How to Make a YouTube Video in 1987

Decades before software like Premiere and iMovie made video editing cheap, easy, and accessible for everyone, the only option was chaining a conglomerate of vintage 80s technology - multiple camcorders or VCRs and a TV - to craft custom analog video. Then the Videonics system changed tech history forever.
With professional-grade setups costing up to six figures at the time, the Videonics brought simple editing to the masses at a tiny fraction of the price… in theory. The reality of the Videonics video editing system was a jumbled mess of retro tech that took a near-miracle to make your kid’s 8th grade jazz band concert video look a little more polished.
And getting it all to work over 35 years later? It took 8 VCRs, 2 camcorders, 3 Videonics units and 4 remotes to create a 1987-era KZbin masterpiece. But in the end, it revealed the beauty and drive of the first-generation analog filmmakers and videographers who made KZbin possible for all of us.
GummyRoach: / @gummyroach
Weird Paul: / @weirdpaulp
TechnologyConnections: • Macrovision: The Copy...
#retrotech #analog #vhs #filmmaking

[@gummyroach]

Very nicely done!

[@SDRIFTERAbdlmounaim]

what are the chances of meeting about gummy roach besides you ?

[@fungo6631]

You must be blind, the video is in 30 FPS. For something talking about analog video that's an unacceptable oversight.

[@tarstarkusz]

No, he's a big dummy who never heard of Amiga.

[@Zer0InfinityLIVE]

Thank You for helping out with this project!!!😺💖👍

[@tarstarkusz]

No, it's wrong. He apparently has never heard of the Commodore Amiga. Unlike other low cost computers of the time, the Amiga could use a genlock to overlay graphics and fonts and other special effects right out of the box (plus a genlock). Of course, all this is ignoring the fact that most big youtubers are using professional grade equipment. He's using consumer grade stuff in this video. He is massively overstating the difficulties.

[@Capturing-Memories]

The fact that 8 random VCRs were all set to low speeds this tells you how much people cared about video quality back in the day.

[@SlyPearTree]

And they'd make copies of copies of copies at those speed...

[@jrmcferren]

The quality loss was not noticeable by most people, especially when recording off of TV, the recording time was considered more valuable.

[@U.S.A.]

I didn't even know and didn't noticed back then that it's gonna be worse quality, all I cared about is that I could record 6 hours of movies onto a 2 hours cassette.

[@marsilies]

It was far more important to be able to record a lot of footage. One possible reason VHS won the VCR war over Betamax was that when it was introduce in the US, all models came with LP mode, for 4 hours of recording, enough for a football game. Betamax originally launched with only the the base β1 speed (its SP mode), which only recorded 60 minutes on the most common tape. Longer record times were so desirable, later Betamax VCRs couldn't even record β1 speed, only the slower βII and βIII speeds.

[@RobertRedland]

With the TV's we had back then, we couldn't really tell the difference.

[@ArtUniverse]

0:30 Fun fact: the time span between 1987 and the first youtube video is shorter than between the first youtube video and now.

[@elimcgamerguy]

..stop that...

[@starsINSPACE]

Oh wow it is 18 years vs 19 years

[@lastnamefirstname8655]

i cry as my body disintegrates into dust.

[@Ironattheend]

Now *that* is a fun fact!

[@tomlangley6236]

SO

[@COASTER1921]

This channel is going to explode in popularity, these latest videos are insanely high quality for the subscriber count. The framing using old popular science magazines is such a good idea.

[@brantub]

agreed. these are brilliant, ambitious, and super nicely made vids.

[@harshbarj]

That's because he did a lot of Vsauce 2 videos. He has a LOT of experience on a large channel.

[@Grim2]

What, 118k subs isn't enough?!

[@rigo.acosta]

I mean his Vsauce2 channel has 4 million subs, he definitely knows how to make high quality videos

[@Nooticus]

It should. But unfortunately it won’t. Not enough people care.

[@theultimatebionicfly]

I was a teenager in 80's Australia and I love seeing your videos of tech from that decade because it was pretty much unattainable for most of us down here because of price and rarity. Keep up your great work.

[@rodmunch69]

It was the same in the US. I had a Commodore 64 that I didn't get until 1988, and out of my friends in school, I was the only one to have any computer at all. That was still the case when I graduated in 93, I can't think of a single person I knew whose family had a computer. Having a computer was very rare until the later half of the 90s when prices finally started to come down, and the internet just started to become a thing.

