Antiquities: an incredible videotape
Now, in 2019, the videotape has lost all relevance. When a year ago I decided to digitize my old recordings, and it was not without difficulty that I took a picture from a VCR to a modern meter LCD panel, it was an experience comparable to listening to gramophone records at 78 turns. Perhaps no old analog carrier shares such an abyss with the modern version: you can get quite decent sound from audio cassettes; reel tape recorders are considered by some to be the standard of warm-tube sound. Photography and film are still used by photographers and mainstream filmmakers.
Therefore, the main reason to write this article was the memory. The video recorder in many families in the nineties became the first artifact of the new world. The video recorder, and someone else also had a video camera, recorded moments of our life, the media environment of that time, and now, a quarter of a century later, I watch these recordings for the first time not with a slight feeling of awkwardness, but with interest. Enough time has passed for it to be interesting to brush away the dust from the abandoned cassettes, get a working machine and briefly give the soapy video picture a second life. For comparison with modern digital video, and to capture the details of this unique experience of interaction with analog technology (not yet forgotten). Well, just like that, for nostalgia for young times.
I keep the diary of the collector of old pieces of iron in real time in the Telegram .
My familiarity with home video starts in 1992, and that means I missed half of the format history. The tape recorders of the Video Home System system went on sale in 1976. VHS successfully survived the format war with Sony Betamax and the less well-known Video 2000 standard (there is a good video on Techmoan about it), replaced the more ancient cassette technologies of the early seventies. The reasons for the success of VHS are initially the longer recording time per tape compared to Betamax, and successful business solutions, for example, the rental market for video recorders (and not just tapes). This option made an expensive device more affordable, and most importantly - the manufacturer took the risk of failure of initially not the most reliable devices.
')
The development of all these formats was in principle possible after solving the problem of recording a large amount of information on a magnetic tape. Early attempts to adapt the mechanism of a reel-to-reel recorder with fixed magnetic heads to this task were unsuccessful: the tape had to be passed through the mechanism literally kilometers per hour. Rotating drum with two (or more) magnetic heads, located at an angle, allowed more efficient use of the entire area of ​​the magnetic tape. The method of oblique-line recording, invented in the fifties, is still used in tape data storage devices.
In the nineties of the last century, video recorders reached us in a mature form: compact, functional, and fairly reliable. An example of “how it used to be” was the legendary Soviet VCR Electronics VM-12 : huge, not inferior in size to Soviet televisions, with vertical tape loading (the horizontal requires more moving parts), with manual tuning of the received channels and mechanical switches between them. I also had a high-quality four -head VCR Toshiba V-312G , with fast tape rewinding (important for regular customers of video rental) and extensive programming options for recording offline.
But the TV was still Soviet, which gave rise to two problems. First, this “Horizon” had no composite video input, and the tape recorder was connected to the antenna input, with a slight loss in quality. Secondly, the image was black and white: the TV understood only the French (and Soviet) color TV standard SECAM , while most video cassettes were recorded in the PAL standard. The purchase of a PAL / SECAM decoder was funded by selling vouchers .
By comparing with the on-air TV, the quality of the picture on the video rental cassette seemed divine. But the coolest were the new horizons of content consumption : you can watch any kind of movies, anytime, and no longer depend on the TV program. Video rentals that appeared at the same time offered a typical assortment of 3-4 hundred tapes, each usually had two films, and for the first few weeks it was normal to take three tapes at once (and watch them until the morning). Recording your own video was originally in the background, although it was thanks to her that the home video format at the end of the twentieth century was videotape, and not laser video disks .
Already later, they began to record movies from TV on blank tapes (or as lucky), and here one could experiment with the “long” recording format. Compared with standard SP quality (tape speed 2.34 centimeters per second, slightly faster in countries with NTSC format), LP mode doubled the standard cassette capacity - instead of three hours, you could record six, with tolerable loss of image quality and a significant deterioration sound. The process took place in real time: one had to remember to pause the recording during the ad units. Now the priorities are different: the same films and musical programs are usually available in much better quality, and it would be more interesting to watch commercials.
