Betacam on VHS Cassettes

roxics

roxics

Veteran
I was just looking up the specs for various tape formats of the past and noticed that Betacam and Betamax initially used the same ferric-oxide tapes. I believe VHS also used ferric-oxide tape. I also believe SuperBetamax used ferric-oxide tape. The switch to metal particle was for Betacam SP, ED-Beta, and SVHS. Let me know if I'm wrong about any of that.


What's interesting to me is the tape run speed.
VHS 3.335 cm/s
Betamax 1.87 cm/s (Beta II)
Betacam 10.15 cm/s

So Betacam is over 5x increase in speed compared to Betamax. By that logic you should be able to fit about 40 minutes of Betacam video on a T120 VHS cassette. Assuming Betacam equipment had been built to use VHS cassettes. Which I don't believe was ever the case.

Furthermore if VHS had used the same recording speed as Betamax, we should have gotten a third more running time out of a T120 tape. A bit more actually. My math is probably wrong but I think an additional 58.6 minutes. So more like a T178. Somewhere in that ballpark? I'm not great at this kind of math.

I'm curious how it was that Beta II could achieve the same quality as VHS at a third lower tape speed.

I'm also curious what you think would have been the ultimate format for this time period for both consumers and professionals if you could bash together any existing formats to create the ultimate home video / broadcast format for that time period. Did it already exist in Betamax/cam or could something better have been bashed together?
 
I and countless other cameramen I know used to grab and recycle used news oxide Betacam tapes for use at home in our Betamax systems. Which as you observed ran at a much slower pace. Technically the Sony Beta tape transport system was of a better design than the Victor VHS system. Beta I speed of 1.57 inches per second (ips) offered a slightly higher horizontal resolution (320 lines vs 240 lines horizontal NTSC), lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS and exhibited less wow and flutter than VHS at those low tape speeds.

Sony with its Betamax development was ahead of the VHS system in development in the early days and decided to stick with Betamax and even actively petitioned the Japanese government to try to make Betamax the "official" home entertainment standard in Japan. This move failed and more and more manufacturers signed up with the cheaper license fees of the competing Japanese Victor system. The cheaper VHS manufacturing licensing fees were one of the major causes of Betamax's failure. VHS machines being cheaper became the leading choice of the Porn industry. Some tech historians suggest that this trend alone, during the Golden Age of home porn in the late seventies and into the eighties was one of the prevailing reasons why VHS overtook Betamax. Then in '82, we were suddenly introduced to a rebirth of the Beta system called Betacam but now running a faster tape speed and now recording a color difference signal on its higher quality oxide tape. The home system I wanted but couldn't afford at the time was the Philips 2000 home recording system. It was very innovative and had a lot going for it but being of European heritage it became too expensive up against the flood of much cheaper VTRs coming in from Asia.

Finally, when PCM Stereo Hi-Fi VHS machines came out with their audio heads adjacent to the video heads on the helical scan video drum Philips were done and dusted. The audio on those VHS HI-Fi machines was good, CD quality. So much so that when Hollywood movies arrived for duplication to VHS the 1" C format video reels that contained the movie also came with a time-coded PCM Hi-Fi VHS tape that contained the movie's audio track. This was then synced in a pro studio S-VHS machine to the 1" type C VTRs for the dupe run. The Dolby C linear tracks on the 1" machines not being of high enough quality for the VHS dupes that now required sound quality good enough for the now rapidly expanding market of PCM Hi-Fi VHS units. Remember it well. I worked on some of those tape transfers to MPEG2 for the creation of DVDs.

In answer to your final question about the ultimate consumer, not a pro tape format there was an answer. It was called DVHS in its day but its market life was very short. Though I must say the quality coming out of DVHS which was a development based on the original VHS-type tape format was pretty incredible at the time.

Chris Young

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRFoLD45URI
 
if you like old stuff - This was Sony - their release of 8mm professional products in the UK - and after the show I bought one - a camera with bolt on 8mm rear end - as seen in the video. I still have it somewhere!
 
cyvideo said:
I and countless other cameramen I know used to grab and recycle used news oxide Betacam tapes for use at home in our Betamax systems. Which as you observed ran at a much slower pace. Technically the Sony Beta tape transport system was of a better design than the Victor VHS system. Beta I speed of 1.57 inches per second (ips) offered a slightly higher horizontal resolution (320 lines vs 240 lines horizontal NTSC), lower video noise, and less luma/chroma crosstalk than VHS and exhibited less wow and flutter than VHS at those low tape speeds.

Sony with its Betamax development was ahead of the VHS system in development in the early days and decided to stick with Betamax and even actively petitioned the Japanese government to try to make Betamax the "official" home entertainment standard in Japan. This move failed and more and more manufacturers signed up with the cheaper license fees of the competing Japanese Victor system. The cheaper VHS manufacturing licensing fees were one of the major causes of Betamax's failure. VHS machines being cheaper became the leading choice of the Porn industry. Some tech historians suggest that this trend alone, during the Golden Age of home porn in the late seventies and into the eighties was one of the prevailing reasons why VHS overtook Betamax. Then in '82, we were suddenly introduced to a rebirth of the Beta system called Betacam but now running a faster tape speed and now recording a color difference signal on its higher quality oxide tape. The home system I wanted but couldn't afford at the time was the Philips 2000 home recording system. It was very innovative and had a lot going for it but being of European heritage it became too expensive up against the flood of much cheaper VTRs coming in from Asia.

