In our school we used it in the 70s. The big disadvantage was the recording time of an hour only.

This is one i had as a kid

My family member had vcrs one was from 1987 it was a zenith 😊

I love this setup. This is what i afraid I would have to do to get real channel surfing on my analog tvs/vcrs :(

I love old tech from my era! I'm 52 years old, and as a child, I used to take apart old gear just for fun. In my late teens, I was able to do some simple repair work, and even now, I'm still a tech enthusiast. However, I don't really repair things anymore. It feels almost impossible - everything seems to be built to break within a couple of years.

Literally my dream

The quality on that machine is better then the hifi stereo 4 head vcr I had in mid 90s

Love the early Sony CD players. In the fall of 2023 I drove 4 hours round trip to score a mid 80’s Sony CD player from their ES line for $50. It’s a CDP-520ES and it is an excellent unit. Since then, I’ve recapped it and lubricated the tray mechanism and laser unit slides. Also replaced the tray drive belts. It has very fast track access as the laser sled is moved using electromagnetic linear motor. I listen to it regularly. It was well worth the trip.

That's amazing! Can u show how to do that? I subscribed!

Now you just need to add some analogue scrambling to the mix ;)

How to fix it IF it does happen.

How do you get the ATSC channels into your system? I know not all TV's support both analog and digital, or one or the other. Very interesting.

This is awesome. I love it!

mine has 4 plug in outlets for the comp cables and only white and yellow? we’ve got it to work before but i cannot figure out how

I need this, one day I'll have a channel for each star trek series

I do have my own one analog channel in my house 24H ;)

Great job on video

Well done!

The "S" in S-Video means "separated". So that means it's luma and chroma as separated video signals.

I used to work in a local access TV station in the early 90's and we did have one of these. The rest were newer front loading machines. As mentioned in other comments, you would lay down a control track before editing, then do "insert edits" where you would cue the source and destination machines to the edit point, push a button and both machines would automatically roll back about 3 seconds, start playing and lock together, and then the source would record on the destination without disturbing the control track. Also, the tape stays in contact with the head to read the control track for the counter on the editing controller. Fun fact: the counter won't work without a control track. I wonder if this model is fully capable of editing with the right controller.

Ahh, U-Matic, brings back so many memories. Back in the 80s I took a kind of all-medias education/course spanning some months. U-Matic was our video media and we learned to operate both cameras and editing machines for the studio. The "portable" machines for field recording were huge and weighed a ton, the cameras would then be connected to these bricks via cables. After finishing the course, I went on to work at a local tv station for a while - also using U-Matic - one of my main tasks there was to make danish subtitles for english language programs, using a Commodore Amiga, then transfering everything to tape, ready for broadcast.

Nice ! I found the same unit in a basement when picking up a turntable. The seller wanted 50€ for it - so i took it. I was blown away from the massive construction. After a good cleanup, some belts and some grease it worked fine. I gave it to a fellow junior HAM radio operator who was very interested in old tech at the age of 14 in 2023. He also took a SIEMENS teletype to tinker with. Always happy to support the next generation of tinkerers.

Fantastic machine that it still works afther all those years! Happy New Year!

Our favorite taking and fixing hand is back!

Diffuser; that’s the thing they use with incandescent to give it that even flood look

26:36 ohhhhh nice! lucky find! great music videos - and theres no good quality version of the video for visions of china by japan on youtube, so if you can ever transfer that, i’d be so grateful.

It is a security bit. You can find them at most hardware stores. Harbor Freight tools sell them.

I have a BVU-950, one of the last Umatic models. This is a professional model, so it has editing capabilities, much more connectivity and i belive it’s all-direct drive, so no belts. It’s heavy and noisy (fan cooled), but it’s working perfectly and the picture is still great after ~35 years. The tapes seem to hold up too - of the approx. 400 tapes i have digitized, i think 3 were unplayable.

I wish you would handle these more carefully, tapping them as you put them down, shaking them etc is really bad for old tungsten filaments which are really brittle. They are precious ! In th3 uk we used to have similar bulbs rated 20 volts, 3 watts, we in a string (240 volt mains).They could run hot too. I modified one set with extra lamps but more recently used inline dimmers to make them last longer. I loved these lamps, so much nicer than the later mini or fairy lamps.

I worked on those Sony's for YEARS until they finally died or got obsoleted. Those plungers binding in their mating "cylinder" were VERY common. . If I didn't find them actually causing a problem, I'd lube them for a preventive maintenance step. Those sliding plates would sometimes bind too and needed fresh lube. Tese problems were caused by lubricants drying out than anything else. They were well built machines and were "state of the art" for the time period.