Last year, I bought a relatively modern LG L274 video recorder. Model of the beginning of the two thousandth, the era of a sharp decline in the popularity of videotapes. This is noticeable: a simple design, in principle, there is no display on the case, information is displayed only over the video on the TV screen. In this case, the technical part is a very perfect implementation of the VHS standard. Connecting to a modern LCD TV was initially unsuccessful: the image disappeared regularly, as if there was a bad contact somewhere. But it's not about him: inherently digital devices expect accurate frame synchronization. For the output on new TV requires an additional device, known as Time Base Corrector . In fact, it re-synchronizes the video signal, so that modern devices (including video capture cards) do not go crazy.
To be fair, some devices for capturing analog video (and TVs too) correct the errors in the signal on their own, but not in my case. Professional proofreaders are expensive, but there is a simple and budget way to combine the old and the new: DVD recorder. They are now sold at times cheaper than VCRs, and completely solve the problem. I had to add LG DRK898 DVD recorder to the rarities collection, which is now completely irrelevant due to the lack of HDMI output. I did not use it for recording: I just connected a VCR to it on one side, and on the other, a TV set and an external Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle video capture card. To digitize the video used the program OBS Studio .
Before enjoying a warm tube video, let's take a look inside. Interestingly, nine years ago I already posted on Habré an article about parsing a VCR - but then it was still a poorly used piece of iron from the recent past, without a particular nostalgic component. A feature of the VCR mechanism (and any device with a rotary drum head for recording and reading) is the need to pull the tape out of the cassette in order to provide the necessary area of ​​fit of the heads to the tape.
Inside, in addition to the main head, there is another one (not counting the uninteresting erasing head in front of the drum). She writes a sound and technical track for video synchronization to tape. Due to the fact that the tape speed is lower than even a compact cassette, the sound quality of the VHS has never been different (especially in the Long Play mode), until the invention of the VHS Hi-Fi.
I wanted to compare the quality of modern video and the quality of VHS, just as I did for an old camera on floppy disks . Take high-quality digital video in 4K format, record it on video tape, digitize it back, and compare. There is another problem here: now we are shooting and watching video in 16: 9 widescreen format (for movies, it can be even longer). VHS was created under the TV 4: 3 ratio. Writing video with black stripes on a videotape means reducing the already low vertical resolution (576 visible lines for the PAL standard). Most of the branded video cassettes with movies because of this was a version adapted for TV, where a part of the “wide” frame was simply discarded. As a source, I took a freely distributed video from here :
The size of the source file is 95 megabytes, the duration is 32 seconds, the resolution is 4K. A lot of details to make the comparison vivid. There is no sound in the video, so I not only cut it to 4: 3, but also added a music track from the free library. In the video above, the frame is divided into two parts. On the left, the original, on the right, export to MPEG2 in DVD quality with a fairly high bit rate. The fall in resolution is already noticeable, but believe me, it will be much worse. I cut a disc from a DVD source, insert it into a DVD player and re-record it into a tape recorder.
Here it is, our soap youth! In the process, I probably made a few mistakes that had a little impact on the quality. First of all, there is a noticeable difference in the frame refresh rate. The source at 24 frames per second is transformed into the standard 25 frames per second for the PAL standard, digitized with a frame rate of 60 frames per second. Because of this, in the process of digitizing and further upscaling to 4K resolution, these twitching artifacts appear on the VHS half of the video. But it is quite possible to compare the quality of “video now” and “video then”. Despite the shoals of my method, this is probably one of the best options for recording on tape.
In the reality of the nineties, we either copied one tape to another with a mandatory loss of quality, or wrote from terrestrial TV, which did not differ in quality at all (a separate quest is to place the antenna correctly relative to the nearest TV tower). Video copy of the highest class was considered a copy from a laser disc, the format is not digital, but at least not subject to degradation. "Laser copies" were advertised separately by movie film sellers. In video rentals, as a rule, something like the tenth copy of the screen was available, with people walking in front of the screen, voice-over and a monophonic creative translation.
