Anyone still using any tape decks? Beta? Or anything standard-def?

[John Davidson]

So funny you posted this. We did our first HDcam layback in 4 months yesterday and had almost completely forgotten how to do it. I would love to offload this HDCam deck, but I know as soon as I do we’ll get a huge request for it.

I think in another 2 years nobody will be using tape. And that will be glorious. Hopefully UVerse will increase speeds by then though, the 3MB upload speed is getting a little bottlenecky.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Herb Sevush]

[Todd Terry] “I can’t even remember the last time I made a dub or had to injest anything from tape. There are multiple Beta machines, DVcam decks, and even a couple of Umatic machines. Ah, and a VHS.”

Got rid of my 3/4″ deck 2 years ago when I moved. Still have VHS, DV, DVCPRO and Betacam for analog – the one client that still required Betacam has just notified me that they now want HD only – so the answer on the SD side is no, I never use any SD decks anymore. Of course the moment I toss them all I’m sure a client will have need of it – oh well.

On the HD side I still get use out of my DVCPRO HD deck, both ingest and mastering.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Steve Kownacki]

No decks in the edit rooms since the move a little over a year ago, but they are in a rack in what’s basically a ‘catch all’ closet with a spare mac for capture. None of them are hooked up, just do that as needed a few times a year. They used to run thru a really nice Sigma router. I’ll keep them because they aren’t worth the time to sell. PVW2800s on ebay are $75-300. If any of them get use, it’s mostly a Pany S-VHS. Sigh.

Steve

[Nick Griffin]

We did our last SD project four and a half years ago and only finished it in SD because it was begun in SD a year and a half before that. So the trusty old Beta deck has sat around un-touched since early 2008… until a couple of weeks ago.

A very long-term client decided that after 11 years a project we’d done needed to be updated, not the whole thing, just a very few scenes and they were only close-ups too boot. The master, needless to say, exists only on Beta. 11 years ago saving the finished digital file was a much bigger deal than it is now. Anybody remember when the biggest removable was the DVD-ROM disk? When hard disks cost $15 to $20 a gigabyte?

So in firing up the Beta deck I (very fortunately) thought to insert a tape I knew had nothing of value on it. At first it played for a few minutes and all seemed OK. Then after a brief pause and re-start WHAM, Error Code XYZ and the deck was frozen. After a cool down and re-boot the deck worked again for a few more minutes before WHAM, Error Code ABC. This time no luck getting it to re-start and it had the tape. Googled the error code, popped the lid, jiggled tension arms and the capstan assy, before realizing that the guts of this complex a machine were WAY over my head.

I flirted with the idea of buying one of the many used Beta decks for sale — did you know that a BVW series deck can be had for around $2k? But decided that then I’d just be buying somebody else’s service problems so, after some searching, found a company still willing to work on our deck.

A $190 worth of parts, labor and, I suspect, mostly lubrication later viola a working deck and I was able to capture the show.

For me the lesson is to not let the deck sit un-used for years at a time, but I’m left to wonder if something like the need to access ancient footage will occur again. My partner asked why we don’t just digitize the existing Beta masters, but I have to question if that could ever be worth the time as this was the first time anyone has ever asked for anything that old to be re-edited.

[Ned Miller]

Timely thread. Yesterday I visited a client/friend in his early seventies, he is 90% editor (brought the first Avid to Chicago) and his 10% producing I do the shooting for him. He now only produces and edits fundraising videos for mainly large non-profits, usually with a religious bent.

His wife wants him to give up the office and move it home so he has to get rid of a LOT of stuff, very retro: racks and racks of gear with a zillion cables in back. Many tape decks of all flavors. I tried giving him some advice as to what to sell on CL and Ebay and the point he made, and the reason I am writing this, is that since he has all these old tape decks he is able to use “legacy footage” that the usual modern editor can’t deal with. The clients who are now half his age grew up with digital editing, yet they see boxes and boxes of old tapes in their organization’s storage that they’d like to view and use but can’t.