[@sideburn]

I was editing videos in 1992 captured off VHS tapes on a Mac II CX with Adobe Premeire 2.0, a Video Spigot capture card, a Radius Rocket accelerator card, and about 40 megs of Ram (several thousand dollars worth but I worked for a RAM company so it was free lol). When I selected “render” in Premeire to build my 320x240 15 minute video, the progress bar came up and said Time Remaining: About two days..” to render and save the video onto my 2GB, $2,000.00 hard drive. I still have everything but the hard drive. I was gonna make some KZbin vids with it when I have about a month of free time 😆

[@no1DdC]

Free RAM is the best RAM. I once found a whopping 32 MB of RAM in a dark corner of the school's basement. Asked a teacher if I could have it, they said yes and my first PC (already cobbled together from other discarded parts) went from 16 to 48 MB of RAM. I was never crazy enough to edit videos on this thing though.

[@sideburn]

@ haha yeah looks like in 1992 Ram cost about $40.00 per meg so I over estimated the cost of ram but pretty expensive.

[@rodmunch69]

Hey, look at the rich kid. Sorry, I meant thief.

[@BigTheSmall]

That last bit with the actual recording is hilarious. I can only imagine the nightmare you had to go through before giving up.

[@andywest5773]

I think this is giving the Videonics system way more credit than it deserves. Sure, it came before KZbin, but "basement dreamers and garage tinkerers" weren't using it. I know because I was one. Like most people at the time, I used two VCRs and did editing from one to the other manually. I even managed to pull off some _very_ crude stop-motion animation. It may have been an interesting consumer device, but it wasn't very influential. I certainly wouldn't say that it made KZbin possible. KZbin was about "broadcasting yourself", and the Videonics unit did nothing to advance that capability.

[@Geopholus]

I started doing video in an Art School 1971. Later 1986-1994 I worked for a school system repairing the electronics there, including working in a "video center" where there was "distance learning" and a weekly TV show for Cable public access!. The preferred technique in Schools was a large scale, large format video editing recorder, and using an Amiga computer, and the "Toaster". Maybe You needed two editors. The trick was synchronizing two video machines with SMPTE time code.

[@visualonestudio]

My dad bought a camcorder in 1987 and made a montage video of pictures and clips of the family, all edited in camera. It even and text because the camera had a keyboard attachment. It was his first and only video (it took so much time to make). But it was great. We still watch it today. I edited my own silly in the late 90s videos using two VCRs and sound effects from Goldeneye. I first edited on a computer in high school in 1999. It was mind blowing!

[@majorbuzz]

I was gifted a Videonics when they were fairly new. If I didn't catch on to technology quickly, I would have been so frustrated using it. As it were, I was never very satisfied with the results. I recently digitized a library of home videos and saw the Videonics graphics for the first time in years. Oh, my.🤣🤣🤣

[@katsemo]

Kevin out there sacrificing his own sanity for us ❤ everyone, after me: THANK YOU, KEVIN!

[@Great-Documentaries]

No one did this sort of thing in 1987 without an Amiga with a genlock. What a giant missed opportunity to show how we ACTUALLY made such videos back then. "It took 8 VCRs, 2 camcorders, 3 Videonics units and 4 remotes to create a 1987-era KZbin masterpiece." Try two VCRs, one camcorder and one Amiga with genlock. Far cheaper, far better.

[@niveketihw1897]

My father got a full-size VHS camcorder that I think was bigger than the one Marty used. He truly LOVED that thing. He was born in 1942 and being able to record his family and play it back on the TV was mind-blowing to him. He loved documenting family events, holidays, get-togethers, sporting events. That thing was a beast. It's kind of sad in a way that these technologies are almost worthless today. But that's the nature of this technological explosion we've been experiencing for generations now. Honestly everything about this vid warmed my heart.

[@EyesOfByes]

My parents still their 1987 B&O TV I grew up with. Amazing audio still to this day

[@rodmunch69]

What a difference a few years makes. I was in high school video production in 1992 and I believe we had Video Toaster, just using a bunch of hardware shuttles and physical controls (I only vaguely remember the details). A thing I do clearly remember is having access to a video encyclopedia on a laser disc and being able to quickly / easily import short clips from it to put into our videos. It wasn't modern by any means - no software timeline or anything that I remember - but it was much much easier than this, but obviously still very expensive. The biggest thing I recall is that in early 1993 we got the first digital camera I ever remember hearing about or seeing. By 1998, I was using Photoshop and Premiere and had a legit 1.2MP digital camera that saved all the images to a floppy disk. I still have pictures I took with that camera, and they're pretty good quality - just limited by the resolution really, which was still a not too bad 1024x768.

[@EricDarrell]

We had a DirectED in 1988 and even back then it was confusing and clunky. We have a few videos on our channel of us as kid actually using it. It's cool to see a video about it as NOBODY remembers this thing.

[@megan_alnico]

The special effects are pretty impressive for the time. I did a bunch of video editing in my high school days back in the '90s and I had nothing besides two VCRs and my little sister's VTech toy to do graphics. Honestly, it would have been easier for you to just have hit play on one VCR and record on the other one.

