Sony Betacam: Not the Beta you're thinking of (it's way better) 

I love Alec's snark. It's part of his charm.

This really is my favorite channel. No unnecessary music. Straight to the point with a little history and with actual object. And the humor.

I was a cameraman during the mid 80s. We were using the Betacam cameras that cost $70000 each. When shooting outdoor, we had to carry the cameras along during lunchtime. We were forbidden to leave the cameras in the vehicle. The Betacam PAL tape ran for 20 minutes only. So at 19 minutes recording point, I had to alert my other partner to focus on the subject. Because I need to replace it with fresh blank tape. Those were the days.

I love the camera shake when he sets the two tape recorders on the table. It really shows how heavy they were

One other *tiiny tiny little* difference between Betamax & Betacam for professional use is that Betacam has a timecode track, which is critical for professional video editing where the ability to reference any specific frame of video is a necessity.

I don't know how you do it, but you manage to make me watch a 40 minute video on something I never cared about once in my life, and you do it consistently. Never seen a channel keep up this quality before, its insane. I love your work man.

I started working in a tv studio this month and there's still a beta VCR in use, a much newer one with mpeg encoding (MSW-A2000P). On the first week they asked me to digitalize an old Betacam L cassette from '86 and with me being born in '95 and grown up with cartoons recorded on VHS from satellite TV i was absolutely blown away for how good the signal looked. Something i never witnessed with consumer analog PAL

As a pro video editor since the 90's I worked all the way from Betacam SP, M2, BetaSX and DigiBeta. Watching this was a joy. Nothing beats those buttons, the sounds of the transports and the fast winding. Many thanks for his video and great channel.

The delightful light-up buttons have another purpose: When the deck is being controlled from outside (via the "Remote" DB9 connector on the back), such as during editing operations, the lights would indicate what the deck was being told to do. (I spent a summer working in a video studio at the tail end of the linear editing era, and we had Panasonic M-II and S-VHS editing decks being controlled from editing software on a Windows desktop; the array of blinkenlights on the decks during an edit run was mesmerizing).

Those Beta/VHS/Modern transitions don't get enough love. They're excellently executed!

I love the format wars. You have groups of engineers pulling out all the stops to out-do their competitors and it ultimately brings more value to the consumers. Brilliant minds at work that aren't making weapons of war or having to solve some unsolvable societal problem... just answer the questions of can Dad can record his entire football game and can Nan record one of her stories while watching another.

The analog mechanisms needed to make it work at all is astonishing. Man, digital era solved not only the quality, but simplified everything down to a micro level. Also there is a happy bug crawling around at 11:35

Former master control operator and engineer from the 1990s here - thanks for taking me back in time! We had Sony BVW-40s (Betacam but not SP) before we expanded to a couple more SP units. They were built to be serviced- they came with service manuals in big binders written in endearing Engrish. We also had extender boards, so one of those circuit boards could be pulled out, slide the extender in its place, then slide the board into it while bench servicing if the procedure called for it. They use special screws called Totsu which is sort of like a flathead but has a little tension finder on it so it could hold the screw without being magnetic. I used to run around with a clipboard to take down the hour meter readings as I cleaned the heads on a weekly basis so we could track our preventative maintenance schedule by replacing the brushes and slip rings on the head, heads, pinch rollers, etc etc…. If you ever wondered how commercials used to work in the 90s, we had a Sony Betacart. It’s a giant refrigerator sized thing, with four side loading Betacam players, and a vertical bank of 40 cassette holders, and (the best part) a robotic elevator that whisked up and down jockeying the tapes. The tapes were barcoded and the whole thing was managed by a central computer terminal with a floppy disk drive that predated HD diskettes, so we had a finite stash of DD disks. OK, you’re bored by now….

I love how the Betamax player literally shook the camera when you *thunked* it down on the table.

As a electronic technician for over 30 years, I have worked on these machines and on camcorder as well. Your video is worth listening, it is a reference !

I cannot imagine how much work this was for you, but seeing you seamlessly transition between current digital technology, and Betamax, VHS, and Betacam, really great work! Thank you so much for your work.