Sunset VHS and ghosts from the past
The digital standard for DVD is considered to be the killer of video recorders (it went on sale in 1997), but in my case, a computer video of the beginning of the two thousandths immediately replaced the videotapes. First, on a CD in the Mpeg4 format, a little later, with the advent of a dedicated Internet, it became possible to completely abandon the physical media. The second decade of the twenty-first century makes it unnecessary to even store videos offline: everything can be viewed directly from the network.
I simply missed several stages of video tape development. This is, for example, the 1987 enhanced S-VHS format. Unfortunately, I was not able to use the folk data recording system on the Arvid VCR, and if we investigate this aspect of VHS, then it is definitely worthy of a separate material. At the sunset of the format, at the beginning of the two thousandths, there was a rather exotic standard D-VHS . In the tape recorders of the system, the Super VHS mechanism was used, but data was written to the tape — up to 50 gigabytes per tape. This, before the advent of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD in 2006, was the only way to watch movies in high definition (not counting the even more exotic MUSE LD format on laser discs).
Perhaps the most useful upgrade for a traditional VCR was support for stereo sound recording. To do this, two more magnetic heads were added to the drum of the tape recorder (there were six in total), which wrote a sound of sufficiently high quality in parallel with the video. Here are the specifications for the VHS Hi-Fi standard: a dynamic range of up to 80dB is less than the theoretical CD ceiling (96dB), but noticeably higher than that of a compact cassette. The most interesting thing is that VHS Hi-Fi is an analog audio recording format, which, according to its characteristics, is close to good reel tape recorders. It is cheaper, but in reality, the implementation of the electrical circuit in a particular VCR may also affect the sound quality. And they were created after all not to rewrite vinyl on them. But the opportunity is there!
Well, in my case, the VCR is first of all a time machine 25 years ago. To sort through old cassettes is a rather laborious process. There is no way to quickly scan the record, and the content is mostly not interesting: movies and TV series in a rather dull quality. If they are recorded neatly, then you will most likely have a bad copy of what you can download on the Internet. The most interesting thing begins when in the recording process 25 years ago some kind of failure occurs. On one tape I recorded the broadcast of one channel with sound from another. How did that happen? Secret! On the other - the recording of the series, made autonomously, which means there are brainstorming ads and other interesting artifacts of the nineties. In the video above - an example of such an "oversight" of the operator. It allows you to assess the quality of the recording on the sickly antenna, and at the end there is an example of what happens when one record is written over the other. It is useful to watch all the tapes closer to the end - there may be a fragment of the previous record, which will be more interesting than the main content.
Of course, the most interesting are your own recordings from a VHS video camera. Unlike competing standards ( Video8 , for example), recording from such a camera could be viewed at home directly on a VCR. A small cassette with a duration of 45 or 60 minutes was inserted into the adapter, where the tape was drawn out for use in a home device. In practice, all that is preserved is the second and third copies of the original. A compact VHS-C cassette was usually available in a single copy, and after the regular session it was necessary to reset the recording to a large cassette. In the video above, I cut pieces from my own video. The sound is removed, it is terrible.
For a long time these records were not of particular interest. The video was filmed because it was a video camera, and did not think about how to shoot . As a result, in the archives are feasts, shooting from holidays with long panoramas of beauty and excessive use of zoom. My cassettes had to rest for a while, and now it is interesting: a city without cars, and if they come across, it is mostly domestic production. Houses without siding, streets without advertising. Apartments with Soviet furniture, and relatives, young, and you yourself are not yet old.
Analog carriers have a big advantage: if you do not throw them out thoughtlessly, they lie and wait in the wings, and accidentally spoiling such a recording is very difficult. There is no culture of storing digital sketches of our life yet, we often rely on popular social services, which, alas, are not eternal, and certainly not concerned about storing your data for many years. Videocassette in our country has gone from insanely expensive toys to the universal standard home video. Then for many years she was gathering dust in the closet, and only now she is turning into an incredible time machine. A quarter of a century is a long time. Looking through records from the past, I made a lot of discoveries, found shooting, which I had already managed to completely forget. And now I think about whether it is possible to create an analogue of such a time capsule in a digital environment, fix the time, and leave it for storage, for a long time, so that for another couple of decades this archive would be preserved as well as records on VHS.