[@esecallum]

That is what I used to do. Also you can insert edit by cutting one of the erase head wires and replacing with a switch!!!

[@jamesslick4790]

@@esecallum So...I wasn't the ONLY one to use this ONE WEIRD TRICK. LOL.

[@mumiemonstret]

In 1995 I had a VCR with jog/shuttle that enabled frame-accurate cuts with exactly that basic method. I made a music video that was super tight but boy was it tedious...

[@rodmunch69]

He didn't use it in the video, at least not that I saw, but this had things like transitions - swipes, etc. That alone would have made this very interesting for the money. Also queuing up things - if you were doing this in that era - well I know at least in my case I'd spend hours just doing really simple stuff and trying to time up things perfectly so you'd completely cut out commercials and it would look professional. Now, in most cases, the commercials are the most interesting thing so not having them kind of stinks.

[@ch9nnel99]

I want to interject. There were absolutely editing controllers and VHS decks and video mixers that would be in what would be considered the "pro-sumer" category today that would have made everything you're trying to do here a lot easier. In fact, I have popular science magazines from that era with advertising for some of them in a pile somewhere. You have two identical VHS decks with a controller between them to set your cuts instead of having to crudely pause and record video as mentioned, and you could run multiple decks through a panasonic wj mixer for fades, wipes and effects once you have all your footage cut together with linear deck to deck editing. This is how I learned to edit video in the early 90s in AV club, and part of my current workflow as a video artist/video dj

[@domramsey]

The reason you couldn't find these things is because nobody used them. I made an edited VHS videos at this time. Firstly, it's pretty easy to do basic editing by using the record & pause functions on the recording player. And you can use the camcorder itself as the source player. For titles & graphics, there were a myriad of video titlers out there, but many people like me used an Amiga. It was ideal because it could be used as a genlock to overlay the Amiga's picture on the video and record the output. This is why the Amiga was used as the basis for the Video Toaster later. The whole process was pretty easy and pretty cheap. You definitely didn't need any fancy control units and you could do some pretty accurate editing with judicious use of the pause button on the VCR. I know you can only make videos on things that have appeared in Popular Science, and this device is quite interesting, but your narrative is a bit off, suggesting people were spending many thousands on these devices. I actually did my own version of The Terminator (starring my cat) using my Panasonic camcorder, a basic VHS recorder and my Amiga. It was terrible, but I did it!

[@Cooe.]

This device was $400, not thousands. People would have already owned a VCR. Also, Amiga ownership was basically non-existent, especially in America.

[@marsilies]

Using an Amiga to edit video was only cheap if you already had an Amiga 2000, which retailed for $2,395. Also, you NEEDED the Video Toaster to overlay anything the Amiga output over another video signal, and the Video Toaster was another $2,399. So $499 for a standalone box that could do overlay graphics was actually pretty decent. It's probably why they moved on to make the standalone TitleMaker 3000 without all the editing features.

[@Dirge4july]

"The reason why you couldn't find these things is because no one used them." I think that was made clear by the fact he could only find one human being on all of KZbin talking about the device.

[@NJRoadfan]

@@marsilies Commodore offered a genlock titler attachment for the Amiga 1000 (A1300). There were cheaper genlock boxes for the Amiga 500 that plugged into the RGB port. Heck, even Apple got into the action and offered the Video Overlay Card for the Apple II.

[@marsilies]

@@NJRoadfan Even going with the cheapest option, The Amiga 500 launched at $699, and the AmiGen was $179, so still more expensive.

[@jl-mg]

For anyone interested: most, if not all, of the music in this video comes from the album "Lady Robot & Underscores" by Lazlo Bencker.

[@ClaudioMalagrino]

I had a personal project of a "video magazine" in 1993. I used a VHS camcorder, a VHS-editing suite and paper-printed titles inserted via lumakey. I recorded myself with a lapel microphone in my room, and even interviewed people in the streets. I tried to distribute the program in video rental shops. It was totally rejected as a kind of heresy: "How dare you doing a TV program yourself?" Funny how people today accept more a home-made content than at the time. The problem wasn't the program itself, but the lack of a distribution medium, something we would have only in the 2010s.

[@no1DdC]

Fascinating. It seems like you uploaded some of them to your channel. I don't speak the Portuguese, but it's still interesting to see.

[@ClaudioMalagrino]

@@no1DdC Thank you for watching! There are a couple of programs about DXing/SW Radio and also a micro-documentary about air pollution in Sao Paulo.

[@supadupasharp]

I see Popular Science, I click. Now I am one step closer to my VHS KZbin career. Invaluable..

