Video Tape’s Unintended Consequences…Agony & Ecstasy
Video Tape’s Unintended Consequences…Agony & Ecstasy
This is a story you have never heard. It is about the advantages and headaches caused by the introduction of video tape. We’ll start on the hard part…The Agony.
When video tape use began to really take off with network use in 1957, it caused what was then referred to as “time shifting”. This is when a show that had been produced live daily, was suddenly able to tape several episodes the same day…usually a weeks worth.
With the advent of video tape, all three networks reduced their production staffs by up to 40%. Cameramen, lighting men, stagehands and engineers were let go in droves because the “time shift” had eliminated the need to setup and strike every set, every day. Another difficulty was editing the tape, which for many years, was a major production in itself.
The Ecstasy part is obvious…instant high quality replay, but…in 1957, there was another phenomenon to deal with which was why the networks pushed to hard to get video tape in place by then.
It seems that in the mid ’50s, Daylight Savings Time had become a big issue and several states were bucking the national standard for some reason. Some of these problems were brought on by lawsuits from drive-in theater owners and some were “states rights” issues. Among the rebellious states were Tennessee, Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona and Minnesota.
A lot of this was in court, but the networks wanted to be able to tape delay programs in these five states if need be. A three hour delay for Kinescope playback of New York shows from Los Angeles was OK, because in that period of time you could get a pretty good, fully processed kine. But, with one hour delays, you had to do a hot kine with below average results.
Florida stayed on standard time until 1966. We saw all live programming 1 hour earlier.
Then there was the Ampex ACR-25. KTLA had two of them, one with an editor. It was great when it ran. KTLA had to build a back-up commercial reel from it for prime time because the machines would occasionally get cranky and go into test mode.
I worked on thèse.
Did kinescopes contain a sound stripe on the film, or was the audio on a seperate reel?
This photo is from the WTVT (Tampa) tape room and appears in the story of quad recording on BIG 13. http://www.big13.com/Facilities/facilities_video_tape_recording.htm
All I can say is: The VR-1000 was easier to operate than some of the machines I have in my bedroom–machines that I bought at Bloomingdale’s and J&R Music World…or on the Internet.
Kinescopes were terrible. At least there was a measure of quality to the VR 1000 recordings. Also tape made reruns more available. That also had an effect on production. However, it made the proliferation of syndicated programs possible. Those heavy hour and half hour reels of 2 inch videotape would be shipped between stations. Occasionally the machine would lose the vacuum necessary to keep the tape curved around the spinning quad head which resulted in catastrophic tape damage. Sometimes, one of the 4 small heads in the spinning head assembly would let go and fly across the room. I remember one lodged in the ceiling of the KTLA videotape room.
Ampex 1200″s?
I sure remember the controversy over daylight savings. I was hired by a drive-in theater company to make a five min. film about all the awful things that would result and they ran the film at the drive-ins before the show. It was pretty funny stuff (unintentionally) and totally ineffective.
I grew up on Indiana in the 70s and at least in the market I lived in (South Bend) there was no time shifting. Prime time simply moved back an hour to 7 pm when the rest of the country changed to DST in the spring. That ended in the early 90s and then of course Indiana adopted DST several years ago.
There was a Mission Impossible episode which used this sort of equipment wasn’t there?