Thank you to everyone who's commented, I really appreciate the response! I wanted to mention that I have not yet completed the subtitling for this video because I've been working on it for so long that looking at it makes me sick; as soon as I can stomach it I'll get proper CC in place.
As someone who does have harder time hearing certain sounds, I certainly do appreciate proper CC. However you speak clearly enough that the auto-gen had no trouble I seen understanding you! While no substitute to proper CC, the auto-gen certainly provided to get me through the video with no issue.
Hey man, this is a GREAT documentary and you are doing a fantastic and really important job of preserving the history. If you want some insight into 70's media (and the reasons for distrust in them) I can really recommend you "Manufacturing Consent" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.
As an old dude who used eiaj VTRs and EIAJ connectors when they were new, i really appreciate your fresh enthusiasm for these topics . I never really thought about how people today are unaware of these gaps, because i used all of these cameras and recorders, but you’re absolutely right ht!
Yes when you start breaking it down and realizing initially it took two different devices, plus your wires, the first the camera just to capture the signal and a separate device with your storage tape. Some of those first portable units were only that by name, since you literally had to have a place to set some of it down and even plug it in, because it was not truly mobile, I think that's where the term remote location started being used. It's interesting to see how far the technology has come. Imagine if he had covered the old large reel to reel systems used in professional movie making as well, I think some of the very first were 1920s or earlier. (essentially the same technology seen miniaturized in the very first home video recording systems).
@@benullom2301 You forget about the basic point: Portable meant you could take recordings out on the field, without a generator and a car to give you power and machinery. Of course you could make that before, using a film camera. But that included a constant changing of incredibly expensive to develop reels, waiting for development and time consuming cutting afterwards. So having a portable Video Tape recorder was huge! Of course it was lame, compared to the following camcorders. But as such, we will be loughed at in a decade, with our constant power plug hungry and sunlight shy smartphones that cost a fortune. Remember, there was a time we had portable phones that had a battery that lasted for 2 Weeks. What if a future smartphone generation can do that, including constant use. What will our current 1000 Dollar smartphone be worth then?
@@genius1a touching on the two week battery life. That was back before we even had smartphones and a lot of phones were Nokia, I don't even think they exist anymore, at least I don't see them. Lithium ion does have more capacity but the phones just eat up power, it's surprising they last as long as they do. The screen is the big culprit it takes a lot of the battery power to light it.
@@genius1a Hey, plenty of good budget phones have 5000-6000 mAh batteries! Not everyone wants some $1000 flagship that allocates more priority to performance or features than a battery. [It seems to be increasingly hard to find a budget phone with optical image stabilisation on the camera though. :(]
Same I didn’t know that people were unaware of EIAJ and video camera’s of this era. It’s really not a big deal and saying nobody knows about this or remember it was hyperbolic by this channels creator.
That transition music and blue screen with flying text really does lend this the feel of one of those classic 80s/early 90s documentaries. I applaud your research on the topic, as well as the passion and humour in your narration. I hope you keep producing content like this: it deserves to become required watching in college and university classes on the subject.
LOL, I am OLD. When he was first showed the Camcorders, I thought "Those are camcorders, NOT video cameras. A camcorder is a video CAMera WITH a built in reCORDER." - And then he went on to explain, LOL. PS Your web cam is a "modern" example of a "video camera" -sans recorder.
The instant you showed the camera and said that nobody would know what it was made me feel very old, as I definitely used that exact camera as a teenager and had not, in fact, forgotten about the original split camera-recorder systems that camcorders were an improvement over.
There’s a guy on RU-vid who seemed to record alot of his life starting in the 1980s when he was about 14 and for about 20 years after. Him and his friends on BMX bikes, later his cars and parties etc. I love watching these things and seeing how life was all thanks to these cameras
I picked up an old camera like that at a garage sale, has the same EIAJ connector, and I later picked up a box to power it and convert it to RCA. Never really looked into the connector, never knew how obscure but universal it is!
This is seriously one of my all time favorite video essays. So much history that never made it into the "mainstream" of youtube tech retrospectives. Thank you for this, I never knew how much I needed to have those gaps filled.
Thank you for this. If you're curious, the short film "VTR St-Jacques" documents an early activist exploration of the social possibilities of portable video equipment (specifically those Sony CV-2000s and Video Rovers.) It was produced by the National Film Board of Canada in 1969 and can be found on their website to view for free, if you wish.
