means you could also distinguish each line if you encoded a bunch of copies of that bitmap to an MPEG-2 video file (DVD) at the maximum bitrate allowed by the DVD-video standard and viewed it on the same monitor.
The reason is that the TVL lines is resolution per vertical height, so you need to take into account the aspect ratio which uses the "Kell Factor" of 0.7. Hence 720x0.7 = 504 lines.
@@video99couk Kell Factor doesn't have anything to do with aspect ratio, it has to do with the display type. 0.7 is used for CRTs. 0.9 is used for digital displays, e.g., LCD. So 720 x 0.9 = 648. Those are approximations though and it can also be disproven by the fact that a DVD can be viewed on a PC, and even with a PC CRT monitor, every line in a 720 x 480 image containing 720 vertical alternating black and white lines can be distinguished. I know it's a fact because I've tested it on my PC + CRT monitor. I see a minor moire pattern when viewing it, but it's not prominent enough to prevent me from being able to distinguish each line. Try it yourself if you have a CRT PC monitor. Set your desktop resolution to e.g. 800 x 600 and view the DVD containing 720 vertical alternating black and white lines without stretching it to fill the screen. Also, use a media player for which you can control what it's doing with the aspect ratio. Some media players automatically resize 4:3 DVDs to 640 x 480, which would ruin the test. You want it to resize to 720 x 540 using "nearest neighbor" resizing (so you don't get any blur from e.g., a bicubic resizing algorithm).
@@video99couk I get what you're saying now. You threw me off with "Kell Factor," which has nothing to do with horizontal resolution. But you're right that you take aspect ratio into account when talking about lines per height, so for DVD it's 720 × 0.75 = 540 TVL. You multiply by 0.75 because that gives you the number of TV lines over three-quarters the width of the screen, which is equal to the picture height when you have a 4:3 aspect ratio. Here's a quote from Michael Robin, a fellow of the SMPTE and former engineer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s engineering headquarters, [who] is an independent broadcast consultant located in Montreal, Canada. He is co-author of 'Digital Television Fundamentals,' published by McGraw-Hill and translated into Chinese and Japanese: ---------- "The horizontal resolution defines the capability of the system to resolve vertical lines. [...] In a 4:3 aspect ratio television system, it is expressed as the number of distinct vertical lines, alternately black and white, which can be satisfactorily resolved in three quarters of the width of a television screen." ---------- Kell Factor only applies to vertical resolution (defined by the number of scan lines in analog video, or the number of vertical pixels in digital video), and with a CRT it's 0.7. So for DVD, if viewed on a CRT, its vertical resolution is 480 × 0.7 = 336. Here is another quote from Michael Robbins: ---------- "Ideally, the vertical resolution would be equal to the number of active lines per frame. This would happen if the scanning lines were centered on the picture details. However, the scanning lines cannot be assumed to occupy a fixed position relative to vertical detail at all times. Complete loss of vertical resolution will occur when the scanning spot straddles picture details. From subjective data, obtained with progressive (non-interlaced) scanning, it has been found that the vertical resolution is equal to 70 percent (the Kell factor) of the number of active lines. In the NTSC standard, there is a total of 525 lines per frame, of which about 40 are blanked, leaving, typically, about 485 active lines per frame. Given a Kell factor of 0.7, the effective vertical resolution is: NV = 0.7 × 485 ≈ 339" ---------- Like I said before though, Kell Factor is an approximation because it's subjective, and for CRTs some sources have said 0.7 and other sources have said 0.85. 0.7 seems to be the most widely accepted value though.
I hate U-Matic videos. I worked in a small studio in the 80's, (promos/ads for local businesses/videos for local bands), and we had 5 realy old top loading U-Matics. Machine 3 was always in bits as it constantly broke down. Everyone kept asking the boss/owner to get Betacams, but he always insisted the quality was'nt as good. Great place to work, horrible video machines. :)
I have not tested it because I don't have a dub cable and my Hi-8 video deck with dub out needs work but an IDEN IVT-7 will convert dub to S-VIDEO like those mentioned.
A dub cable, interesting, have you seen them with RCA/S-Video/BNC on the other end? because I have one machine that only has this kind of connector as I/O.
Yes I've seen them with S-Video at one end. That's because JVC made some SVHS machines with S-Video outputs which could be changed to DUB with an option card installed. It does NOT mean that S-Video and DUB are in any way compatible at a signal level.
Thanks for yet another very helpful video. I still wonder, If DUB is to be made a difference when playing out, isn't it also supposed to be recorded via DUB ? I mean, if a tape is recorded via composite it would not get any better that that, played on either DUB or composite would it ?