I had these back in the day. Usually the solenoids would fail. That was the main issue for me at least.

PDC stands for "programme delivery control" - if you were making a timer recording, it was a way of allowing the broadcaster to start/stop the VCR automatically rather than when it was scheduled. most useful for last minute changes to the schedule such as the disruption caused by overruns during live events. assuming the broadcaster did their job correctly, you'd be guaranteed to get the whole of your programme. VPT seems to be a reference to the internal teletext decoder - a very high end feature in a VCR. i think some broadcasters sent their listings in some appropriate format over it and the VCR could digest it. some could also burn in the subtitles (which was transmitted via teletext) onto anything you record. SCART was notoriously fickle even with better quality cables :)

I actually just came into posession of TWO VP-2000's from an abandoned office (with a box of training videos) and they're both plagued with dried grease as well. I haven't worked up the courage to start working on them yet. They are so densely layered inside and weigh 65lbs a piece, and I'm just not ready for that 😅

im a few minutes into your video, the machine looks late 70s or early 80s the circuit board has chips on it so it cant be '72 even though umatic came out in '71 the machine looks more modern. EDIT i googled it and this one is from 1978

That sledgehammer clip looks better than the KZbin upload. The Ford archive makes their videos available online from their website, and they also don't look as good as what I've seen here. They suffer from serious de-interlacing problems in the digitization process. In later years, the Ford Communications Network used laser disc for their dealer videos.

Really enjoying this video and the way you describe and show your progress. Subcribed 👍🏻👍🏻 "Surviving The 80's" 😂

Oh, this looks nearly identical to the tv i had in my room as a kid. I'm fairly certain this is the type I had. When you pulled it out of the box, it all looked so familiar. I had that tv from 88 or 89 until the late 90s. I let a friend borrow it and never got it back. Didn't care too much about it at the time but man do i miss having it now. Thanks for the video, now i know what to look for.

The tape you tried playing that was in the cream coloured case: DEMO REEL/ MODE: PAL is a PAL format for europe, asia, Australia. It would not play properly in a NTSC deck or display properly on a NTSC tv.

What a blast from the past. I used these back in the early eighties to record training courses in the UK. In fact, I had three of them along with cameras and monitors in the back of a Volvo 245 in London. Driving in London is a bit of a race course. I saw a gap in the traffic and dropped the clutch to get across the junction. The car moved about 10 metres and then the clutch gave out. I was not very popular with the other drivers I can tell you. It took four of us to push that old Volvo out of the way. Yes, these things weigh a ton!

I have one of these in my garage, except I have the editing recorder! Anybody want it? Too heavy to ship. Los Angeles.

I use to carry large crts by tiping on side and carring with the screen agains my chest .hay you could always fit wheels to that small table thing you got it on . Or find something else more suitable to fit wheels to so you can just pust it away in a corner wjen not being ised for a while

Excellent find. I too have found and have 2 C format VTRs and they both came with thier own tapes. One machine had to be restored at an expensive price but it was well worth it.

How thats built inside is very cool wow ! I know you will pay a premium but you may be able to source the nobs on craiglist

Glad you managed to drop on a find like thatb shame you didnt get all the tapes that were thrown out i love getting tapes with machines with old stuff news etc from back in the day on the look on mrs face when she came in and i had local news from 88 on 😂😂🤣

If you used that VHS VCR as modulator, there's a good chance that that was what was causing the blanking. It might have detected some signals in the video lines that are used for MacroVision and refused to pass the signal through to the TV.

Thieves used to have to lift back in the day apparently

The UHF connector is also known as PL-259. And I'd love to see full transfers of those Ford tapes!

You are correct! Sony did offer a specific screwdriver with a round pilot point and flat blade. In the late 80's we had over 100 rack mount U-matic players for cable tv local commercial insertion and a full time tech assigned to machine maintenance. Even had a direct account with Sony for Parts.

I have a Sony VP-2000 I rescued from an e-waste recycler-bound skid at my university surplus about 12 years ago. I cut my teeth transferring some tapes I got about 20 years ago from my high school at my university on their machines which were still being maintained at the time by the A/V department so I was ready for the challenge of working on mine. A few years later I got a newer model from the early ‘80s which is missing the top cover but records and otherwise works fine. My university threw out a bunch of tapes around the time I got the first player but due to tight privacy concerns they unfortunately were not available for procurement. Thanks for the great video, I’m now a subscriber.

Having three of these. There are a few things you can do to improve the picture quality for both record and playback. Demagnetise all the heads. But, considering the age of the tapes and not knowing how they were stored. It may also be the tape condition.