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…
December 25, 1937…Toscanini Debuts The NBC Symphony Orchestra Tom Lewis, in the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, described NBC’s plan for cultural programming and the origin of the NBC Symphony: David Sarnoff, the president of RCA who had first proposed the “radio music box” in 1916 so that listeners might enjoy “concerts, lectures, […]
What A Night! September 27, 1954…’Caesar’s Hour’ & ‘Tonight’ Debut A week or so back, we touched on this but here’s something new. Thanks to Maureen Carney, here is the ad that ran that day introducing not only ‘Caesar’s Hour’, but the rest of the television line up that Monday night, including the debut of […]
‘Saturday Night Live’…April 5, 2014 Time Lapse Video This was a great show…the one where Pharrell Williams did “Happy” and Anna Kendrick was guest host, just 4 weeks before my visit. This starts with the audience load in and zooms through 90 minutes in just 2 minutes. As good as this is, this static single […]
November 7, 1954…”Face The Nation” Debuts On CBS Wait till you see this video of the first ever presentation of “Face The Nation”! The first thing you see is a closeup of a camera’s lens turret, in a widening shot, that would be the standard open for several years. The “guest” camera is behind the […]
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.
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 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.
American designed and built!!! Those were the days!! Sure was great to hear one again!!!
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.
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.