Therefore, the main reason to write this article was the memory. The video recorder in many families in the nineties became the first artifact of the new world. The video recorder, and someone else also had a video camera, recorded moments of our life, the media environment of that time, and now, a quarter of a century later, I watch these recordings for the first time not with a slight feeling of awkwardness, but with interest. Enough time has passed for it to be interesting to brush away the dust from the abandoned cassettes, get a working machine and briefly give the soapy video picture a second life. For comparison with modern digital video, and to capture the details of this unique experience of interaction with analog technology (not yet forgotten). Well, just like that, for nostalgia for young times.
I keep the diary of the collector of old pieces of iron in real time in the Telegram .
My familiarity with home video starts in 1992, and that means I missed half of the format history. The tape recorders of the Video Home System system went on sale in 1976. VHS successfully survived the format war with Sony Betamax and the less well-known Video 2000 standard (there is a good video on Techmoan about it), replaced the more ancient cassette technologies of the early seventies. The reasons for the success of VHS are initially the longer recording time per tape compared to Betamax, and successful business solutions, for example, the rental market for video recorders (and not just tapes). This option made an expensive device more affordable, and most importantly - the manufacturer took the risk of failure of initially not the most reliable devices.
')
The development of all these formats was in principle possible after solving the problem of recording a large amount of information on a magnetic tape. Early attempts to adapt the mechanism of a reel-to-reel recorder with fixed magnetic heads to this task were unsuccessful: the tape had to be passed through the mechanism literally kilometers per hour. Rotating drum with two (or more) magnetic heads, located at an angle, allowed more efficient use of the entire area of ​​the magnetic tape. The method of oblique-line recording, invented in the fifties, is still used in tape data storage devices.
In the nineties of the last century, video recorders reached us in a mature form: compact, functional, and fairly reliable. An example of “how it used to be” was the legendary Soviet VCR Electronics VM-12 : huge, not inferior in size to Soviet televisions, with vertical tape loading (the horizontal requires more moving parts), with manual tuning of the received channels and mechanical switches between them. I also had a high-quality four -head VCR Toshiba V-312G , with fast tape rewinding (important for regular customers of video rental) and extensive programming options for recording offline.
But the TV was still Soviet, which gave rise to two problems. First, this “Horizon” had no composite video input, and the tape recorder was connected to the antenna input, with a slight loss in quality. Secondly, the image was black and white: the TV understood only the French (and Soviet) color TV standard SECAM , while most video cassettes were recorded in the PAL standard. The purchase of a PAL / SECAM decoder was funded by selling vouchers .
By comparing with the on-air TV, the quality of the picture on the video rental cassette seemed divine. But the coolest were the new horizons of content consumption : you can watch any kind of movies, anytime, and no longer depend on the TV program. Video rentals that appeared at the same time offered a typical assortment of 3-4 hundred tapes, each usually had two films, and for the first few weeks it was normal to take three tapes at once (and watch them until the morning). Recording your own video was originally in the background, although it was thanks to her that the home video format at the end of the twentieth century was videotape, and not laser video disks .
Already later, they began to record movies from TV on blank tapes (or as lucky), and here one could experiment with the “long” recording format. Compared with standard SP quality (tape speed 2.34 centimeters per second, slightly faster in countries with NTSC format), LP mode doubled the standard cassette capacity - instead of three hours, you could record six, with tolerable loss of image quality and a significant deterioration sound. The process took place in real time: one had to remember to pause the recording during the ad units. Now the priorities are different: the same films and musical programs are usually available in much better quality, and it would be more interesting to watch commercials.