This was cool. I actually didn't know anything about how betacam worked. Funny story, when I was a kid, I used to record my Commodore 64 onto VHS and I could never understand why the quality looked so bad on playback. Because with regular TV recordings, which usually don't display small text and fine pixel arrangements, I simply couldn't tell that the quality was lower.

The level of snark in this one is a sight to behold. Thanks again for an awesome video, Alec!

I lived through the VHS - BETA wars as a kid and ended up professionally producing broadcast video using U-Matic then eventually those 1800 machines. I preferred using those to cut video over the DVCam decks we upgraded to. Something you might find cool to try is entering the Service Mode on that 1800. You can activate every single solenoid and motor in the unit to prove each is working. I sometimes had to enter that mode to get a stubborn tape to eject. Still have one in my basement destined for the e-recycler I’m afraid. Anyhow thanks for the video.

I was a broadcast engineer in the 90's, and serviced many a Sony BetaCam VTR and camcorder. To this day, I've never seen or worked on anything as electromechanically complex, yet elegant, as the Sony BVW-75 VTR! Those dynamic tracking video heads were incredible, but replacing the upper rotating video drum assembly on them, was a day long job LOL! Thank you for the stroll down memory lane :)

Fun fact: Professional Beta (DigiBeta & HDcam) was still going strong in the 2000s, but died very suddenly - not because hard drives were better yet, but because the Tsunami in Japan destroyed Sony production facilities & created a worldwide shortage of Beta tapes. Post houses had to figure out other ways to ship masters to stations. People were hoarding tapes for special projects that absolutely needed them, especially large tapes (hard drives were quite small & expensive for lengthy broadcast masters, especially HD data sizes). It was an interesting time in the industry. I remember having to call around to different shops and pay THEM to make a master for us just so we could use their remaining tape stash.

Thank you so much... this was an indie-documentary tour de force! I'd forgotten how relaxing and enjoyable it is to just sit and listen to you talk over my head about fantastically ingenious consumer engineering!

BOTH formats are so incredibly mechanical that it is a wonder how they worked at all. All the mechanics of wrapping the tape around the head - are amazing. I remember you had to be careful 'watching' the video while fast-forwarding because the head would heat up (I think). Good stream. I never knew Betacam was a thing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.

Finally! Someone attempts to clear up the Betamax vs Betacam confusion. The amount of times I've had to explain that Max and Cam are entirely different formats is too damn high

Fun fact: One other use of Betacam (& UMatic) was to (by way of extra equipment) record audio to Betacam tape as a PCM digital audio signal, as a precursor to DAT, in the process of mastering early CDs ... With the digital audio sample rate of 44.1kHz (that we still use today) set in part by the constraints of recording onto video equipment. So if you stumble across a Beta tape that won't play in a Betamax/2/3 or Betacam/SP/Digital/SX/IMX/HD/SR player ... it might just contain a WAV file!

Beautifully done! Also, the best part about the Betacam SP VTRs (the DVWM2000 and similar models) was that each of the channels - Video, Audio, and Time Code were individually editable whether manually, or remote. You could mark-in, mark-out and record over the channel or channels you want to edit and for the duration - it was freaking amazing! When I was editing on these monsters, it felt as though I was operating a nuclear silo, LOL.

Thank you for setting the record straight on this. It clears up some confusion for me. I edited video at a local TV news station in the late aughts and was thoroughly mystified by the Betacam tapes everywhere. They had the larger/older tapes in their archives, and the smaller/newer HD tapes in contemporaneous use. No one was knowledgeable enough to explain to me the history of the distinction between Betamax and Betacam, or that there even _was_ a distinction.

For the record.... We actually STILL use BetaSP in broadcast. A LOT of news archive video is on it (and UMATIC!). Plus, when we still ran master control locally (it's hubbed out now), we got a LOT of paid programs coming in on Beta. In fact, we JUST removed that Beta deck not that long ago, even though old Master Control has been out of use for about 4 years now.