I noticed a set of rewinds and a Moviescope (know what those are?) and he told me that some clients want him to tell them what’s in the 16mm cans!

So I’d say if you have the room you can use your legacy tape decks as a marketing tool by approaching large organizations to work their cool old imagery into their modern videos. The older the exec is and the longer they have been with the large company, the more they will appreciate their history and tradition. That’s what I learned from visiting him.

Ned Miller
Chicago Videographer
http://www.nedmiller.com
www,bizvideo.com

[Shane Ross]

Captured from HDCAM two weeks ago. Still capturing from HDV for many companies who refuse to give tape up (Deadliest Catch also still shoots on HDV). Captured from DV two months ago…and BetaSP at the same time.

In the world of documentary filmmaking, tape will always be there, as the archives are on tape. WE shoot tapeless for a lot of the new stuff, but the old stuff still has tape.

Oh, and when I was at Disney, and we needed footage from ABC shows for promotional pieces, they all delivered HDCAM tapes to us. Only one show gave us a file. Even though we asked for digital files.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Scott Sheriff]

I’ve got hours of archive stuff on various tape formats including quad, 1″, betaSP and SX, 3/4, D2, 16mm and HDV. In fact I still shoot HDV on tape. I don’t imagine I’m the only one.

Scott Sheriff
SST Digital Media
Multi-Camera Director, VFX and Post Production

The Affordable Camera Dolly is your just right solution!

“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair

[Rich Rubasch]

I think a lot depends on what your client’s needs are. We do have plenty of clients with Betacam sources. We upload from them once in a while. In our setup, all our machines have Kona cards and are hooked to the Blackmagic Studio Hub. All decks and other sources are connected and routable. So for us it doesn’t matter what the system is…it gets put on the router and it has access to all the decks.

Not taking them out until I close down shop!

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks for the observations, gang….

I won’t put the decks out beside the road (yet)… but I might not be so ambitious about getting them all cabled in right away. As I said, if I need any legacy footage we do have identical decks in another suite.

My problem is I can never bring myself to get rid of anything. I have countless cans of 35mm film stored, with footage that will never see the light of day again. I keep thinking I might just someday need that some obscure piece of that footage again, and most of it is from projects from back in the standard-def days, so the negatives were digitized to SD only. They’d have to be telecined again if I needed the footage in HD. Of course that need will never come. Until the day after I toss the footage.

Slightly interestingly, back when we were still physically sending out tons of tape dubs of commecials to television stations (although not too long ago), we actually had a television station (somewhere in the midwest, don’t remember where) ask us to send them a one-inch dub rather than the Beta we had sent them. When I explained we couldn’t make a one-inch dub because we didn’t have a one-inch machine, they asked “You don’t? Why not?” Of course we said “Ummm… because they haven’t even made those machines in something like twenty years.” They were genuinely suprised to learn that. Weird.

We also got a one-inch request from the local NASA center here just a few years ago. Their media department was looking for a facility in town with a one-inch machine, since they had recently disposed of the last couple of Ampexes they still had… right before realizing “Hey, how would we ever play these warehouses full of 1″ archival reels?” Hmmmm

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Bill Davis]

[Rich Rubasch] “I think a lot depends on what your client’s needs are.”

I agree with this BUT…

The big problem is that the clients have no clue that at some point in the near future, their thinking will evolve to reflect the new reality no matter how entrenched their thinking is today. It won’t be a gentle transition, it will be sudden – and it will be forever.

So they’ll order their last DVD, or Tape, or whatever. That day will likely be unnoticed. It’ll be a regular tuesday or thursday or saturday just like all the others. But it will mark the last day you’ll need a particular format and you’ll be left with a machine and some stock and a vague sense of nostalgia.

It’s Toy Story for Video Professionals. The shelf of things that were once important – and that we have feelings for – but who’s times are largely gone.

I literally threw away a Tektronics WFM/Vectorscope about six weeks ago that I originally paid thousands for – sic transit technology.

And I’m holding on to my antique wire recorder to remind myself that this is the way it’s ALWAYS been.

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