Aesthetically perfect blue gradient and public school synth. Now I know why my parents basement has plastic tubs of 8mm reel, a Sony VHS camera, and how we got from one to the other.
That JVC commercial at 19:54 is a big yikes. Great work! I'd definitely watch any follow up rabbit hole you jumped down around this, or likely any other subject
I'm impressed how every since video I've seen of yours so far has been touching on a topic I thought I knew a lot about, and still manages to drag me through a rabbit hole of history that I didn't even know existed!
Great video. It might be good to include "EIAJ connector" or similar in your description or even title just to help with those searching about it in the future!
Well, I don’t think it’d be wise to try and establish “EIAJ connector” to refer to the 10-pin camera connector, because “EIAJ connector” is already firmly established as the term for the EIAJ-defined system of DC barrel plugs. (It not only defines the plug dimensions, but also pairs each size with a specific voltage range, so that devices don’t get damaged by overvoltage.) It seems that “10-pin camera connector” and the like is the most common term, but if it does have an official name, it’s not easy to find.
Just stumbled on your channel, great stuff! I'd love to see more like this, where you dive into the details of forgotten tech history. Since the 90s, I've been fascinated by analog TV descramblers for cable and satellite, and it seems no one has done a full video on how they work and how it started. It would be awesome if you did something like that.
I'm genuinely shocked that this has only 6k views. That's an absolute _travesty_ for the quality this brings. I've sent this to a few of my tech chats to hopefully get this more traction. Hopefully you'll get your break soon enough.
Watching this video makes me realize how fortunate I was to come across a working Sony AVC-3400 with it's portable recorder 10 years ago. When I turned it on for the first time I was hooked on how the quality of the image looked and enjoyed its limited quality atheistic. Thank-you for putting together this history and it was really cool to see how the device that I have fits into it!
Please don't forget the system called "VCR" released by Philips and Grundig in 71/72. It used cassettes, offered full frame rate, full resolution, color and even stereo. Quality was like VHS. It was aimed at consumers and it had some commercial success. Video cassettes for consumers did not start with beta. There were portable machines and there was even editing equipment that allowed editing with single frame precision. It was only released in Europe and Africa, PAL only. Tech history tends to forget things not sold in the USA.
I should note that I became a Patreon supporter based on this video. I know this can't happen every time, but I appreciate the piece at the end discussing what people actually tried to do with this tech.
I want you to stay motivated. I see your videos as being like Technology Connections or Techmoan, but with your own unique style and look, which I hope you continue to refine. The first video of yours I came across, I enjoyed - and it was surprising to see that you only had ~8k subs given the level of information and research that went into it, as well as the production quality. I'm sure that if you keep it up, you'll be as well known as the aforementioned. Keep it up, mate. You're doing beautifully!
Thank you for this video a few years ago i worked in my high school theatre and there was a 10 pin in the tech booth that nobody knew what it was for (this theatre was built in the mid 70s) and now i realize how cutting edge that mustve been to have wired in video capability with the recorder being in the booth and the camera being wherever the director wanted considering the flexibility of the overhead wiring network. I'm now the only one who knows what that connector was for
What a video! The way you have demonstrated the mass forgetting of such a ubiquitous device (the "half-inch") and related technology is certainly something I am going to keep thinking about as I continue to learn about all the many things we keep forgetting.
When I was a little kid and first heard the word I thought it was "camquarter" because they were about a quarter size of the professional cameras at the time. Then I saw it spelled out.
There was an attempt by Bosch to sell a news camera called the QuarterCam. It used quarter inch tapes. The prototypes were tested by ABC at the 1984 Olympics but Betacam had already established an unbeatable lock on the broadcast camcorder market for another 12 years.
I watch one youtube video a year and I'm really glad it was this one, great work!! I am always glad to watch your latest documentary about technology I've never heard of
I just found your channel here on RU-vid and have been power watching dozens of you programs for 2 or 3 days now. My gosh my man, so good. You're just great -- keep it up!
Thank you for this amazing documentary. It was wonderful and provided little-known information that is fascinating and interesting. Now I feel like I should try filming on one of those cameras.
This is it! This is great! Thanks for collating all of this information into one place. "Typical" in that title provides a lot of tension. Also, excellent points about how home film vs home video were recorded.
let me tell you , in re: "typical", i had to back off my verbiage like 4 times to make sure i wasn't inadvertently insulting anyone. the original script was basically me going "everyone just lies about all this!" when that isn't true at all!! but yeah, "typical" is carrying a LOT of weight here, and I much prefer it as implicit rather than an explicit callout, heh. thanks for watching!