[@aL3891_]

What a marvelous hack, using the ir sensor to control the vcrs and discovering the codes using a vhs tape, i love it 😄 Amazing video as always Kevin, popular science got the deal of the century

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

ive been pretty lucky to see how music videos were made at a recording studio with vhs(composite tv) and 1/4 inch audio feeds. Needed to run multiple tapes at the same time and switch the feeds to other tapes to get different footage into the main stream. Super cool to see in person . Loved the residential/light commercial aspects as well. The platforms were about 6 or 7 feet wide, about 30 inches deep and slanted towards the user. Populated with hundreds of inputs, outputs and buttons or dials. I think it was very close to your proposed figure of 250, 000 $.

[@jeffc2190]

It used to be a painstaking process editing videos. I remember many long nights with 4 VCR's bouncing tape back and forth to get time-lag edits from getting cropped short of their starts (as seen in your final edit). This box was a dream that I had, and now I'm glad to see I could never afford it. My favorite tool was a fade/wipe machine made by Videonics. Many wedding videos were created with this, along with audio insert dub on hi-fi machines with SAP analog stereo. The 4.2 second lag-time is still ingrained in my reflexes for the pause button on my Panasonic VCR remote. Ah the good old days... BTW, there were little Macrovision removal boxes that you could toss inline of the outputting vcr signal to remove the copyright protection. These especially came in handy for dropping in your Rambo edits. Cheers to your frustration on this adventure. Just think, we didn't have the internet as a resource for help back then, so those 800 numbers for support were key. Also, someone actually answered when you called, and spoke English. Bonus!

[@markmuir7338]

Looking at the final output of your edit: one can appreciate how tight cuts mid-sentence (that we are so used to) just weren’t a thing until the technology allowed it.

[@no1DdC]

Pretty much the only way to do these at the time was by directly splicing film together.

[@alexss3]

on consumer VCR's, not really, but studio grade equipment let's you scrub one frame at a time and when you have timecode to work with you can do it a lot more accurately.

[@evanrhildreth]

You did not need that device to make videos in 1987, nor did it solve the biggest problem: VCRs took a second or so get spin up to speed, so every time you made a cut or spliced a video, the video would blip. They made VCRs for editing, including some consumer models. They had two features: 1. a shuttle wheel, that allowed you to quickly skip forward or backwards to find and pause on any frame, and 2. synchronized dubbing. Once you had both VCRs paused where you wanted, you pressed one button. Both VCRs rewinded a few second, spun up to speed and synchronized their time bases, so both got to the previously paused frame at the exact same time, at which time the second VCR instantly switched from playback to record. The result: a perfect slice.

[@no1DdC]

Huh, this unlocked an old memory of mine. We had a VCR with a shuttle wheel. I always wondered what it was for and now I know.

[@MinoltaCamera]

I didn't know Weird Paul. It's amazing

[@weirdpaulp]

Thanks

[@pootca]

Did Kevin lose the password to Vsauce 2?

[@brandonmack111]

Right? I thought this was Vsauce at first

[@BrendanWeibrecht]

I thought he looked familiar! I found an announcement post from March about Kevin Lieber and Matt Tabor from Vsauce2 relaunching Popular Science on KZbin - Google 'Big news: Popular Science is back on KZbin'

[@shaider1982]

Vsauce 2 is still operational. What hsppened was he was hired to host Pop Sci

[@Drozey710]

Seems like they all do their own channel now but kevin still comments from the vsauce channel which is a little odd.

[@no1DdC]

@@Drozey710 They are most likely freelancers. Nothing odd about it.

[@OG_Mereles]

The real question is 'If there's 3 million videos added every day, WHY does my feed only shows the same 15 videos every time I hit refresh!?' KZbin sucks!

[@no1DdC]

Because the holy algorithm decided that they are not relevant to you. If we are being fair, 99.99% are likely useless junk. You influence recommendations by blocking channels you don't like, upvoting content that you do and commenting under those videos.

[@williambrennan5701]

i ask the same thing...ive got the same 3 videos in my first row bar for a week now..im like bro go away

[@andywest5773]

Because 2.99 million of them are of cats sleeping, dash cam footage of somebody driving to the grocery store, what somebody ate for lunch, and other wastes of bandwidth.

[@alexkuhn5078]

Imagine if this technology had taken off and given rise to some sort of snailmail-based community, where users would produce tapes and then just circulate them around. Every couple days you'd get a tape from a random subscriber under the condition that you either pass it along or submit one of your own.

[@SportsCasters2326]

Incredible. Kevin doesn’t miss.

