Recording video in the 1950s

[Mike Watterson]

Yes, I was thinking of monochrome. Stupid.

Having designed multistandard digital video kit I can assure you that all the possible standards are a PITA.

It seems too that variations have multiplied since Digital

Fortunately 48kHz sound works OK with all of them, though in a slightly odd-legged way with 59.94Hz. 44.1kHz sound in a TV environment can best be called a nuisance. Thank heavens for good, low-cost audio sample rate converters.

I have both an H4N and H6 and edit/convert with Audacity. I got the as new H6 for €220 as an upgrade , with 2 year warranty, which is crazy cheap for what it does.

Curiously some companies distributing Audio Books give customers 48 KHz sampled MP3, but want 44.1 kHz CD style wav files uploaded.

Even composite + analogue stereo, and component + analogue stereo to HDMI is very cheap.

I have an old purely analogue 5 ch amp and it only took two attempts to get a cheap box with RCA & optical digital in that seems to do everything, to 5.1 Ch analogue out. I combine the 0.1 ch to centre in the amp and have an external two way filter on output to drive centre speaker and sub-woofer. The lounge has a modern do everything Yamaha with HMDI switching / decoding etc and aux analogue in plus FM tuner.

[Richard_FM]

When discussing video recording, it is worth mentioning CED discs. RCA introduced this technology to the market /1981/ knowing that it was outdated compared to the competition /Betamax, VHS/. Apparently, from the point of view of the company's image, it was better to sell a poor-quality product to consumers than to admit defeat and end 17 years of research with nothing.

From what I've heard CED had a lot of quality issues.

At one time there was the thought that disc formats were be used for pre-recorded media & tape formats would be used just for recording, because the tapes were more expensive to duplicate at the time.

Probably because few people could afford to buy 1 device at the time, let alone 2, this didn't work out.

[Mike Watterson]

I'd forgotten about CED!

From what I've heard CED had a lot of quality issues.

Yes. The early idea of selling them like LPs in a sleeve had to be abandoned.
The Capacitance Electronic Disc format was commonly known as "videodisc", leading to much confusion with the contemporaneous LaserDisc format.

Also RCA released the 45 (in 1949? one year after 33 LPs) with a big hole in the middle and their player thus couldn't play LPs or 74s, so the "spider" was invented and the Labels then produced 45s with knock out centres.
Tapes are inherently "for ever" more expensive to duplicate, never mind the material & manufacturing costs. The mass produced CD, DVD, BD are pressed, which is why 1890s record discs better than phonograph cylinders. Even MO drives, like in the PS Portable, could also read pressed discs, though those never caught on for music for PSP.

RCA had lost the plot by the 1960s.

The nuvistor is a type of vacuum tube announced by RCA in 1959. Nuvistors were made to compete with the then-new bipolar junction transistors.

—Wikipedia.
Actually the transistor was 10 years old then.

Then by maybe 1986 RCA were gone.  Originally Victor and created HMV in UK and Japan Victor Company (JVC still uses a version of the Nipper logo in Japan).
CED and Philips Laser disc both invented in mid 1960s. CED was grossly inferior.
I remember reading about it and the article was sceptical. Only the size and marketing power of RCA allowed them to sell as many as they did,

[DrStrangelove]

Goodness me, laser disc invented in 1963 according to Wiki, the reflective version in 1969.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc#...0in%201968.

I've seen exactly two systems, the BBC Domesday one that graced the local library for a while, and a Philips LaserDisc player in the "Instrument Store" at work.

Someone made off with it when I cleared the room of half a century of accumulated detritus* in the noughties.

*Including a complete 3 phase lab.

[Mike Watterson]

I've seen only two also. One in a shop in late 1970s on demo and one part of an interactive training system with a PC in a factory in late 1990s. An RCA "CED" based system would never have lasted that long.

But though development of Laserdisc might have started in the 1960s, it wasn't available till 1978 worldwide. It may have been earlier than the Wikipedia date of 1978 in USA in UK/Europe. Certainly some Philips, Grundig and other European developments were in UK/Europe (and PAL before NTSC) before USA or Japan. With USA developed products (Apple II, IBM PC etc) Europe could even be up to a year later.