Good information! Another company involved in home video recording in the early 70s was Cartrivision in San Jose, CA. Their machines used ½” video tape in a stacked reel cartridge format and recorded in full color using a skip field recording technique. The machines were too expensive and not packaged or marketed well (along with a host of other problems) and the company went bankrupt. A lot of unsold machines (along with a black & white camera AND microphone) were sold in the mid 70s for dirt cheap. I got one then and still have it. After a few years of use it sat idle for about 40 years. I replaced a belt and did some other minor repairs and got it working again.
so well done! big thanks for crediting all of your sources, this is a goldmine of research that was as entertaining as it was intensely interesting to watch! also gotta appreciate the network shoutout, one of my favorite movies.
I grew up with my grandfather having a camcorder. I want to say it was a National branded VCR that had these great big NiCad or sealed lead acid batteries that slotted in the front. It had a faux leather over the shoulder case that held the VCR, with a clear vinyl window so you could see the buttons and protect it from the elements. He always had the neatest gadgets.
This video is an absolute blessing and I had no idea about almost any of the camcorder history, as my family was mostly involved in production broadcasting so I only really knew the professional side until my uncle showed up with his fancy VHS camcorder many years later. Very well put together and very worth it. However, I have one thing to add to the timeline, and I don't fault you for not including it as I only found out about it through a series of strange coincidences. The first home video cassette format, i.e. something actually aimed at consumers and not U-matic, was made by an American company, the format called Cartrivision, released in 1972. This system allowed not only for timeshifting on a cassette-based system, but also allowed for home movie recording (provided it happened within your home, as you needed to plug the camera into the unit). The problem, and why you've never heard of it, is that it was only sold integrated into certain television sets, which were really expensive, and most of the tapes were rentals with a "rental-only" switch on them, a historical predecessor of the self-erasing DVDs the MPAA tried to push for in the early 2000s. I personally found out about it via the fact that the only taping of the last time the New York Knicks won the championship was on a home-recorded Cartrivision tape, as the broadcast videotape had turned to mush. Here's a source on the Knicks: www.creativecontentwire.com/duart-relies-on-nucoda-to-get-lost-and-found/ And here's videolabguy's transfers of original Cartrivision material, including a video "manual" for the device: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bClJ12fHl5A.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pXEiJ1e6Iqk.html His website is quite informative on the development of the device as well: www.labguysworld.com/Museum017.htm (his site is also full of references to some of the VTRs you noted!) On a final note - really, U-matic came out in 1969? My dad had some archive videotape from a live performance that went on TV in 1984 that was recorded on U-Matic, and a couple other U-Matic broadcast tapes from that time...that's quite a lifetime for that technology; they were still using it very actively for archive work in Venezuelan TV through the 80s.
Wonderfully comprehensive history. Quite a bit of this was familiar to me via working with broadcast equipment and rummaging through miscellaneous electronic artifacts at amateur radio festivals, but I've never seen such a thorough & comprehensive retrospective. Bizarre to me that the EIAJWTF cable didn't even get a seat at the Wikipedia table, and the preservationist in me continues to wonder what obsolete tech knowledge is still a gap in this internet that we tend to think Has It All.
the internet does not have all the answers! in fact, it almost DENIES you the answers! when you try to search for this stuff, google tends to prefer results about newer, more popular stuff, so it implicitly, unintentionally erases this history. if people were to spread this knowledge around, google et al would sprinkle in a few more results about older tech!
My dad started an editing studio out of our house in 1990, when I was 10, so I grew up around prosumer grade equipment... Hi-8 camcorders, big SVHS and 3/4"SP decks, Toaster/Flyer, and so on... but it blew my mind when I saw corporate video footage being recorded circa 1995 at my mom's workplace with a portapak-style betacam setup. Even that late in the game, footage was still being captured with discrete video cameras and battery-powered VTRs. Any time since that I've seen equipment like this, I always assumed it was high end studio gear, so It's remarkable that it was a consumer-oriented technology that far back. Thanks for presenting this history of it here.
22:30 Ad for the Sears C131. A peeve of mine: When discussing home movie cameras: People who call 8mm or 16mm FILM cameras "video cameras" or "camcorders".(not uncommon on Craigslist and eBay, LOL!) UGHH. "Video" is an ELECTRONIC form of motion picture. Film cameras do NOT make "video". While it IS perfectly OK to call a film camera or an analog (or digital) video camera or camcorder a "movie" camera, (as "movie" is slang for "motion picture") it's NOT ok to call a film camera a video camera.
my parents have been recording weddings since the 70's. They had a recorder, or a battery pack and audio set up, in a messenger bag well into the early 00's. Nice to learn about the predecessors.