[@CK-ceekay]

Love love love the retro tech videos. Great stuff

[@3-dog-solution]

Wonderful, .. hooking up two VCRs was much easier way back when, and one of them was the camera itself: we had fun video editing way back when. This magic box would have been a boon, so glad I didn't know about them (grin!) Well done indeed with the analogue path you took, fascinating! EDIT: splitting up the audio and video into separate channels (audio out/in) on the VCR from the camera, stopped that annoying bar from travelling down the screen; well, at least, that's how we did it in the 90s. EDIT2: those VCR cuts in the final [cut], where much better than anything that we could have ever achieved, well done indeed. I bet they were the best three hours of your life: well done again.

[@lusitaniafilms]

I was, and still am an Electronics Tech. Started in 1986 I have fixed thousands of VCR's Stereos, TV's , Video Cameras, and other Misc. But never even heard of that wonderful toy :)

[@chayadol]

Weird Paul is really a good eaxple of We may evolve in term of technology, but at the end of the day, We, huma, are really the same regardless of time and era.

[@HighFuel90]

This video had my on edge, great work.

[@dpc4548]

The difference in video quality in just 3 years was insane. Now there's nothing new, just people saying it is. I made fanedits in the early 90s. Macrovision wasn't legal here, so our players didn't support it. I simply just used two VHS units and it worked fine. If I'd known about this, I would have run away very, very quickly. I started working on television in the early 2000s and never once saw any macs. They were simply never reliable enough and difficult to use.

[@tutacat]

You don't need the second VCR, you can use the camera instead of the second VCR.

[@no1DdC]

I'm assuming this would require a camera with an IR remote though, correct?

[@gabrielopez195]

"Se aprecia el progreso solo cuando vemos lo que vino primero", la mejor frase que he escuchado en un canal de tecnologia antigua.

[@trabolmix2839]

Un poco más y acabo desesperado tan solo viendo el sufrimiento que as tenido para poder hacer el video funcional. Una odisea. Felicidades ❤

[@benjamindover4337]

Twenty years ago I worked for a little media studio who had stuff like this still in use. They also had cutting edge computer systems, but nobody there knew how to use them. So they trained me to work these bizarre systems, where it took hours to do anything, before I showed them you could do the same thing on their power mac in 30 seconds. They were completely mind blown.

[@derekeyler2634]

I don’t know what it is about these retro tech videos but I find them strangely relaxing and therapeutic

[@jonathanreedpike]

I started making video in 1987, you gave a good modeling of the frustration of editing at that time.

[@srenhaandbk7904]

if he hadn't said youtube in every other breath this would have been way more enjoyable

[@NJRoadfan]

Even with actual professional VCRs...ehh VTRs, this was painful. Linear editing a masterpiece with two decks and a dedicated editing controller takes forever. I even had access to a really fancy setup with two playback decks to allow for A-B roll effects via a Panasonic WJ-MX50. Endless scrubbing thru footage and marking edit points...... I really don't miss it at all. At least they had time code so you didn't have to rewind tapes back to the beginning again! Yikes. By the way. There was a modern take on this concept made in the late 90s, called the Pinnacle Studio 400. It relied on VCRs and Camcorders with control jacks like LANC and Control-S. It was just as janky and I lost several hours trying to get one of them working. Seriously, I setup a Video Toaster with minimal knowledge of both analog video and Amigas in less time! One thing in common with all this analog video stuff. WIRES.... lots and lots of wires.

[@keenanmoore264]

That was a super interesting watch. A trip down nostalgia lane. Very well done. :)

[@MBUncle]

That VHS video whine gave me flashbacks. The last bit was such a trip. Thanks Kevin

[@ghostrider2664]

It's interesting that you pick 1987. That year I was attending 7th grade at a magnet middle school that focused on media and communications. It had a full TV production studio. I mean the real stuff. The pro camera the big board and everything. We spliced tape by hand with razor blades. Yes a load of 7th graders with razor blades in their hands. I still have the VHS tape from those days. Somewhere in my parents house. So I do know of what you speak. You took me down memory lane man. And Mr Dills, if you're out there, you are remembered.

[@tvamsterdamonline]

Already in 1982 the portable VHS recorders had a mechanism to edit properly, by then we learned that pressing de Pause button 18 frames ahead of the aspected cut was final. A few years later the U Matic video systems edited more accuratly, so there was no more need to edit on VHS machines. Recently I re-edited this early VHS-edited footage on the computer and there was most of the time nearly no reason to adjust the cutting points. Videonics editing tool was never released in Europe, I later bought a videomixer from them to add titles from the Amiga to my program. The quality was very bad. Other companies came with much better solutions for compatible processes like the Panasonic MX10 mixer. At that moment everybody edited with professional machines, nobody was dubbing consumer VHS to VHS as it was horrible. So the introduction of this Videonics editing system at that time nobody was waiting for this. The result of a decent editing session with this crap isn't available on youtube jet, although at the end I see some jerky examples. Your end statement has nothing to do with the subject of your video: the crap enterprise from the USA in the eightees. Videonics, in Dutch "Niks" means "nothing".