Back to the Future
Last year, I bought a relatively modern LG L274 video recorder. Model of the beginning of the two thousandth, the era of a sharp decline in the popularity of videotapes. This is noticeable: a simple design, in principle, there is no display on the case, information is displayed only over the video on the TV screen. In this case, the technical part is a very perfect implementation of the VHS standard. Connecting to a modern LCD TV was initially unsuccessful: the image disappeared regularly, as if there was a bad contact somewhere. But it's not about him: inherently digital devices expect accurate frame synchronization. For the output on new TV requires an additional device, known as Time Base Corrector . In fact, it re-synchronizes the video signal, so that modern devices (including video capture cards) do not go crazy.
To be fair, some devices for capturing analog video (and TVs too) correct the errors in the signal on their own, but not in my case. Professional proofreaders are expensive, but there is a simple and budget way to combine the old and the new: DVD recorder. They are now sold at times cheaper than VCRs, and completely solve the problem. I had to add LG DRK898 DVD recorder to the rarities collection, which is now completely irrelevant due to the lack of HDMI output. I did not use it for recording: I just connected a VCR to it on one side, and on the other, a TV set and an external Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle video capture card. To digitize the video used the program OBS Studio .
Before enjoying a warm tube video, let's take a look inside. Interestingly, nine years ago I already posted on Habré an article about parsing a VCR - but then it was still a poorly used piece of iron from the recent past, without a particular nostalgic component. A feature of the VCR mechanism (and any device with a rotary drum head for recording and reading) is the need to pull the tape out of the cassette in order to provide the necessary area of ​​fit of the heads to the tape.
Inside, in addition to the main head, there is another one (not counting the uninteresting erasing head in front of the drum). She writes a sound and technical track for video synchronization to tape. Due to the fact that the tape speed is lower than even a compact cassette, the sound quality of the VHS has never been different (especially in the Long Play mode), until the invention of the VHS Hi-Fi.
I wanted to compare the quality of modern video and the quality of VHS, just as I did for an old camera on floppy disks . Take high-quality digital video in 4K format, record it on video tape, digitize it back, and compare. There is another problem here: now we are shooting and watching video in 16: 9 widescreen format (for movies, it can be even longer). VHS was created under the TV 4: 3 ratio. Writing video with black stripes on a videotape means reducing the already low vertical resolution (576 visible lines for the PAL standard). Most of the branded video cassettes with movies because of this was a version adapted for TV, where a part of the “wide” frame was simply discarded. As a source, I took a freely distributed video from here :
The size of the source file is 95 megabytes, the duration is 32 seconds, the resolution is 4K. A lot of details to make the comparison vivid. There is no sound in the video, so I not only cut it to 4: 3, but also added a music track from the free library. In the video above, the frame is divided into two parts. On the left, the original, on the right, export to MPEG2 in DVD quality with a fairly high bit rate. The fall in resolution is already noticeable, but believe me, it will be much worse. I cut a disc from a DVD source, insert it into a DVD player and re-record it into a tape recorder.
Here it is, our soap youth! In the process, I probably made a few mistakes that had a little impact on the quality. First of all, there is a noticeable difference in the frame refresh rate. The source at 24 frames per second is transformed into the standard 25 frames per second for the PAL standard, digitized with a frame rate of 60 frames per second. Because of this, in the process of digitizing and further upscaling to 4K resolution, these twitching artifacts appear on the VHS half of the video. But it is quite possible to compare the quality of “video now” and “video then”. Despite the shoals of my method, this is probably one of the best options for recording on tape.
In the reality of the nineties, we either copied one tape to another with a mandatory loss of quality, or wrote from terrestrial TV, which did not differ in quality at all (a separate quest is to place the antenna correctly relative to the nearest TV tower). Video copy of the highest class was considered a copy from a laser disc, the format is not digital, but at least not subject to degradation. "Laser copies" were advertised separately by movie film sellers. In video rentals, as a rule, something like the tenth copy of the screen was available, with people walking in front of the screen, voice-over and a monophonic creative translation.
Sunset VHS and ghosts from the past
The digital standard for DVD is considered to be the killer of video recorders (it went on sale in 1997), but in my case, a computer video of the beginning of the two thousandths immediately replaced the videotapes. First, on a CD in the Mpeg4 format, a little later, with the advent of a dedicated Internet, it became possible to completely abandon the physical media. The second decade of the twenty-first century makes it unnecessary to even store videos offline: everything can be viewed directly from the network.
