It happens. Great video on a subject I know little of. Good God the effort to get rid of occommercials for dups and the clogging tapes. Were you able to save any of the tapes from the "box from hell."
It's on the backburner until after the end of the season. I'm really dreading moldy tape duty this year--I think it's some 30 tapes. Obviously, not everything is getting transferred.
I could never have imagined that I would be looking for tapes recorded with commercials in them and fast forward through the program to the next commercial break, Strange times.
The videos by Ray Glasser and the late Kerry Decker are a fascinating look into the life of videophiles who bought into Betamax early, used it heavily to trade copies of TV shows and movies with fellow enthusiasts, and stuck with it until the bitter end. Ray had a collection of up to 2500 Beta tapes until he started thinning it out in recent years.
As a teen in the early 90s I mastered the VHS real time recording editing and I remember the frustration if a commercial break took long enough for the 'pause' to jump to 'stop'
I was in an Atari computer version of that Ohio collector club as an early teen. We would all haul our TV sets and computers to a community center meeting room on a military base in Japan. The club officers would bring the club's library of software and you could check a disk at a time out of the library to use (or more often copy). Often, the disks couldn't be copied by normal disk drives due to copy protection, but at least one member had something called a Happy Drive, which was a disk drive specifically designed for pirating games (created by the brother of one of the most famous adventure game creators of the time, Scott Adams). So, if a Happy Drive owner had time and liked you, he might dupe a disk for you. Otherwise, there were also pre-hacked disks by pirate groups that could be copied without the Happy Drive. Can't believe I hauled a TV, computer, disk drive, and floppies to this group on a regular basis. Near the end of my time going to the group, they finally attracted too much attention for their activities and meetings moved off-base. It was actually a pretty large club with very well attended meetings. You really had to squeeze in.
I remember seeing that Cheap Trick performance on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert. First time hearing the band and I thought they were awesome. Also cool to see the old Dodge Club Cab ad featuring "old man" football star of the Oakland Raiders, George Blanda.
First it was Kate Bush and LaserDisc, now its Cheap Trick and Betamax... throw in some Star Trek on CED and you've pretty much nailed my late 70's and 80's
As soon as I saw Betamax in the title of the e-mail notification, I had to watch this one IMMEDIATELY. And it was even more fascinating than even my already-high expectations. Paused the video to read all of the letters, print ads, etc. I can't get enough of this stuff. The amount of obscure period material you collected here is just astounding. And a shout out for the Ray Glasser material - I've been dropping in on his sites/channels from time to time for probably around 20 years. Absolute top-notch episode - classic OA, among your best. (And I'm REALLY looking forward to the upcoming episode you teased.) THANK YOU!
Once upon a time there was a device that would pause your VCR during the recording of black and white movies. The box would monitor for when the color burst for the ads showed up and pause the recording, worked until the TV broadcasters got wise and just left it on all the time.
I remember the cost of videotape back then. My parents spent anywhere from $14/18 on a blank VHS tape, hence we needed to record 3 movies per tape to make it worthwile.
Another great episode--I could watch this stuff all day. I recently found a tape from circa 1989-1990 that contained the last half of "Airplane II" and a movie called "The Gate" that had all of the original commercials, and I thought I'd died and gone to paradise. Who knew that the ads we used to obsess about cutting out would become lost media in lots of cases!??
Considering how much of YT is preserved commercials from around the globe that would otherwise have been lost to time, don't think we're not grateful to those who taped full off air recordings.
@@Capturing-Memories We really need both for preservation. Studios aren't going to release absolutely everything unaltered, but certainly only a handful of companies are going to release back commercial catalogs.
Indeed, I'm a huge fan of watching old commericals, and follow several channels that frequently upload batches of them like Dave's Archives, and it's amazing the quality footage he manages to pull off the tapes.
Yea you can see the old movies and tv series on modern formats. but a commercial was usually only broadcasted for a few months in one country and then it became obsolete. and commercials provide great insight in how the economy at the time was and the culture of the time and the technology available to consumers. a lot of the details get lost quickly.
Great episode Ben! I'm always astounded (and grateful) that any recordings survive from the early days of home video given the price of tapes let alone any with the ads and ephemera intact. Just yesterday I found a tape with a BBC2 recording from Christmas 1979 which had over an hour of unused space at the end. Whoever recorded that must have been loaded. Anyway I'm off now to read the entire collection of The Videophile. Cheers!
