What happened to real Fast Forward and Rewind?

roxics

roxics

Veteran
Back in the analog days we used to get smoother 2x or 3x (or whatever) fast forward and rewinding. You could watch the video as it moved. With some formats you even got sound.

Since the era of DVD, everything is jumpy. We're skipping forward or backward.
And that's in the best case scenario. Sometimes all we get is a timeline bar and can move the play position marker forward or backward and select a new spot. It won't even give you the skipping forward and backward.

There is no real rewind or fast forward anymore.

Why is this? I miss this.
 
It's there, but it depends on the software.

You could load any digital file into a NLE and have it forward or rewind (with sound) in a wide range of speeds.

Same thing with QuickTime...press J or L (press multiple times to cycle through speeds).
 
It's true that video-editing software has scrubbing. But for recreational viewing, the controls have often frustrated me, especially streaming sites like Amazon.

Often what I want to do is rewind a few seconds of a movie, because I missed a bit of dialog or I just want to see a really cool action move again. This is very fiddly with the timeline cursor.

Eventually I discovered various shortcuts to skip forward or back a few seconds, but it is inconsistent across providers and sometimes not obvious.

In some ways, these new digital shortcuts are more convenient. Youtube has several keyboard shortcuts. Also its ability to play a video at 2x speed, with sound, has made a lot of videos more tolerable.
 
Some of the online streaming players have useful 10-second backwards/forwards buttons.

Eventually (if not already), they will probably develop them to be customizable (maybe you'd like 5 seconds, or 8 seconds).

Obviously not the same as playing back in a certain speed for whatever reason (besides cleaning up footage which is done like this on a daily basis), but it's useful to be watching something and have the ability to press the 10-second button once or twice to instantly start playing from 10, 20 seconds before/after.
 
There's a few things that are contributing to the problem. Tape allowed the frames to move sequentially across the head at variable speeds both forwards and backwards. The tape was moved faster and slower. DVD doesn't do this. It only spins one way. So the head has to move around to find the past frames or wait for the disc to spin around to get the frames it needs. It's not possible to smoothly read frames sequentially. Second, on tape, every frame was encoded fully as a complete frame in analog. So each and every frame was available to be played back. With digital, there are full frames and partial frames from which the frame has to be reconstituted. This makes for a real headache when playing back digital in reverse or at frame rates other than normal. The media can't just grab any frame. It has to get a full frame and then transcode the other frames that it needs to play. So has to get frames it may not display in order to play the ones it does need to display.

When it comes to streaming, the protocol chain to send messages back and forth have a lot of delays through the network. Especially if you are going from say Comcast to Amazon. The Comcast network has to figure out if the command from the remote is for Comcast or needs to be forwarded to Amazon. Then there is the server itself which could be anywhere and it has to get that stream to you through who knows what networks. When playing a steady stream, this is relatively easy because once the stream is set up, it can be buffered for smooth play. But when doing fast forward or reverse play, this becomes a real problem. There may be plenty of other issues, but it gives you an idea of how things are different now.
 
It didn't even occur to me the OP might actually be talking about doing this on traditional hardware (even a DVD player in a computer)...but that would actually make more sense.

I don't remember much about DVD players but supposedly towards the end of their best manufacturing days the better technology had better scanning vs. cheaper unit skipping.

There probably is some more information about it online somewhere, but a quick random YouTube search actually shows the scanning in action here (I don't know if this is a serious tutorial).

 
Paul F said:
There's a few things that are contributing to the problem. Tape allowed the frames to move sequentially across the head at variable speeds both forwards and backwards. The tape was moved faster and slower. DVD doesn't do this. It only spins one way. So the head has to move around to find the past frames or wait for the disc to spin around to get the frames it needs. It's not possible to smoothly read frames sequentially. Second, on tape, every frame was encoded fully as a complete frame in analog. So each and every frame was available to be played back. With digital, there are full frames and partial frames from which the frame has to be reconstituted. This makes for a real headache when playing back digital in reverse or at frame rates other than normal. The media can't just grab any frame. It has to get a full frame and then transcode the other frames that it needs to play. So has to get frames it may not display in order to play the ones it does need to display.

When it comes to streaming, the protocol chain to send messages back and forth have a lot of delays through the network. Especially if you are going from say Comcast to Amazon. The Comcast network has to figure out if the command from the remote is for Comcast or needs to be forwarded to Amazon. Then there is the server itself which could be anywhere and it has to get that stream to you through who knows what networks. When playing a steady stream, this is relatively easy because once the stream is set up, it can be buffered for smooth play. But when doing fast forward or reverse play, this becomes a real problem. There may be plenty of other issues, but it gives you an idea of how things are different now.
Click to expand...

Great explanation. It's unfortunate that despite the advances in digital technology we've mostly lost this ability.
 
NorBro said:
It didn't even occur to me the OP might actually be talking about doing this on traditional hardware (even a DVD player in a computer)...but that would actually make more sense.

I don't remember much about DVD players but supposedly towards the end of their best manufacturing days the better technology had better scanning vs. cheaper unit skipping.

There probably is some more information about it online somewhere, but a quick random YouTube search actually shows the scanning in action here (I don't know if this is a serious tutorial).

Click to expand...

Yup. Regular DVD and Blu-ray players. But even that is skippy.
I'm talking more like the JKL keys work in Premiere Pro
More like this:
 
Yeah, I used to like that "effect" when I was younger and watched the tapes rewind (when I did it that way and didn't stop them to do it).

Since you're asking about the difference literally, it simply comes down to the technology and its memory.

If pinching a long piece of film with your thumb and index fingers controlled the playback's speed, you could slide them back and forth and see the mechanical result in its affected real time.

A disc player cannot write what it reads fast enough on the disk to provide you the same seamless feedback/output.
 
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