Runtime really was a major factor. My grandmother was an early adopter and she sold her Sony Betamax and got a VHS VCR specifically because it would let her record CBS's entire Daytime Soap block while she was at work: The Young and the Restless, As the World Turns, Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow. (God I watched so much of that crap as a kid) The only other person I knew who had a VCR before most people did; My uncle Mike had thought the VCR was just a gimmick until the RCA VBT200 and he realized it could record live sports broadcasts and he got one not long after and they were still using that same VCR into 2000s!

3:03 "They both have model numbers divisible by 1800..." 😂

when i was in grade school im so amazed at how the mechanical part of both vhs and betamax, my father used to fix them back in the day & i'm so eager to help him fixing the timing issue of the gears. great video as always.

That splitscreen of Betacam/Betamax could not have been easy to do as seamlessly as you did. Well done, I see the work that went into that!

You're one of the few creators putting out almost hour long videos feeling like 15 minutes top, thank you :)

Awesome video, brings me back 2003 when I was taking video editing in film school and we learned to use these exact Betacam SP units, I was always amazed at how precise and responsive they were when integrated with our Avid editing PCs and it was amazing seeing such clear video from a tape.

Thank you for your work on your videos. Yes your videos are longer then most content creators but i do love the thoroughness of all your videos. I love the research and the detail you get into. I ensure the hard work you put into all your videos. I feel knowledgeable afterwards. This was a cool breakdown again.

hearing about how color is kinda cheated to work really explains both how tapes looked and how tape errors look, with the colors becoming separated from each other. and it sounds like betacam basically pulled an old NES music trick out of the hat, recording rapidly in alternation to cheat 'two things' out of one thing's room of things. Also, I'm realizing now that I've seen Betacams in operation on tv shows, when a TV studio is pulling up footage, fastforwarding it, etc. the sound brought back memories. .. how have I never noticed that Large and Small have the same initials as Long and Short???

man this video unlocked the weirdest childhood memory, my father was a reporter for local news and in the mid 90s to very early 2000s he was using a UVW-1800 (before upgrading to a DNW-A225 in the early 2000s) and seeing it in this video i can distinctly remember as a toddler i once put a pop tart in the cassette drawer 🤣

I work in the professional broadcast industry. I started circa 2003, and DigiBeta and Betacam tapes were common at that point - this is an excellent video and it takes a lot of skill to take such a complex subject and present it in such an accessible way. Truly nice work!

I really appreciate all of the extra effort put into capturing video from the different formats!

6:36 The format launched with a maximum recording time of 60 minutes (that's one hour for those of you who speak Metric). THAT JOKE IS TOO GOOD DARN IT, I was rolling on the floor.

My favorite part of editing video on BetaSP back in the day - the Jog/Shuttle wheel. That was so cool, scrolling frame by frame or bouncing around. Really satisfying.

Those snap transitions for the picture quality comparisons were magic! They were so satisfying that I watched them each about a half dozen times.

Excellent, finally I am aware of technical details about VCR war. Thank you from the bottom of my old heart.

I have to say something! The script, editing and the overall production of this video is astonishing. Having followed this channel for multiple years, it doesn't surprise me, but I hope others can see all the work behind making such a video. I'm only 17m44s in the video for now, but I'm hoping to see some outtakes or bloopers at the end. I love those!

My father had a huge collection of beta tapes when he passed away (as well as a betamax machine), and some of the movie titles were suspiciously... modern? We quickly found out that every single Beta tape was... an "adult film" that he had later just re-labeled with popular movie titles. My mom didn't find the humor in this, but I thought it was HILARIOUS. Damn. I miss you, Dad!