I'm re-watching this again in January 2022. Your videos are always great quality, and keeps me glued to the monitor the whole time. Please keep up the good work! Your channel is vastly underrated!
love seeing those acid-inspired diagrams. im sure they seemed at the time like they needed to be communicated to others!!! reminds me of the mspaint scribbles in jordan peterson’s “maps of meaning” LOL
Thank you for teaching me about the history of home video (and a whole bunch of other stuff)! This is so wonderfully produced, the amount of effort and love that went into it is palpable.
Thanks for filling in the gaps that most had forgotten. I, being in my middle aged times, knew about a lot of this but even I learned something today. Keep up the great work.
You’ve got a great thing going! I love the nostalgia and forgotten information. From one creative to another, don’t be afraid to venture out of your comfort zone, I believe you have real knack for informative content and could make interesting works on anything your interested in. Way to go!!
I had one of those rover cams with the goofy plug back in the late 80s/early 90s. It had a power brick/some kind of signal processor. Never got ahold of the tape/recorder unit for it as i picked it up at a yardsale. I managed to adapt it to my little black and white tv and i could see a live feed of whatever the camera saw on my tv. My buddy managed to find another one in his grandparents' attic but again no recorder. We ended up stringing a bunch of coax cables together with barrel connecters from radioshack to connect the feed from my camera to the tv in his room and vice versa.....strung the cables out my window, thru a tree, and into his window. Viola video conferencing. ....then our parents got pissed off that we'd swiped every unused coax cable from both our houses to create what they thought would be a nice lightning rod and made us take the whole thing down. Still, 12 year old me thought this was the raddest thing ever. The picture quality sucked, but man, we thought we were the jetsons.
Great video - I really do appreciate all the work that you must have put into editing this - not to mention the research - top notch! It just shows that great TV programs can be made completely independently. I have a few 80s JVC cameras, also really into the Panasonic switchers - its a great hobby as stuff can picked up so cheap on ebay still. Keep it up!
I'm so glad I found your channel. Its exactly the type of content I like and usually consume but with loads of info I've never seen before. Thank you for putting so much effort into this videos.
This was an excellent timeline that produced a fair bit of fodder for chatter for me and my friends, and it's information I can keep tucked in my pocket as I dig through the myriad bygone junk my father has collected over his long life. Still, excellent framing of the video and good job keeping it interesting and moving forward throughout the whole length. I really do miss this era, when technology was something you could see and touch.
Excellent episode. I just discovered your channel and you're making some great content. I'm a big fan of both Techmoan and Technology Connections, and you distinguish yourself with this wonderful, original research and your own unique style and humour. It's a pleasure to share your fascination with old tech. Love it.
Your transition screen music gives me PTSD from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on NES. The beginning of the music from the underwater section of the Dam, that transition music must have been what inspired that music. Awesome production quality by the way.
Great video! Thanks for taking the time to document this. We have a video transfer business (digitizing old tapes) and had a few of those early Sony 1/2" VTRs - never had a lot of demand - maybe once every few months someone would inquire about that format. Umatic was definitely an industrial & commercial format but we do get an occasional early adopter who spent a ton of money to film his family on Umatic. The 10 pin camera connector is cool - had one on our first VHS VCR in the early 80's - I remember my dad would rent a camera from the local video rental store for the weekend if we were having a party. I've gotten involved in amateur radio the past few years and I'm fascinated by what hams were doing in the 1980s and 1990s with fast-scan TV. I'd like to eventually set up a station with some of the old equipment we've acquired over the years.
Agree with you re the EIAJ plug. It's a godsend. I have tons of old cameras I wanted to use but had no recording device for them (plus I didn't want to carry around even a VHS-C VTR). So I developed a device that would record the signal from these camera to SD card, and still allow the use of the record button to trigger the recording. It works with all the cameras that have the ten pin connector, and I've build it so that I can use a variety of sd recording devices with it. I'm surprised there wasn't a device like this already (or maybe I'm not based on the scarcity of info in the internet), but there must be tons of enthusiants around looking for a way to record these cameras without bulkiness and unreliability of tape recorders. I'm curious about that switch unit too. Will have a hunt for it on eBay. I presume the switcher doesn't provide smooth cuts between sources? That would presumably require all cameras to be synched but I'd be interested to hear more. Thanks for this video. I learned a lot.