The odd sharpness control effect is interesting, some kind of resonance but opposite in polarity maybe, or not lol. I know nothing about it really. I like composite video but seperate chrominance / luminance seems better. Composite = Compromise.
Voiced over by Deryck Guyler if I remember right, I always thought the advert was a bit macabre. The video tapes didn't seem to perform as well as TDK for instance and the Scotch compact cassettes were terrible...always seem to jam.
Lifetime guaranteed to be replaced (in brackets, as long as the format remains current). That get-out clause means they don't have to replace any more tapes now.
Sony made D1, but I think the format was originally developed by Ampex. There were two other 3/4 inch digital formats, Ampex DCT which was a little used compressed component format, and D6, an extremely rare high definition format with machines only made in very small numbers. All four formats used very similar looking cassettes, but the tapes were different, D1 used oxide tape while D2 was metal for example, and there were probably some ident holes so the machine could identify that the right cassette had been loaded. These cassettes came in three sizes and the large one was huge, the library case actually had a carrying handle on it.
I have a sony vo96009p it's been in the flight case for nearly 19 years never been used never I have not even turned it on so I don't know if it's working would like to get rid of it
Never a fan of Umatic.. the battleship construction made them ok for running a 10 min demo at an exhibition for a week or so, but for long term storage the long play hour ones were a pain in the neck, the machine sounded as if it was straining to play them and if it did without snapping the picture quality seemed to be fading away.
How do the 'lines' of a video tape map to the horizontal lines of the output or do they not. I've never understood how 220, 230, 250 lines are expanded to 525 lines or is this totally misunderstanding what's going on?
This used to confuse me, too. The explanation is, the one value are indeed horizontal lines, but the other (lower) value are vertical lines. The horizontal lines are defined by the television system, so it is always the same. The vertical lines are not part of the system, they are just a specific video signal: A test pattern made up from alternating black and white vertical lines, that are increasingly close to each other from one end of the screen to the other. Eventually the lines are so close to each other that they can no longer be resolved, and the pattern looks just grey on the screen. And this point, where the pattern of black and white lines fades into grey, is the maximum resolution of the system that's playing back the test pattern.
@@DrCassette Thank you, so when we talk about 'Ines' of resolution on analog systems, we're talking horizontal resolution not vertical. Seems like a poor choice of word for the industry calling them lines when that was already a term used for horizontal lines and given that they aren't lines so much as points on a line.
I always thought the ringing you talk about is due to PAL to NTSC Conversion. You see it constantly in music videos that were recorded in UK/EU studios That used PAL then the video was played in the U.S. (after ntsc conversion) then uploaded to RU-vid. I have a classic example of this on my channel. This bowie video I got 2nd generation copy 1" type c PAL then converted to NTSC then to digital an uploaded to the official bowie channel in terrible quality. My video ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8RXtqIEYFVY.html and the official ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-HyMm4rJemtI.html
If I may, I'll share my U-matic NTSC transfer system to digital. I have a BVU-950, dub-out connector to a DPS-275 time base corrector. Y, R-Y, B-Y out of the TBC to a Sony DVCam DSR-45 Y, R-Y, B-Y in. The DSR-45 is used as a E-E transfer only to firewire out to my computer, capturing the file as a .AVI with the WinDV freeware program. In my opinion, the best possible transfer results for U-matic. If someone has another transfer equipment recipe, let me know...
I use a very similar system for PAL: VO-9800P, Dub cable to DPS-375, then three possible routes. For DV signal goes S-Video to DSR-25 in E-E. OR YUV cables to Sony DVW-A500P DigiBeta in E-E mode, SDI out to computer OR as above but SDI to SDI/Firewire bridge.
@@video99coukYes. That should also give excellent results. The power supply died in my DPS-275 last year and as you probably know, finding another working DPS-275 can be next to impossible. Took the power supply out and found someone to do a complete re-cap/rebuild of the power supply. Works good now and probably better than it did in the last 20 years.
Shouldn't that trick with the simultaneous DUB and composite connection work with any S-Video input? I mean there's clean luma on the DUB connector and the S-Video input shouldn't care about the luma in the composite signal.
Yes they are. 20 years ago they were getting dumped, but now U-matic decks are valuable, at least the SP/High Band ones are. Low Band-only machines still don't have much value.
The difference in output between using the composite connector and the DUB can be quite striking! Here's a screen grab I made a while back to highlight the difference: imgur.com/5ZnPVNe