Excellent explanation of this interesting history. Having grown up in a tv repair family business and then a career in video production and broadcast operations from the 80s until today, I can attest to how completely this story was told. Great channel! And the public tv station in Canada I worked at just stopped accepting 1080i masters on HDcam tape 2 years ago. BTW I was the proud owner of a Toshiba-branded Betamax top loader in 1980. Wish I’d kept it…

I am of that age that I remember this battle of the tapes. I had a VHS Recorder at the time and remember just how magical it seemed to be able to record shows and watch them later. And don't get me started on trying to tell our parents that you didn't have to a show as it was being recorded or the whole idea of programming a recording. I do though remember seeing a friend's original Bata recorder which knock me for six, to see the quality of the onscreen search function. There was hardly any break up of the video compared to my VHS and I did consider because of this to change my recorder but I think because of price consigns and the explosion of Blockbusters made the decision for me. Great upload, I will be looking for more like this one.

As someone that used to work in the broadcast engineering space, it's wonderful to see this topic finally covered by someone like you!

I used to work at a small-ish TV station and the sound of you rewinding the beta casette warmed my heart. Fun story: when I started I had no idea about the difference between betamax and betacam and was utterly baffled why we were using BETA when VCR clearly won the format war. Luckily I kept it to myself or I would have never hear the end of it.

Excellent video! This really helps explain the differences between the formats and the myths between the video formats in layman's terms.

Back in early 80s, I visited a television station studio for local abc broadcasts and news. They had a few betacam machines with those large cassettes. At the time, I knew it was something for professional use only, but didn’t realize how advanced the machine truly was. Thanks for sharing!

Something that is more impressive than a Betacam is just how long Sony's U-Matic was used in TV production. Well into 2000s. There are U-Matic tapes out there with promotional material for Revenge of the Sith (2005), and other feature films that were released in theatres in 2008 or later.

That particular Betacam machine didn't just demux the chroma, it digitized Y/C for timebase correction, which was required for genlocking to studio sync on the REF VIDEO input. It also had drop out compensation, if the tape had a dropout the DOC would fill it in with previously captured samples. That's what a lot of the boards in there are for. Demuxing is essentially "free" when you're doing TBC, you just read the Pb/Pr samples out in parallel at 1/2 the sample rate.

All your transitions in editing were FANTASTIC! I was watching a full on PBS show about Betamax vs Betacam!

Wonderful, as always! You do an excellent job of explaining complex technology in a comprehensible and entertaining way. And I loved your summation of Betacam as "equal parts hilarious and impressive." That is how I felt often in my 40+ years designing analog video products -- NTSC itself still amazes me. I once interviewed at General Electric to work on their Telaria theater video projector, and I could hardly keep from giggling during their explanation of how it operated. And then the demonstration of its actual operation left me quite impressed.

I worked with U-Matics, Betacam, and even GASP! Ampex VPR-6, I loved them all. Ampex was my favorite, it was oldtimer when I was working in broadcast, but we still had TV shows on these tapes, so it was used. Learning to thread tape on them was a scientific achievment :) I enjoyed this video, it made me go back in time. There are lot of details that comes with more expensive devices, we had Sony BVW-75P machines, they were crazy good and were my daily use machines.

I was genuinely impressed with your editing of this video. The seamless transitions from analog to digital were quite impressive.

Excellent job explaining a complex subject. That was a TON of editing work and is greatly appreciated by all of us nerds. Well done!

I just wanted to thank you this was something I was always curious about but didn't have the time to research. You made it very clear and understandable thank you😃

This video isn’t pointless, because lot of us who worked in television broadcasting used Betacam well into the mid 2000s! I used to work in tape editing for press releases from colleges. We used the Sony Betacam VTR for video recordings, and we also archived video on DVDs or digital files on computer!

34:14 [Various Delightful Mechanical Noises] I absolutely LOVE your subtitles, friend.

Oh, I do love this channel and thank you for all your hard work attempting to educate and entertain us. All the very best from Scotland

Ayy, I appreciate the two star trek clips shown! Even though I don't fully understand your technobabble, I do appreciate learning and I always end up learning watching your videos, with a lot of rewinding.

I worked at a videocassette/CD/audiotape manufacturing plant in the late 90s. We had literally hundreds of recorders in racks for the "Normal Speed Duplication" area, pulling off of the masters in the "Digital Betacam" format that literally just recorded video on hundreds of tapes at a time. We also had a "High Speed Duplication" area that worked very differently, but was also neat.