I always wonder about random how random subcultures get created and forgetting over the years. One time, I randomly encountered an old Spanish website of an RPG Maker Community, and was surprised to see they had a Discord Server. Still active too, though can be really quiet sometimes.
Just recorded the recent Svengoolie airing of The Ghost And Mr Chicken on Saturday night onto 📼, and it was pretty much the same process for not recording the commercials. I chose to skip them that night, so I could record the movie with Svengoolie bits in SP mode for a better picture quality on playback. I feel both sides of the coin on the recording commercial issue. I sometimes record interesting ones when I record wrestling, but avoid repeats of same commercial, usually allows me to get 4 episodes of SmackDown on a 6 hr tape on EP mode.
Weird. When I first got my own video recorder, back at the end of the 80's, (yeah, I was a bit of a late starter due to not having been of sufficient age or wealth to have a VCR of my own any earlier in the period when they came into being), I would meticulously record movies and do almost exactly as described when dealing with advertisement breaks. Stopping the tape, rewinding and pausing a frame before the ad caption came on, then pressing, 'record', (I had a machine that would stay paused and switch from play to record without the need to stop the tape heads), then, wait fervently for the ads to finish and press the pause button to carry on recording the movie. Something I got quite good at doing. I preferred recording off the BBC whenever possible, of course, as they had no advert breaks, but would have the annoying habit of talking over the end credits! Something I'm sure they did deliberately.
Always enjoy the Beta videos. Love the obscure info you uncover every time you cover the subject. Definitely in my Top 5 Running mini series that you produce.
We've had some tapes with the commercials cut out of them but our video cassette tape of choice was VHS. That music at the end of Alien is heavenly. It's a sheer contrast to the most tense and scary pieces of music.
I taped a lot of The Soup from 2011 to 2015. I knew how to set the timer, but often I'd try to be home to watch in live remote in hand to start and stop recording.
Such a silly system. My father used to work at a national baker (not banker) and he was given what he called a route book. In this route book he could write up orders for what each specific place on his route wanted, such as how many cinnamon roll packs they wanted. He had a lot of those route books around, so I took one as my own, and recorded my VHS data on them (I still have this information). I would simply just number each tape, and then refer to the route book for the contents of each tape. This made for a fascinating start, and maybe I got 20-30 tapes deep before I stopped it entirely, merely numbering the tapes and thinking I would get around to putting down what was on them in the route book later, which I never did. I think it's largely because I stopped recording tv shows, such as Three Stooges shorts, and just started recording movies, so that with a six-hour tape, I had just three movies on them. I guess when enough tv shows got to be officially on tape, or later dvd, with the increase in quality, I pretty much lost interest in recording anything OTA anymore. Nowadays, I do some OTA recording, but will only record HD of any program I'm interested in. I get most of my free recorded stuff off the net in HD, though sometimes will dabble in 480p. I've bought an awful lot of dvd and BD programs on disc, including the Three Stooges of course. It's really fun to order BD at a pretty cheap price for an entire series, and then see what the series is like, for a series I never watched when it was on (such as X-Files). I just love watching recorded stuff like this, due to it being entirely under my control, and just needing cash to buy it. In many cases, I would prefer to record it free, but then I have all the damn commercials, and that just destroys the mood all so much. I used to do the pausing-as-you-watch syndrome, but that gets to be a drag real fast, and seemed to make more sense back in the frontier days of VHS, when so little of higher quality was available on recorded media. I still remember having that corded remote (a super Panasonic one) and sitting back and trying to remember to hit the pause just when the commercials started. I never got any of my recordings to interact with my computer, other than the fact I love to run the discs through my computer and take snapshots of some of the content. I'm really not into making clips of various scenes, as I figure I can just watch the entire show if I want clips. I also don't understand the prejudice against VHS tapes, because the media wants to make you think they go bad after ten years. Liars! I have tapes 41 years old, and apart from stretching them every once in a while, they seem to play just as well as they always did. I think what I recorded on them is all but useless these days, but I keep them for nostalgia and I see no reason to throw them away, as at least there are bits and pieces of forgotten memories on them, which newer better recordings of the same stuff won't ever have. I'll have to admit, as much as I hate commercials, the fact that those recordings look pretty poor compared to today's HD, the fact they look pretty poor, combined with having the undesirable commercials, puts just a little more value to them than you would suspect. It makes you a little bit more appreciative for what you have now, plus being able to make a glimpse back into your real past. There was a time when that was the best I could manage and it certainly was a thrill. Younger generations just have no idea what a thrill it was to be able to record entire programs for hours on end, and it all be free, whereas before you had nothing like that except the sister recording style of recording audio off the radio that way. I suspect most of us that ever engaged in recording video with pause-as-you-go, started off the same way with their radio and recording that on cassettes. Man, I've been a recording buff for an awfully long time!
