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Ampex VR 1200, Up Close and Personal
For those who have never seen a big Quad videotape machine in action, here’s your big chance. As you’ll see, it’s not as easy as just pressing the ‘Play’ button.
We forget sometimes how far video technology has come in just the past few years. I recently needed to get some video from an old 2″ Quad videotape and disco…
Oh the memories….I remember pressing play with a one-minute pre-roll, hoping the beast would lock up before going on-air. Sometimes I miss analog. 😉 …..sometimes.
Back in the day I got to the point where I could load and cue up spots in 30 seconds. I would sometimes have to set up on the air but I always had it ready to go. This was back before spot reels. Program was on one machine. Spots were on the other. Spots were also on film which gave us time to load another spot on videotape.
American designed and built!!! Those were the days!! Sure was great to hear one again!!!
I have a working1200 and two working Ampex 2000 machines in my taperoom at work. Use them fairly often. We have just about every broadcast format ever made. Got to love the old formats.
Amazing to see (and hear) this beast in action again. I do remember how happy we were when the 3/4″ U-MATIC format came along with electronic editing versus using the big “Z-shaped” editing block for 1″ and 2″. We had to bake some 3/4″ tapes in order to dub them to digital.
I remember a time when rolling two decks to do an edit required hitting the button of one of them with a yardstick, in the case of one short-armed operator.
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