My college media department used Betacam for everything. I remember the nightmare over-the-shoulder camcorder that took the full size Betacam carts. The student editing decks though where all S-VHS with a single Betacam to bring all their footage over. But I was so sorry to see you didn’t have the jog-dial interface with the Betacam unit. Those were soooooo smooth and satisfying. Your scrubbing through the footage alone brought back so many memories. ❤

This is quite possibly my favorite episode of yours! 😂😂😂 I can’t stop watching it! On my 4th or 5th time, makes me laugh most of the video! Keep up the great work!!!

I really do just love this channel. I cannot wait to see how festive holiday lights piss you off this year

You asked about the time offset from the Betacam offset heads: It's really a non-issue once you think about it, because the offset that's put in when recording is automatically undone by the same offset during playback. This is simply due to the fact that the same heads are used for both record and playback. I'm assuming that Sony was careful to make the positional offset between the heads the same on all their heads, so tracks recorded on one machine would play back correctly on any other Betacam machine. Hope that's clear. Thanks for an informative video. I'd always wondered what Betacam was all about, and never knew that it started out using the same Betamax cassette. BTW, loved the TOS Star Trek clips.

The incredible amount of editing it must have taken to line up the the switching between the digital/VHS/Betamax/Betacam signals is well appreciated. Thank you!

I spent years trying to explain this exact thing to people but Your explanations absolutely nailed it! The only thing I experienced that You didn't touch on was the cameras. I ran an offline edit suite and used BetaCAM SP gear, the cameras were properly hefty, especially when You add on the weight of the PAG belt external audio recording gear and of course all those dang cables! My pals with their fancy VHS cams used to take the p*** out of me pfaffing with the heavy and more complicated gear and fighting with all the cables with what appeared to them to be weird connectors, but they simply could not get anywhere close to the quality of BetaCAM gear. Of course they could SEE the difference when they visited my edit suite but still didn't get it. Thank You for doing this and setting the record straight Excellent work as usual. Keep doing what You do so well.

Great video. I used to work in a private cinema and we had a Betacam recorder which was used to play back content from professional broadcast studios who used to hire the space. The quality, even on a large projection screen, was quite acceptable. Personally, whilst I was into VHS, I also eventually bought a Philips 2000 format home VCR (Grundig brand) which gained some traction here in Europe (I am in the UK). This used 8 hour tapes - 4 hours per side; yes, it could be flipped over like an audio cassette! The video quality was perceptively better than VHS, although, on my machine anyway, the linear audio track was of poor quality. Incidentally I recently bought a new old stock SVHS recorder which I am currently putting through its paces - first impressions are that it is not too distant in quality from DVD.

Fascinating when you swapped the video from Beta to VHS, I got instantly hit with a wave of nostalgia. A lot of the TV I watched as a kid was on VHS tapes, and a lot of those were hand-me-downs from my Aunt who had recorded a bunch of kids shows from the TV for my older cousin. Seeing those VHS artefacts with the blocky colours and hard edges is big nostalgia!

Professional Video Engineer here. I loved this video. Amazing content. I learned on Betacam decks. They were amazing. And they were used well into the 2000s. To answer the question about the offset heads, I'm pretty sure, if I remember right, that the Chroma and luma heads being offset in the record didn't matter because they were also offset in playback. So the Chroma is still reading simultaneously to the luma at the same spot where it was written. I don't think that there was color information being recorded in the blanking interval. That doesn't jive with my understanding of how analog video worked. A few more things: We just called this stuff "Beta" and left out the Cam part in the professional space. We all knew it was Betacam, not Betamax. And we called the tapes "Beta 90" and "Beta 30" The original Betacam only died because the tsunami in Japan wiped out the factory that made the tapes. I remember this happening. Suddenly no one could get any tapes and they were selling for thousands of dollars on eBay because everyone was desperate for them. Then Sony announced they would not rebuild the factory because it was a dying format and not worth it. And overnight the entire professional video industry was forced to finally let go of our beloved Betacam for good. Another thing to note: the Chroma channel is derived from a 4:2:2 sub sample in component video. So it essentially has half the information as the luma channel. That's why you only needed one head to record it. You were recording half the information. And for tape size, the Beta 30 tapes being smaller was absolutely essential. When doing eng work and putting the tape into a shoulder mounted camera, this smaller tape was a god send. And in a television studio, where you may be storing hundreds of half hour TV shows, the smaller 30 min tapes were ideal for lowering storage. We used to have pallets of tapes in the professional space. If you only needed 30 min for your sitcom, having a smaller tape for it was much much better than storing even VHS sized cassettes. And finally, if you see this comment, I have some Beta Decks that still work and have the jog wheels. It was great to see how much you loved the satisfying feeling of operating a professional beta deck. You should try it with the jog wheel! It's a joy. I will gladly loan you one to play around with.