Re the vidicraft. Satellite distributed material used touchtones to signal local stations when a break occurred. I think that was changed to a more sophisticated system in the 90's
Hearing about the tendency of early home video owners to try and keep ads out of their recordings is funny to me because I went through a phase of recording stuff onto VHS in 2016 and 2017, and I specificly remember recording the commercials which aired during the Super Bowl LI, while trying to keep as much of the actual game off the tape (I never cared for sports, and I was also looking for a specific commercial, only taping every ad before then because I had no way of knowing when it would show up).
I tried so hard to get my mst3k collection on vhs. Most tapes had four episodes. A few short years later the digital archive was far more attractive. Oh well. I gave the tapes to an old folks home.
I SO remember sitting there with my finger poised over the Pause button as I diligently cut out commercial breaks. I had my 1980 Panasonic with "flying erase heads" so I was able to get fairly clean edits this way. But man do I wish I had all the ads I chopped out! You're right.....at $12 per tape back then, it made sense to save as much recording time as possible by taking out the commercial breaks. These days, if I get a collection of tapes (yard sale, Craigslist ad, etc) all I'm looking for are the ads. I used to have a listing locally on CL asking people if they had a shelf of "home made" tapes from Beta or VHS that they wanted to get rid of and I got a few good batches. I still have several boxes of them to go through but I'm finding that I really need a TBC to make some of the Beta II and VHS SLP recordings even watchable. My YT channel is full of pre-MTV music video shows and vintage ads. I still chuckle watching pre-Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston selling Preparation-H.....Preparation Heisenberg? One weird experience I had was answering an ad on CraigsList offering a Beta deck along with several "home made" tapes. The deck wasn't anything special (it worked) but the tapes were a bit odd. They had titles written on them that sounded vaguely like regular Hollywood movies but.....not quite. When I got home, I discovered that the tapes were dubs of gay porn.😵My gay friend who cuts my hair LOVES to tell that story to his friends!!
One hour just wasn’t enough. It wasn’t like you could accidentally leave it recording after your show ended and get a bunch of stuff that came on after, like a few VHS tapes I have that are six hours straight from one station. All the newscasts I have were “accidentally” recorded that way.
god, i miss tape trading... spent a ton of time from the mid-80's into the mid-90's collecting all kinds of live/unreleased audio & video... the anticipation of new recordings arriving via snailmail alone was worth bottling and selling... still have a bunch of tapes, and 5 different VHS players (two S-VHS, two multi-standard machines and one standard barebones model) and probably close to 20 cassette decks... i still make mixtapes for friends (some get a mixtape AND a tapedeck, if the situation calls for it)... good mixtapes are a lost art, but i digress... just found your channel, and am absolutely geeking out over what i've seen so far... youtube and its instant gratification is great and all, but try and explain the joy found in the process of collecting, well, basically anything, back in the days predating the internet (in the form we now know it as)... i get a lot of eye rolls and sometimes the odd confused puppydog head tilt while my eyes light up as i recall walking home from highschool, turning the corner a block or so up the street from my house, and straining my eyes to see if i could see anything sticking out of the mailbox that looked like a padded mailer of any sort, and the ear-to-ear smile that would happen if i thought i saw something matching that description... it all started with replying to an ad i saw in the back of a Hit Parader (or possibly Circus) magazine sometime in 1986... after that, all bets were off, and my energy was consumed in finding shows i didn't have, tracking down upgrades, maintaining my ever-growing list of acquired recordings, and eventually saving to upgrade the equipment i had so i could make better copies when trading out my stuff to others... now, i have my desktop computer with 72TB of internal storage (no, that wasn't a typo), and i'm constantly tracking down shows/recordings from all the bands i'm interested in (about 95% of which are in lossless formats, hence the stupid amount of harddrive storage)... don't know if i'd have the spare energy to go down the rabbithole that is collecting tv broadcast recordings, but i certainly find what's managed to be preserved pretty fascinating! anywho, LOVE what i've watched so far... you have yourself a brand new subscriber :D take care!