I simply missed several stages of video tape development. This is, for example, the 1987 enhanced S-VHS format. Unfortunately, I was not able to use the folk data recording system on the Arvid VCR, and if we investigate this aspect of VHS, then it is definitely worthy of a separate material. At the sunset of the format, at the beginning of the two thousandths, there was a rather exotic standard D-VHS . In the tape recorders of the system, the Super VHS mechanism was used, but data was written to the tape — up to 50 gigabytes per tape. This, before the advent of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD in 2006, was the only way to watch movies in high definition (not counting the even more exotic MUSE LD format on laser discs).
Perhaps the most useful upgrade for a traditional VCR was support for stereo sound recording. To do this, two more magnetic heads were added to the drum of the tape recorder (there were six in total), which wrote a sound of sufficiently high quality in parallel with the video. Here are the specifications for the VHS Hi-Fi standard: a dynamic range of up to 80dB is less than the theoretical CD ceiling (96dB), but noticeably higher than that of a compact cassette. The most interesting thing is that VHS Hi-Fi is an analog audio recording format, which, according to its characteristics, is close to good reel tape recorders. It is cheaper, but in reality, the implementation of the electrical circuit in a particular VCR may also affect the sound quality. And they were created after all not to rewrite vinyl on them. But the opportunity is there!
Well, in my case, the VCR is first of all a time machine 25 years ago. To sort through old cassettes is a rather laborious process. There is no way to quickly scan the record, and the content is mostly not interesting: movies and TV series in a rather dull quality. If they are recorded neatly, then you will most likely have a bad copy of what you can download on the Internet. The most interesting thing begins when in the recording process 25 years ago some kind of failure occurs. On one tape I recorded the broadcast of one channel with sound from another. How did that happen? Secret! On the other - the recording of the series, made autonomously, which means there are brainstorming ads and other interesting artifacts of the nineties. In the video above - an example of such an "oversight" of the operator. It allows you to assess the quality of the recording on the sickly antenna, and at the end there is an example of what happens when one record is written over the other. It is useful to watch all the tapes closer to the end - there may be a fragment of the previous record, which will be more interesting than the main content.
Of course, the most interesting are your own recordings from a VHS video camera. Unlike competing standards ( Video8 , for example), recording from such a camera could be viewed at home directly on a VCR. A small cassette with a duration of 45 or 60 minutes was inserted into the adapter, where the tape was drawn out for use in a home device. In practice, all that is preserved is the second and third copies of the original. A compact VHS-C cassette was usually available in a single copy, and after the regular session it was necessary to reset the recording to a large cassette. In the video above, I cut pieces from my own video. The sound is removed, it is terrible.
For a long time these records were not of particular interest. The video was filmed because it was a video camera, and did not think about how to shoot . As a result, in the archives are feasts, shooting from holidays with long panoramas of beauty and excessive use of zoom. My cassettes had to rest for a while, and now it is interesting: a city without cars, and if they come across, it is mostly domestic production. Houses without siding, streets without advertising. Apartments with Soviet furniture, and relatives, young, and you yourself are not yet old.
Analog carriers have a big advantage: if you do not throw them out thoughtlessly, they lie and wait in the wings, and accidentally spoiling such a recording is very difficult. There is no culture of storing digital sketches of our life yet, we often rely on popular social services, which, alas, are not eternal, and certainly not concerned about storing your data for many years. Videocassette in our country has gone from insanely expensive toys to the universal standard home video. Then for many years she was gathering dust in the closet, and only now she is turning into an incredible time machine. A quarter of a century is a long time. Looking through records from the past, I made a lot of discoveries, found shooting, which I had already managed to completely forget. And now I think about whether it is possible to create an analogue of such a time capsule in a digital environment, fix the time, and leave it for storage, for a long time, so that for another couple of decades this archive would be preserved as well as records on VHS.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/449502/
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