Oh wow, another great video on old technology. I can't imagine how much effort (and hours of work) you put into this, and it really shows. Thank you for that. The comparison shots were really enlightening, I've never really seen Betamax in action (I'm from Germany, I've never met any Betamax fans here, only some Video 2000 fans that held onto it into the 90s). I would say I've also never seen Betacam in action, but I guess I've seen countless hours of it on TV (I think it was also the de facto standard here in the TV broadcast business).

The screen shake as you plopped those behemoth units on the table was hilarious. 😂 Also, a lot of people (myself included) used the VHS EP option almost exclusively to record TV back in the day because, as you said, it gave the most bang for our buck. On our terrible mid-80s TV with terrible resolution I never really noticed a difference.

It’s honestly kind of wild how long Betacam was around for. We were still shooting on it in high school (along with S-VHS) in 2006 and at the TV station I worked at we were still receiving some paid programming on Betacam tapes as late as 2014.

Even into the mid 2000s HBO in NYC used betacam. My cousin worked there before I got into the industry and actually had the job of digitizing many of HBOs betacam tapes. Fun time checking out all the crazy gear they had.

20:57 The diagram of helical scanning shows tracks more like Quadruplex! Helical tracks travel from one edge of the tape to the other in about half the circumference of the drum, so the angle is very shallow with a great overlap.

My favorite part of this one is all the callbacks to videos I've already seen. Excellent work as usual.

This takes me back… in the late 80s I worked at a video duplication facility. We didn’t handle Betamax (it was already dead) but did everything else: 3/4”, Betacam, 1” type C, and even occasionally 2” Quad and 1/2” EIAJ! I labeled all the VHS tapes that came out of duplication, boxed them up and shipped them out. Years later I became a producer for the video production side of the company. Good times.

Top tier editing. The transitions were delicious. You're the best damn technology historian in the biz.

I went to college in 1995 for radio and television production and broadcasting. These were the exact machines we used and they were so much fun to use the shuttle jog to move forward and back in the video you could scrub through to the scene to the very frame you needed to edit and splice in another track and back seamlessly.

Well, thank you for thanking me for watching. And, less facetiously, thank you for doing this video. You have just explained and answered all the questions I had for my older brother back then. I had the ability to set these systems up and start them working but, No idea why or how they worked. Through diligence and hard work I have gained the expertise to setup electronic equipment... and, why you don't stray from the accepted path to get stronger signals to the preamp... you can fry the winding in the cartridge on the turntable, yes... but , why?

I love watching objectively pointless, but educational videos! Keep on going :D

In Brazil Beta was very uncommon, but here in São Paulo (the biggest city) at the then economic center on Paulista Avenue there was one rental Store that only had beta. It took me a time to realize why: many movies were Japanese: Japan Consulate was on the same building or very near I can't remember. I deduced that Japanese movies were common in Beta.

Thank you for your clarification for those of us who use the metric system, otherwise I would never have known that 60 minutes is an hour

27:58 - "Because Betacam uses compressed time division multiplexing, *silly*!" LOL!