On the subject of the video geeks' debate on whether or not to record commercials, a lot of the off-air D-VHS recordings that have surfaced on RU-vid have the commercials intact
I'm glad the argument about commercials on early Betamax (and to a lesser extent. VHS) tapes was discussed here. This video below says it all. Why VCRs shouldn't have come with Pause buttons! (from August 25/26, 1977 on WCBS New York w/ad break cut off) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6KEsMqKyMyc.html
That’s my video, from a bunch of tapes I got in an EBay lot. I didn’t get a VCR til 1985 but I never cut out the commercials since I considered them historically valuable. This week I’ve been going through movies I taped off independent stations, I can get the movies now on Blu-ray in better quality so the commercials are the main reason to save those tapes.
Years ago watching Ray Glasser's videos I think he said he would record shows/movies/whatever, then copy the show(s) he wanted to another tape to cut out the commercials. I think that was also one of the reasons he was an early adopter of DVRs. I also remember him saying he was one of the first buyers of ReplayTV, a DVR system that I think pre-dated TiVo, so a show could be recorded "digitally", then copy to Beta or whatever the show without the commercials. Maybe if he sees this he'll clarify.
Already mentioned this in a sub comment but it beats repeating that commercial breaks are the most valuable part of most recordings now. Movies back then were usually run off 16mm film and edited for time and content- why would you watch a recording of those now if you can get the same movie on Blu-ray? The point of preserving these recordings is for the commercials and the primitive way they were shown then. Besides the point of taping late night movies was also so you didn’t have to stay up that late!
I came across over 250 Betamax recordings from a Craigslist seller I bought them from, over a year ago. It almost didn't happen because we couldn't agree on a good price. The content is local/network TV from the Pittsburgh, Johnstown, and Steubenville, OH/Wheeling, WV areas. Last night, I actually weeded through them again to get rid of some PBS stuff and dubs from rental copies. Sadly, I currently don't have the proper equipment to transfer/digitize them. What I need is a better Beta player and capture device.
My parents got a zenith branded Sony Betamax in 1977. Tapes were expensive so they did edit out commercials which required pulling a lever on the unit. The times you found commercials was when it was a timer recording. Often those would include the prime time show and keep recording through the local news sometimes even to station sign off.
Any transfers of vhs to dvd r that I used to do more frequently years ago was always mainly to see just what 1980’s to early 90’s commercial breaks my father allowed to remain in the original recording. He was usually quick to edit out the ads, not knowing that is where the good stuff would be for me, lol.
+Oddity Archive; Hi, Ben. Another enjoyable episode of OA. I'm guessing the celebrity pictured (8:38) must be Tom Leste, best known as sweet, slightly clueless, 'Eb' from Green Acres! It was one of those shows I'd watch when I was home (sick) from school- before the game shows came on, starting about 10a (sigh, RiP, all those terrific shows) As for your 'S' (11:58), it possibly meant 'SP', the recording modes/lengths were SP, EP, ELP/SLP (that's 'standard play, extended play, and extended/standard) long play', and you misty likely wanted to record it at the best possible speed you could - and using one tape.
Oh snap, you feature old Art vuolo. I know his history. He first started recording at least by fall of 1976 because recorded the 1976 game between michigan and minnesota. He had to use several tapes because the telecast runs over 2 hrs. He was editing pretty early. he recorded the 1976 Michigan Ohio state game, but with the radio sound. It was not live however because little bits of TV audio exist. He also had connection with the detroit ABC affilate so perhaps he got a copy from them. He also got copies for the 1969 & 1973 Michigan Ohio State games from the ABC affilate. He was shooting with a camcorder as early as 1979. He has a lot of pressbox shot films with the radio audio which in these cases i beleive was a live feed rather than edited. He's still around and has a website.
Did these recording decay very hard or is this just the best they could do in the 70s. because my 90s recordings look way worse than i remember back when they where new. but now they look almost as bad as these 1970s recordings.
I would watch all of your videos and subscribe if you just presented the technology and the story without all of the hyper-geeky layers of sarcasm and irony, which aren't even very humorous, just noise. Sorry to be harsh, but this is just my opinion. The stories are super interesting and your commentary is super annoying.
@@bradmad8346 💯 ... Benny Boy's delivery is the best part. I don't get the midwits that pop up in the comments section of almost every single OA video that don't get Ben's humor.