I also had early Video CDs, including one CD-i format version of a Star Trek TOS movie. With in a few years of 1994 (when White Book VCDs came out) the home PC encoding on Windows was better than the original releases. IMO all the commercial VCDs are poorer overall than VHS and much poorer than S-VHS due to to encoding artefacts. Our "home made" VCD were better, somewhere between VHS and S-VHS. Colour smearing and noise could be a problem on VHS as was lack of horizontal resolution. The VCD is only 352×288 25p but for slower moving content (no visible artefacts) obviously early commercial CD-i and VCD had better colour registration and lower noise. VHS resolution limitation is horizontal frequency response. Often quoted is 250 lines horizontal, PAL VHS is similar to about 335×576 pixels luminance and 40×576 chrominance. Hence VCD is slightly better horizontally, much better on colour, but on static or slow moving scenes, though there are no artefacts it has half the vertical resolution (no interlace on recording) for PAL or NTSC. Our first DVD player still goes and plays the actual Video CDs. The CD-i title (or titles?) only played on a Windows 3.11 PC with a video editing card that had a PAL TV out, to the TV. I can't remember if we tried that/those titles later on XP or Linux or later DVD players.

I also have a Kodak supplied Portfolio CD (CD Audio tracks synced to an interactive slide show using PhotoCD images). It plays on my Philips PhotoCD/Audio CD player (must be over 25 yo, but goes well) and on a free Kodak app for Windows 3.x. The high cost of authoring Portfolio CDs certainly helped to kill it. Similarly archival and high quality PhotoCD was replaced by Picture CD, using jpegs on CDROM format (cheap aluminium backed CDRs) that was too low resolution and too compressed because of Kodak Bureau costs for PhotoCD.

But Film APS and PhotoCD finally killed off by digital cameras.

[Mike Watterson]

I found 3 discs
ST II and ST III are Video CD. The Linux box can see the files, but Celluloid doesn't understand the video format.
ST VI is oddly "Digital Video on CD-i". Linux caja filemanger can't see the filesystem!

[Mike Watterson]

I found 3 discs
ST II and ST III are Video CD. The Linux box can see the files, but Celluloid doesn't understand the video format.
ST VI is oddly "Digital Video on CD-i". Linux caja filemanger can't see the filesystem!

ST II is labelled "CD-i Movies" in the corner of cover, but is a VCD.

The actual Video CDs (VCD) do play on Linux using VLC. The leaflet is © 1994 Philips

The Video Editing card with HW MPEG/MJPEG coding/decoding is in the attic, it's a huge ISA card and the VGA looped through it. It added PAL format video in a window on the VGA display and has various PAL input/outputs. I rather suspect that other than a PS1 with MPEG cartridge, or a rarer CD-i console or a suitable 386 with ISA slots and Win 3.1x (or maybe Win95) the ST IV is orphaned. CD-i Video doesn't seem to have used a standard CD-ROM format (High Sierra, ISO 9660).

The VCDs do play on my original 2003 Supervision 2500 DVD player (which plays SVCDs) and on a Sony DVD recorder with Firewire input.
The Panasonic BD player doesn't recognise VCD or CD-i.
The older cheap (€39 in Tesco) Philips BD player does play the VCDs, but "Unrecognised Disc Format" for CD-i Video.

The CD-i disc (ST VI) is unreadable on everything. The only date on it is the Paramount © 1991, which may not be pressing date, but OTOH the two earlier movies in the VCD format are © 1994 Paramount as well as © 1994 Philips.

All three editions "Made in Germany" on the disc.

[Richard_FM]

I remember by school library getting a PC with a CD-I drive, which mostly had interactive software available. There were some stand alone machines to play them as well.

[ppppenguin]

Time for a quick summary.

The story of recording video starts with Baird in the 1920s and 30s. The 30 line signal could be recorded on 78rpm discs. Don McLean's excellent book "Restoring Baird's Image" tells the story. Well worth reading if you can get a copy.