It's amazing how pervasive that myth about adult content is; I've seen it crop up multiple times even in techy circles, even in circles that generally know about their tech history. I ofc know better (your videos on the topic being a reason why, though I had familiarity with it before then) and I knew Betacam was a separate thing already - but I didn't know too much about it until now. Excellent video as ever, love the snark. That Betacam VCR is an absolute monster, I love it. The quality of footage it records made my jaw drop - I don't know why, it is indeed broadcast quality - but that night and day comparison with Betamax is insane. It really looks incredible for analogue video tape.

0:50 knowing alec, there’s a 50/50 chance that shake is edited in

I like your videos about old video and audio formats. They always steal my attention

I love the small detail of shaking the camera when you put each machine down on the table.

Awesome video Alec! I've worked in the broadcast industry from 2004 to 2019 and saw the transition from Betacam to Digibeta to XDCam (tape on a disc 😂) to no tapes at all. I can totally relate to your enjoyment of operating the beige machine. I've worked with them a ton and they really are a joy to operate. Especially the more expensive models with jog buttons and other gadgets. Betacam has been THE standard in broadcast for many, many years. The S size tapes were used in cameras mostly, where the L tapes were used for editing, mastering and delivery. I remember the days of the bi-weekly delivery of a box of 10 master tapes to the television station for our daily show. Yes, someone had to drive down to the television station to BRING them a box of tapes. Awesome times. XDCam discs were the standard for capturing video for a few years. Right after tape and before we all went solid state. Strange format with a magneto-optical disc in a very cool looking cartridge. Maybe you should do a video about this format once? Thanks for the great content Alec! As usual.

That's a nice Betacam unit, it was heavily used in broadcast studios and professional video editing. FYI the hours meter data shown has to be multiplied X10 in order to see the real time in hours. You can also connect it to your monitor through the composite video out labelled as "Super" (Superimpose), that will display extended information from the menus :)

Outstanding video. I couldn’t believe the size of the boards and sheer amount of potentiometers in the Betacam board. One of your best videos, learned a lot I didn’t consider.

I'm a video engineer and actually learned a lot from this video. I only got into the industry 8 years ago, and I work in live events, so by the time I started, we were already all-in on Flash drives and hard drives for media storage, though we still use BNC and XLR connectors every day for our equipment. Thanks for making this video!

Gun to my head, I would absolutely say that in the picture quality comparison, VHS-SP looks better than Beta II: the picture is slightly more aliased, but still sharper (especially between foreground and background), the colors a bit cooler and pleasing (though more accurate? no idea), but these are the sort of differences I could entirely believe being owned to the mechanical variations in an analogue video tape format, and again, even the VHS-DVD combo "feels" a lot more modern than a seemingly ancient Beta recorder (even if that difference probably doesn't matter here). Great video as usual, thank you!

I spent a lot of time with those decks in an edit bay preparing for the morning news between 1am-3am in the early 2000’s. The edit controller that we used to control two at once was next level. We would play those decks like instruments. We also had a giant automated machine made by Odetics that would keep four of those decks loaded up full of commercials for master control. I had always been into recording equipment previously, and getting to go work in broadcast was a dream come true at the time. So many cool toys and smart engineers. I left just as everything was converting to digital.

Long time viewer, first time caller. Great job breaking it down AND keeping my attention...oh and cool jacket my man! Keep the content coming😎

thinking about the time I was a kid and my parents renting VCRs in a store that carried Beta and VHS it's fascinating to see the history of it all. I was always told BETA had a better picture because it had a wider tape but never once used a Beta machine, renting one wasn't an option in my town and I never knew anyone who owned one. I do remember my parents buying our first used VCR that was RCA with the big popup cabinet, and remember being disappointed that I couldn't play any of my friends HBO recorded tapes because they recorded in EP when the VCR we had only did SP and LP. It was a big lesson to learn when I was 12.

I got into making home videos as a kid and eventually worked my way into the movie industry. As a teen/young adult in the late 90’s, I always wanted to get my hands on betacam equipment for my projects. It never came to fruition. Still, I love these old machines and droll over them like the teenage film dork that I was.