[@lehpares]

Hahahaha! I kept laughing as you go stacking more and more vintage electronics through the entire video. Nice piece. Reminded me of my childhood when record TV shows on VHS tape was an integral part of an 80’s kid duties.

[@jorgerincon6874]

Hi Kevin, a little bit late, but I recommend a Harmony Universal control specifically the Harmony 650, you can program basically any button to it, and I'm sure it has whatever obscure button or remote control in it's database. I used to have that remote and I loved it

[@AppliedCryogenics]

The real cool kids had deluxe paint 3 and an Amiga 2000 with a genlock card. ..And no less than two VCR's.

[@ChrisAguilera-q3l]

OMG That was my Zenith growing up. I loved that VCR. My dad bought a Betamax in the 80's that was so big with a pop top. I loved that Zenith and I went through a lot of VCR's but the quality with the exception of a JVC was second to none.

[@thindarogiancola9358]

@ChrisAguilera-q3l há 10 dias please hi-8 u-matic.vo 5850 edit pre-rool insert ... i love V2000 philips grundig radiola 1972 vcr philips pye Panasonic nv f70 ~ ag 1980 s-vhs bnc connector ... vhs edicao superiores

[@pierdeer]

So happy to see one of these units in action after so many years. I collect some old AV gear myself and over the years saw the DirectED a lot on eBay. But the fact that you needed a video tape to feed the software to it, to make it usable in the first place, always scared me off. I always understood it being solely a device that does cleaner editing cuts ... and that's it, so I never considered getting one myself. But seeing how you struggled with it, probably for the best haha. Great video!

[@ScottGrammer]

Dude, I had one of those Videonics rigs back in the day! I think I paid $400 for it brand new? I got it to work - sort of - and control the VCR's - sort of - but was never able to use it for anything worthwhile. They were a royal pain in the butt.

[@cortx7]

Keep up the awesome content!

[@lastnamefirstname8655]

great work, kevin! thanks for showing us this technology!

[@KristopherNoronha]

Reminds me of the time (early 2000s) my buddies and I recorded a home video, our very own remake of the matrix, using a webcam connected to a PC, because we did not have a wireless video recorder. I should upload it on KZbin. We've truly come a long way!

[@Manliquor]

Good tip is that the VCR doesn't start recording right after hitting the button, there is a second or so delay, and when you stop the tape, it will be a second or so beyond on the tape. By getting the timing on this right, you can make this totally happen. you can also go back and check to see where the VCR will stop or begin playing by simply rewinding and hitting play and trying that a few times to see exactly when you'll need something to be recorded on to the tape.

[@Toronado1986]

The real OG Vlogger was Nelson Sullivan, He started in 1983 and walked around with a VTR Tube camera!

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

16:03 - OMG, that RCA remote! That is the *EXACT* remote I had for my VCR in college! (Goodwill purchased VCR with no remote, because college student, so I bought that remote at Walgreens or something.)

[@thej3799]

I am really loving this channel more and more with each video. I think the first one I saw was the digital butler, and most recently was the polovision, which was an amazing video. This one is great, too. I hope you keep going.

[@JulianUccetta]

Pro tip for anyone ever in a remoteless situation - You can pick up some old Android phones like the LG V20 which have IR blasters on them, and there are plenty of universal remote apps out there that have codes and all the buttons for ancient VCRs and CRT TVs :) I use my old V20 all the time as a universal remote.

[@Viscount]

Awesome. Reminds me of trying to do stop motion animation on a handheld... the times i had...

[@BrandonToy]

I don’t think younger people appreciate how absolutely awesome KZbin is (it was even more awesome in some ways before Google bought it).

[@rustymixer2886]

23:55 saw it as *potential* rival product , bought it, boxed it and shelved it

[@tt3233]

Everything electronics was hard back in the 1980's. I remember moving to different places and having to tune in the UHF channels on the TV. When we recorded music on to a cassette. We put 2 radios facing each other in a quiet room. We turned up the volume loud and shut the door until everything you wanted recorded played.

[@xliquidflames]

1987? Wow. I was born in 1982. This tech feels more recent. I remember renting videos and using full VHS camcorders, not the VHS-C or others, in the late 90s. In fact, I still have a bunch of VHS-C tapes I filmed. I'm a lifelong Florida native and I was a pizza delivery driver the year we had the most hurricane landfalls in one season. So, I borrowed my mom's VHS-C camcorder to film all the destruction I was seeing while I was out delivering pizzas. That was 2004! 1987 feels like too long ago for this tech. What a great video, though. It really brought back a bunch of memories for me. My family got a Packard Bell computer in the 90s. It had Windows 3.11. It came with a game demo CD. It had a game on it called VidGrid. It was this slider puzzle game. But the puzzles were music videos. So you had to solve the slider puzzle while the video was playing. One of those videos was Peter Gabriel'e Sledgehammer. I haven't thought about VidGrid in decades.