In the first high definition era from 1936, the only way to record video was on cine film. This was widely done but it was expensive, not very satisfactory and there was no possibility of immediate playback. There were various attempts to record video on magnetic tape but none was commercially successful. In 1956 Ampex devised the quadruplex system. The trick here, as on almost all subsequent VTRs, was to spin the heads to give a high head-to-tape speed.

After quadruplex, professional and domestic VTRs all used helical scan** until the end of the tape era in the 2000s. Gradually computer disks and then solid state memory replaced tape which is now only of interest to archivists and vintage enthusiasts.

Recording pictures has gone from almost impossible to utterly trivial.

**Barring a few minor outliers mentioned in the thread which used linear recording.

[Mike Watterson]

… Gradually computer disks and then solid state memory replaced tape which is now only of interest to archivists and vintage enthusiasts.

Recording pictures has gone from almost impossible to utterly trivial.

When I first got PC based PAL video editing the biggest disk I could afford allowed only a 20 minute project (source and destination) of SD PAL using MJPEG.

My oldish still camera (EOS 70D) can store 6 hours of full HD at lowest compression (a so called "edit format") on the full size SD card (256G), which is cheap. Actually free because I bought a micro-SD for the tablet before I had the camera, and Amazon sent a full size card by mistake. The current EOS 90D can do 4K video (but a mirrorless Micro Four Thirds camera is now best value video with interchangeable lenses, better now than a camcorder). I think there 4T SD cards, because 2T micro SD cards are easily found, and full size SD can have two chips, always twice maximum of micro size). I've many terabytes free space on both workstations and nearly 1T free on laptop. One WS and laptop are hybrid, have SSD for OS and HDD for user files. My wife just got a Nintendo Switch and the 256 G micro SD card was under €22 inc shipping. It can record video files from your gameplay.

Also you can point it at an LCD screen (running different frame rate video at any resolution, it's a 4K HDR LG 23″ screen) and have flicker free HD video. VGA, composite & Component adaptors to HDMI are cheap too.

The €45 HD sat box can drive composite PAL, NTSC and the HDMI can do HD to 4K screen, or downscale to drive an old 5:4 LCD with only 768 lines @ 60 fps. Interlace or deinterlace no matter what the source was. An extra €40 gets a version with DVB-T2 also (though HD here is DVB-T, so a €12 USB DVB-T stick works).

The 4K TV manages NTSC DVDs with no obvious issues and upscales. It even fixes ghastly US DVDs where the film souce was incomprehensibly encoded at 480 30i instead of usual progressive.

Amazing changes since I was a child watching The Wooden Tops in 405 line with the curtains needing pulled in 1960. Or even watching the moon landing our 405/625 mono TV in 1969.

Richer people used to do home movies on 8mm (actually 16mm, and you turned round the film and recorded other half, then lab cut it into two 8mm lengths with sprocket on one side).

The film home movies survived till VHS camcorders where affordable. Digital 8 was the last gasp of tape based home movies and I thought it was brilliant when I got it in about 2006 (S/H). MFT makes it and any video camera under £1500 look stupid. My daughter-in-law does 4K cookery videos on a Panasonic MFT. My camera (EF/EF-S APS-C & 20 M pixel) is better for stills and the lenses are cheaper, but the mirrorless and OLED viewfinder beats it (and latests model) on video.

It's amazing that there are few working machines and heads for almost every commercial video tape system ever used since 1956, yet some of the video disc formats might be unplayable. There was even a CD sized LaserDisc (1987) I've never seen. I never saw RCA CED either. No doubt someone can still play CD-i, but I'm surprised that up to maybe 2000 I could and now can't, though my bought Video CDs and home made SVDs still play.

At least my CD-i is cheaply replaceable, remastered Blu-ray is only €12 (maybe only £6!) . Shame BBC deliberately destroyed 16mm film and reused video tape of expensive to make "drama", not just time shifted mass produced stuff like in USA. More ITV stuff survives.