Can I just say I love the presentation of this, you made me feel like I was back in school watching an educational VHS with those title cards and synthy music.
So glad to finally see you having some success. I sent technology connections a tweet about this video and it looks like it worked! Also love the PUP shirt! Once things settle down you should come up to Vancouver BC for one of their shows.
Thanks! Think he followed me on twitter after my last video, but I appreciate the effort. I'd love to see PUP again, I missed their last couple Seattle shows.
Fantastic video, thanks for making it! Nice to see yet another person on YT sharing the interest in vintage video equipment. I knew most of the stuff you mentioned, but it was still a pleasure to watch. Never heard of the Videofreex - definitely a topic I have to dive into.
I'm so glad you took the time and care to do this, I had always had this kind of nebulous idea that there had been home movie cameras with separate recorders, but I had never followed up on, or imagined, that the market was so competitive and innovative up until the first camcorders.
Thank you! Yeah, this is something that I think we could arrive on by thinking real hard about it, but nobody ever seems to (including myself) until it's right in front of them. I felt I had a duty to help!
I appreciate that you made this short documentary. I was in a frendly dispute with a buddy of mine on this very topic. terns out I was right we knew what the 1/2 in plug was but we couldn't find any good info on what it was called. Thank you and keep up the good work
It's great you allocated a section for the 10-pin [14-pin for prosumer/broadcast] EIAJ camera/recorder era, of which ran up into the early 1990's with the Panasonic AG-6400 VHS, AG-7400 SVHS, and Sony BetacamSP portable VCR decks. In the mid-late 1980's it was common for people to use a mix of gear, from Super 8mm film, two-piece camera/vcr combos and solid-state camcorders until technology began to drop in both price and size when camcorders really became popular on a mass scale. I recall seeing portable video camera/recorder combos in use at school plays, soccer games, etc from childhood, but it wasn't until the mid-1990's when Internet forums, websites and eBay arrived that I began purchasing/backtracking through tech to learn more about the functionality of such equipment. Glad to see the trend and interest in old tech continue. Nice documentary on the faded formats of time!
Been following you on twitter for a while and I've always enjoyed when you'd post about some weird thing you noticed, dug into and found all these unseen details of, so it's great to see that but with a little more polish. Hope you'll have time to make something like this again
Around 1980-1981 I recall a family acquaintance that had the portable Betamax system consisting of camera, shoulder carried recorder and a same size electronics box that handled some signal conversion stuff (maybe tuner/modulator for TV hookup and time shifting). Oh, and this is in Europe, with no commercial networks needing the 2/3 hour timezone shift used in the US, anything broadcast Europe-wide was actual live events through the Eurovision collaboration network, such as their song contest. Their logo was a stylized microwave relay network like the one assembled on each occasion from state broadcast network infrastructure. Oh, and at school, educational videos were sometimes played from the schools movable U-matic machine getting rolled into class with a TV on top, they had an identical rig with VHS, all under lock and key.
Fascinating! Enjoy the reference to Tech Connections. Kudos for finding the early video news advocates. The offbeat uses of technology are often the forgotten starts for later trends and you stitched that together wonderfully.
I think you should feature this video on the front page of your channel. Watching it has helped explain so many things that you mentioned in your more recent videos that I was confused by.
I have no prior connection or interest in this hobby but coming here after your nintendo broadcast video was recommended to me, this little documentary is fascinating throughout. Thank you for making this!
We used to have a JVC separate camera and recorder when I was growing up. The tiny CRT viewfinder blew my mind. My dad took it on a few camping trips in the 80’s. Hard to imagine how he got the battery to last long enough to record four hours of Australian desert vistas. The recorder was our main VHS deck for many years. It didn’t have RCA so probably had an RF output for TV connection.
I think I saw my very first video camera in another of your videos. It was an RCA CC010 with a _heavy_ portable VCR (not VTR, because it was full-sized VHS). It was a great tool, what was called a "pro-sumer" camera. One feature it had was manual controls as well as automatic. And a 10x zoom, which was a fair amount for those days. When I got my camera, portable VCRs were already getting a lot lighter. And something you didn't mention (because it wasn't part of your video) was that they came in two parts. One was the portable part you carried with you, and the other half stayed at home, and remained plugged into your TV, and typically also had the tuner built into it, so you could also use the portable as a home VCR. I'm a bit late to the game, commenting. Sry. I just discovered this channel--and it's amazing!