[@xliquidflames]

Yeah, I'm old. Get over it. Lol

[@MayorMcC666]

i love the tiebacks to the popular science historical catalogue

[@Banner18MindTrip]

We had a camcorder at the Computer Museum in Boston during the late 1980s. Dad said regular people with camcorders and computers would become the new media in the 20th century.

[@venusproject8202]

I enjoy your videos because they are an adventure. An adventure going down an unknown rabbit hole full of interesting facts and pioneers of their time. I also enjoy it because I can just watch the summary and highpoints of your relevant gruesome journey in which you are finding pleasure.

[@ddturnerphd]

Another awesome insight into how far we've come.

[@guaposneeze]

1987 was a bit of a weird moment. The Video Toaster had been announced so people had seen it, but it wasn't out yet. Like two years after the setting of this video, you could use an Avid and a Video Toaster to do all sorts of wacky video stuff with a Mac and an Amiga. You still needed to deal with tapes by the start of the 90's, but just the last few years of the 80's was a real shift from "I think this new tech may make some stuff theoretically possible" to basically the first version of totally modern tooling. Just insane how much stuff changed from year to year. At the start of 1987, Apple hadn't released a Macintosh that could display color yet. By the end of 89, Avid on Mac doing real time video was a thing. Everything was obsolete in ten minutes.

[@no1DdC]

This rapid pace was still going over a decade later. When we bought our first family PC in 2001, the salesperson told us to not look back, because the device would be quickly outclassed by newer PCs. On one hand it was true (we bought ours mere days before Windows XP came out - oops), but on the other hand, I kept this machine going with various upgrades and repairs (but the original case, motherboard, power supply and floppy drive) for over a decade.

[@stevendembo2389]

Thank you for your channel!

[@nicksmith4507]

Very interesting, thanks for the effort/frustration you endured!

[@angieandretti]

3:14 Intel 80186 CPU, not 166. Sorry but I cannot help it, I have to be "that guy." Intel made the 8086, the 80286, 386, 486, Pentium (cuz they couldn't trademark 586) ... and the lesser-known 80186 which didn't find its way into many computer systems like the others... but the rare "Mindset" computer was a notable exception. But they all end in 86, hence the term "x86 architecture."

[@garrisonfjord]

Living through this tech as a kid, all of this is giving me PTSDs.

[@elainebenes7971]

I used to have an Android phone with an IR blaster. With software you can send any command you want. Im sure you could use some homebrew hardware for this too.

[@marsilies]

The Logitech Harmony Remote Controls also have a vast library of remote control commands

[@KenneyCmusic]

Cool video. I love old technology. I checked out Weird Paul too. Great content for nostalgia geeks!

[@weirdpaulp]

Thanks!

[@SaschaStradtmann]

The Videonics was sold in Germany, too. It was advertised as revolutionizing video editing, but as you point out correct in your video, the machine was a nightmare to use. The creators of the device simply put in too many features and options without thinking of a proper user interface. Hence the machine indeed offered great functions that were way ahead of their time, but alas, it was so difficult to use that more than 90% of the prople who bought one sold it immediately after using it once. To give you some background on video post-rpdoction in the 1980's, here are the options you had: a) reel-to-reel editing: this required 2 VCRs and you basically copied the film from one VCR to the other one by simply leaving out the scenes you did not want. If you wante to go fancy, you added an editing controller and special effects generators to the mix. But while the editing controller managed the start and stop of the VCRs for you, effects needed to be timed BY HAND! So if you hit the button too early or too late, your whole edit was ruined and you had to start over again. b) in the early 1990's non linear editing (meaning editing with the help of computers) came up. Here the options were: - only render the scenes that required graphics and effects on the computer and then edit the rest analogue reel2reel - edit a low-res digital version of your video on your computer, then generate an editing-list from it, load it into your editing controller and let it do the analogue reel2reel editing based on that list In 1997 I bought an Apple PowerPC 7200 for around 5k, plus a 2GB Harddrive for another 2K and a Video-Digitizer for yet another 2K. The whole set-up was 10k in total. It allowed me to edit 2 Minutes of video in SD quality with a rendering time of about 8 hours.

[@MichaelLoda]

What a fantastic video, what a journey!

[@elainebenes7971]

Old VCRs couldnt stop on an exact frame. You might get within a second or two. This device cant edit at the quick pace of a youtube video. Still that was impressive.

[@eDoc2020]

That's why this device has functions to learn the response characteristics of your VCR. By compensating for this the timing error can probably be reduced to under 0.1 second.

