Where to rent/buy 1″, 3/4″, Betacam decks

[Bob Zelin]

Most people can’t even throw out their 1″ machines. Would she be willing to pay for shipping of a 1″ VTR, if she got it for free ?

Bob Zelin

[Mark Suszko]

I see ads in the back of TVTechnology magazine for decks like this sometimes, try their online version. Our agency just surplussed a Sony one-inch machine in cherry condition, do NOT contact me about it, but if you want to look for it, google up the State of Illinois surplus property auctions. Some stuff they auction online, ( I think it’s called I-Bid) and even ebay. Other items, you have to come down to a 4-times-a-year auction in Springfield to bid on in person with cash in hand. They sell off old bluesmobiles, john boats, dentist chairs, all kinds of things, but mostly office furniture and old computers. Do not contact me about this, I have nothing to do with it and want nothing to do with it, you’re on your own and I will deny I ever heard of you. I can only tell you that when it left here, it was in perfect working order with good life left on the heads, it’s an older manual-threaading model. What happened when it got stuck on a pallet and shipped out to the surplus warehouse, I have no idea. Could be sitting pretty or already stripped for rare metals, don’t know. Do your own detective work.

Consider too that this may be a big year for local TV stations to surplus out their old decks as they transition to more digital gear. Ask around your local TV stations and college Tv departments to see if you can take one off their hands, free for the hauling… or borrow some off-hours access time.

I don’t know that bumping to digi-beta is smart for this, I’d rather see you use a laptop and hard drives to convert it on the fly into some uncompressed format. Digibeta decks are expensive if you don’t have one, the tape for a thousand hours is not cheap, and are they technically even HD? I’m not sure they are, I don’t think they are. Not that your source materials are HD but certainly I should think you want them uncompressed so you have them as good as you can possibly have them right at the outset, no further cross-conversions needed. Plus putting them to hard drives right away as you play them off lets you start adding the all-important metadata right there too. That’s going to be KEY when this project gets going full-bore.

[Mark Suszko]

One laptop, Dave, but many inexpensive drives, they are under a dollar a gig now. They are going to wind up on a RAID anyhow, why not start there and save some steps and some bucks?

[Steven Bradford]

I think the first question is, how many tapes does she have? If it’s less than a dozen of each format, it makes sense to just send them out to be dubbed to a single modern digital format she can work with.

3/4″ machines are very cheap, good condition betacam decks are under a thousand dollars now. So just a few dubs would buy a deck. If she has dozens of betas or umatics, I’d definitely recommend buying. If she has a dozen of each I’d rent.

1″ machines are very cheap. The last time I bought one, for someone in a similar situation, was five years ago, for $1500. At the time, they all cost $1500, no matter the brand model or features. But that producer had 100 tapes, it made sense. Also, a working 1″ machine isn’t that hard to operate and will probably be just fine for the lenght of the project. Again, if you only have a dozen tapes, I’d send them out for dubbing to DVCam or DVCPro.

2″ Quad is a whole nother scale, of size, hassle, etc. I’d send them out, There are a couple of places (VideoPax in PA??) around the country that have machines. You’d have to have hundreds, thousands even to justify setting up for quad dubbing.

I’d also make a backup protection dub of every new tape. DVCAm doesn’t take up much room.

Steven Bradford
http://www.seanet.com/~bradford/

[Bob Zelin]

As I don’t see Karen racing to respond to us, I think the real question is “is there any place locally near me, that I can transfer all these tapes for $500 ? “.

Wake up boys !

Bob Zelin