Finally, when PCM Stereo Hi-Fi VHS machines came out with their audio heads adjacent to the video heads on the helical scan video drum Philips were done and dusted. The audio on those VHS HI-Fi machines was good, CD quality. So much so that when Hollywood movies arrived for duplication to VHS the 1" C format video reels that contained the movie also came with a time-coded PCM Hi-Fi VHS tape that contained the movie's audio track. This was then synced in a pro studio S-VHS machine to the 1" type C VTRs for the dupe run. The Dolby C linear tracks on the 1" machines not being of high enough quality for the VHS dupes that now required sound quality good enough for the now rapidly expanding market of PCM Hi-Fi VHS units. Remember it well. I worked on some of those tape transfers to MPEG2 for the creation of DVDs.

In answer to your final question about the ultimate consumer, not a pro tape format there was an answer. It was called DVHS in its day but its market life was very short. Though I must say the quality coming out of DVHS which was a development based on the original VHS-type tape format was pretty incredible at the time.

Chris Young

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRFoLD45URI
Click to expand...

Thank you! I love learning about this kind of stuff. I didn't know 1" tape was used to make VHS dubs. Or for that matter Hi-Fi VHS used in conjunction with it for its superior audio. Although I was aware that Hi-fi VHS had very good audio. I was a kid at the time this stuff was happening. So it was not on my radar yet. I do remember getting my first Hi-Fi VCR as a teenager in the early 90s though. A Christmas gift I had asked for. A JVC model. I also remember my oldest sister and brother-in-law had a Sony Betamovie camera. I remember that in the mid 1980s and being fascinated with it. In fact I picked up a Sanyo Betamax player at a thrift store a few years back for $12. Only to find out it doesn't work. But it did take me a couple years to find some beta tapes in another thrift store to even be able to test it out. So maybe it worked when I first got it and something died over the two years before being able to test it. I bought it as a curiosity. Thinking maybe at some point some client might approach me with some older beta tapes and I'd then have a way to transfer them. lol. That's never happened. Oh well. No real loss.

But I remain fascinated by these older formats. Partly because as a teenager I remember reading about them in my Videomaker magazines and so on, but never being able to afford them back then. By the time I hit adulthood, we were making the switch to digital. By the time I started doing this professionally at 27 years old, DV was already entrenched in the lower end of the market where I work, and HDV was starting to make headway in for a short while. So I never really got to play with the Betacam stuff or anything old school high-end. None of the old linear editing systems or anything like that.
I kind of feel like I missed out a little bit.
 
roxics said:
. So I never really got to play with the Betacam stuff or anything old school high-end. None of the old linear editing systems or anything like that.
I kind of feel like I missed out a little bit.
Click to expand...

Hmmmm. What can one say. I understand the "missing out" feeling but boy, my nostalgia for that era isn't based so much on fondness as familiarity. Tape-to-tape editing was a huge PITA compared to non-linear, slow and cumbersome, and particularly with the consumer formats you suffered generational loss (so a copy of your master was noticeably more dog-eared than your camera originals). I think the one possible advantage of editing on tape (and film) was that being a destructive medium it forced you to be more thoughtful about your edit choices ahead of time. And possibly more attuned to thinking in terms of seconds and frames, for what good that does? To this day, probably 30 years after my last tape edit, I still have a pretty good grasp on what a 7 shot looks like vs 5 or 10 (as opposed to non-linear where you might think of it more vaguely as a visual block on a timeline), which might make for better communication with an editor.

As far as shooting--having a heavy deck banging around your waist and a cable curling up to the camera was really cumbersome and was glad to welcome in the camcorder!

Really the only affection I still hold from the days of yore is the look of vintage video, especially tube cameras which I have yet to see anyone properly emulate in post from modern acquisition.

I recently unearthed on a VHS tape footage from a teenage excursion into Boston with a borrowed camera with the intent of recreating the opening sequences of "Cheers" and "St. Elsewhere" which were both on air at that time. I thought it would be fun to cut those into the actual opening sequences, something I'm sure I hoped to do back then, but never got around to and it would have certainly been in a more scrappy version than what is simplistic to do today. Check out the split screen of the final shot--I got pretty close! I can't remember now 40 years later what my actual MO was but I would have to guess that I had the actual opens on one tape and kept swapping it into the VHS deck and playing it back as a reference- which would have surely meant hitting stop to get the camera to go live, then re-cuing the playback, and repeating until I got it right. Incredibly laborious, compared to how one would probably do it today (playing back the reference material on an iPad).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5aw14er6wds0h4j/CheersStElsewhere.mov?dl=0
 
CharlesPapert said:
Really the only affection I still hold from the days of yore is the look of vintage video, especially tube cameras which I have yet to see anyone properly emulate in post from modern acquisition.
Click to expand...

Have you seen "Computer Chess" by Andrew Bujalski? It's a 2013 film shot entirely on old B&W tube cameras—a great film on its own merits but made even more interesting, in my view, because of the look.
 
drboffa said:
Have you seen "Computer Chess" by Andrew Bujalski? It's a 2013 film shot entirely on old B&W tube cameras—a great film on its own merits but made even more interesting, in my view, because of the look.
Click to expand...

Hadn't seen but just did a dive on it and I will have to watch. Outside of my interest in old tube cameras, I grew up around the MIT computer labs in the 70's as my dad and uncle worked there so that movie is right up my alley! Looks like they were using the Sony 3260, a chunky box of a camera. I think that was the one featured as a working prop in the movie "Auto Focus".
 
Oh yeah, if you're into old computing you'll really enjoy it. Bujalski's films are understated and slow (compared to most mainstream films) but I think they're great. "Computer Chess" might be my favorite just for the look and the old tech.
 
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