[@UltrasEpicChannel]

atleast i still have this man to give me my vsauce type long form videos

[@databits]

I love your videos!! ❤❤

[@adamgh0]

16:42 I still have my Panasonic PV-V4020 from 2000 and I still have the chunky "Light Tower" remote it came with.

[@LilCow]

That's part of the reason I still have my old Galaxy S5, because it has an IR blaster built into it. I can download remote codes and make my own remote with the buttons I need in a IR remote app. The Logitech Harmony remote is also amazing because Logitech has a database for practically everything and you just select the device from some lists.

[@marsilies]

You didn't necessarily need two VCRs to create an edited tape, if you used the camcorder to playback the source. My family had a camcorder that used a full-size VHS tape back in the mid 80s, and our VCR had a front panel that flipped down to show a myriad of controls. My parents edited some Christmas footage together and dubbed over a Christmas song to make a custom music video, back in the 80s. My older sister also edited together a video presentation for a class project, and even made a few short films. Doing video overlays wasn't possible though. Another bonus of having a full-size VHS tape camcorder was that we paired it with a 5" B&W portable TV, plugged both into the cigarette lighter in the car, and us kids could watch movies in the backseat on long car trips, about a decade before portable DVD players came along.

[@FedeVicente88]

I feel that in 3 years time this video will have 20 million views, if not more.

[@misterskippy2u]

"The Nondescript Magic Brick" would have been a great tag line for a DirectED advertising campaign!

[@roselima1741]

Sometimes odd functions for a universal remote are mapped to seamingly non-relevant buttons or maybe other brand codes. Who knows, I have a tv remote that shuts off my flloor fan. The proper IR flash sequence is in there...somewhere. Thanks for the excellent episode!

[@mikes-wv3em]

is it one of those tower fans they sell at costco?

[@Robdeltonie]

I went to school for video and audio production and editing at a local tech school. I had a friend in a similar program in another tech school miles away from me. And believe it or not, they taught the students how to do linear editing (which is what this device is used for, for those that don't know; Premiere, iMovie, etc. are non-linear editors). The instructors insisted that people in the industry were still using it. (Who are these instructors talking to? I have no idea.) And according to my friend, everyone HATED it! Even the instructors at MY tech school were dumbfounded by this!!

[@Nooticus]

These videos are incredible and in my opinion should still be on the Vsauce2 channel so more people would watch it. But I appreciate that Popular Science is giving you the money to make videos such as this, so overall this is amazing!

[@joewilson5452]

There was a little square cutout on the recording side of a commercially recorded VHS tape that would prevent the consumer from recording over the tape. We used to put a piece of electrical tape over the hole and then we could rerecord over the tape.

[@michaelhenrici]

For some reason my copy of Superman: The Movie didn’t have the tab removed and I accidentally recorded over part of the opening as a kid.

[@damian9303]

My parents just used some folded up cardstock and scotch tape for the same effect

[@thumbtak123]

You need a Flipper Zero, or a M5 CardComputer. The flipper would most likely work with any device, you have the codes for, on an IR, and the m5 card computer, might do this. You can find databases for the remotes online and if it has it, you can usually find all of the buttons someone recorded. You can also ask the community to submit a capture of a remote, if they do not. This will help with future projects, when you run into this issue.

[@SDRIFTERAbdlmounaim]

a back to the future reference just as am working on a little bttf project of mine ❤

[@MagnumForce51]

LOL. I have that exact Zenith VCR! Got it sometime in the early 00's (perhaps '99 or '98 even. I've had it for so long that I don't recall if I had it before or after my final move into the state I live in now. Previous state I lived before that was California and I still have a VHS tape with an episode of Beast Wars I recorded back when I was still living there. It's possible this very VCR was what was used to record that episode!) and my sister had it for the last 10+ years before I finally got it back. (I gave her a different VCR to replace it). Still works...but guess what...she's yet to find the remote to it! I honestly don't recall if I ever had the remote to it. My sister seems to think she still has it. I'm probably just gonna get a replacement off eBay or something at some point. :P EDIT: Now that I think about it I'm maybe 90% sure that Zenith was the VCR I had in California. I definitely remember the SpeakEZ features and what not so it's probably the oldest in terms of how long I've had it. It was probably relatively new at the time I first got it too. Was the family's VCR originally and after mom moved onto DVDs I naturally ended up getting it. Cool to see this thing show up in a KZbin videos. I have fond memories of it on top of still owning it! :D

[@KeritechElectronics]

Techmoan, Fran and VWestlife - eat your hearts out! Dang cool tech.

[@0326Hambone]

RCA, built in Indianapolis! I'm a native and thankfully got to see the old factory before it was demolished.