Sony UVW1400 Betacam SP VCR Transport Service

[@dalemettee1147]

Dave, when I worked for the defense contractor, racks that had a bunch of PCB's in it and held in place in a vertical mode, they were call buckets. 20 or 30 cards in one unit, all held in place .

[@12voltvids]

Like the cards in the gtd5 switch at the old Telco central office. Card goes bad just pop it out and pop in a new one.

[@crashbandicoot4everr]

Many of the Philips and Grundig consumer VCRs sold in the 80s were designed like this with plug-in cards that could be unplugged for easy servicing, however the reliability of these machines was nothing compared to these Sony professional machines. The hinged large boards on Japanese consumer machines is still a nice touch though.

[@12voltvids]

Well for the 14k the pro machines commanded they better be good.

[@750kv8]

I LOVE the mech of this one.

[@12voltvids]

This was the same transport that the original betamax design and it's basically a mirror image of 3/4" umatic.

[@ThejasonJaw5442]

Betacam had the best pictures

[@12voltvids]

Betacam SP has a broadcast quality picture. The horizontal resolution was only 330 lines of horizontal resolution. Super VHS and hi8 were rated 400 but betacam SP still kicked the crap out if both. There is more to picture quality than horizontal resolution. Signal to noise ratio and chroma bandwidth and CNR. (chroma noise ratio) are more important numbers and both batecam (300 lines) and the metal tape SP version with 330 lines. Checked all the boxes. Svhs and hi8 (and Ed beta) had higher resolution in the lumanence signal but the color was really bad. Svhs only managed about 30 lines and hi8 40. Betacam did the full 120 lines of color that the ntsc signal carried. The lumamance channel recorded right up to 4.5mhz bandwidth the limit for ntsc. DV claims 500 lines but this is not possible. Digital video is pixels. Standard def is 720x480. Well the 480 is the lines. On NTSC there are 525 lines but some are in the test signal area and the vertical blanking area. There are 480 active lines. 240 per field. 720 is the horizontal pixels. If you had alternating black and white pixels you are at the maximum resolution which is 360 equivelant lines. Betacam is pretty close to this number. Even though 3/4" umatic also has 330 lines of resolution the chroma is a color under system and is limited to about 35 chroma lines, the same as betamax. VHS was the lowest as the chroma was converted to 629khz. Betamax and umatic 688 khz and 8mm 733khz. Betacam didn't convert the color down. It recorded it direct in time compressed component recording on a seperate video track recorded by dedicated heads

[@m9ovich785]

Thanks Dave. Time for a tape Autopsy Video HAHAHAHAH. Do You have a link to the Analog Capture Card / Device You are using?? Mike M.

[@12voltvids]

For DV format I use a Sony gvhd700, if going to .mp4 a hauppague HD pvr or cloner alliance

[@m9ovich785]

@@12voltvids Thanks , I just ordered the Cloner Alliance pro..

[@12voltvids]

@@m9ovich785 that's the main one i use for most archiving as it does a great job of conversion to 1080p60 or 720p60 your choice and it accepts ntsc and pal video.

[@m9ovich785]

@@12voltvids I have a Boat load of tape recorded starting from the early 80's Can you use a large Terabyte Hard drive or just a Flash drive with this ? I have vintage Video from the Oshkosh Air Show I'd like to upload to KZbin. Thanks..

[@netimmerse]

greetings @12voltvids i have an offtopic weird question for which i haven't found the answer anywhere: how do digital formats such as DV or Beta SX behave with 240p video output from videogame consoles? (which is not actually 240p but a 480i trick, hence the question)

[@12voltvids]

The output is 480i, they just repeat the same 240 lines. The problem us the .5 line delay between the fields. On analog recorders this isn't a problem but some encoders are picky

[@Raptor50aus]

Dave, I think that bad tape might deserve its own video perhaps.

[@12voltvids]

It's not my tape. Once the transfer order is done and I am paid and upload it to his cloud storage the owner will decide if he wants to pay return shipping or have me recycle the tapes. If that's the case then yes i will be opening it to see what is going on with it. The other 2 will be erased and used to record some test footage to run through the machine from time to time just to keep everything working. I have 8 small tapes but no large ones so having a couple of large tapes for testing will be good. Was lucky that tape decided that it wanted to pack it in after I had transferred the content to hard drive.

[@northernplacecorporation]

Uhh... you do realize that the small tape you had in the professional form-factor was actually a DigiBeta videotape...

[@12voltvids]

Same tape formulation just a different length. Digibeta tape is slightly slower. That dbc 32 min only runs 27m on the sp machine. Its all i have for testing. I covered the detection holes on the bottom to trick the machine into thinking its an sp tape.

[@northernplacecorporation]

@@12voltvids Oh... I see.

[@Vintagelover1]

Hey dave greetings from Indian fan i love and watch all your video I learned a lot from you thanks for your video and i have questions recently I purchased Panasonic nv-m7 in cheap price but when i plug cord in camera nothing work but all red light is turned on what was the problem? V

[@12voltvids]

Don't even know what that model is.

[@dalemettee1147]

Dave,, not only could pull a board, those boards could be tested on that test fixture and it would tell you what to replace. Easy-peasy. haha

[@12voltvids]

There were card extenders for the engineer to test the boards. Without them it's difficult to troubleshoot.