Sony Betacam: Not the Beta you’re thinking of (it’s way better)



This discussion is long-overdue.

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What about the whole television saga?

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00:00 Intro
02:58 A closer look
04:50 The Beta / VHS Format War
11:33 Picture Quality Comparison
15:15 Home Video
17:41 What Betacam Is
21:52 Why videotape is usually pretty bad
25:57 More heads is more better
27:20 Three signals with two heads?
31:15 The tape moves really fast – this is a problem
32:40 Sony’s ridiculous solution
34:28 Using the machine
37:31 Betacam’s competition
39:42 bloops

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38 Comments

  1. Great job as always. Started my career in TV with 3/4 then Beta. Also, don't forget the second format war between JVC and Sony in the tape business, DVCAM VS DV.

    The best part of the BETACAM line of recorder/players was the BVW-(x)5 series of units that had the Dynamic Tracking systems. This allowed (using an external serial controller that looked like it controlled the death star) to do slomo instant replay. Sports would utilize these decks and make it the defacto standard in tape formats for years to come. Of course, the first usage of tape in slowmo instant replay were giant 2" reel to reel decks that would take up an entire half of a TV bus and weighed a ton.

  2. Wonderful, as always! You do an excellent job of explaining complex technology in a comprehensible and entertaining way. And I loved your summation of Betacam as "equal parts hilarious and impressive." That is how I felt often in my 40+ years designing analog video products — NTSC itself still amazes me. I once interviewed at General Electric to work on their Telaria theater video projector, and I could hardly keep from giggling during their explanation of how it operated. And then the demonstration of its actual operation left me quite impressed.

  3. Fantastic details I thought I knew all this, but I learned a bunch about time stretched component on Betacam. It’s a miracle these things worked… I can’t believe how complicated they were.

  4. IMHO, the longest rec time I find most useable is 180min. That too already takes almost forever to forward/reverse scan if you want to find a section that you want to rewatch.

  5. I resell video equipment, including betacam tapes and vcrs and found this video very informative. For your information, Digibeta is still used in post production work to this date, certainly because the quality is good and the equipment is cheap and very reliable. I have a sony VCR with 129 000 hours on the meter. That is almost 15 years of work, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Impressive no? No wonder that beast weight almost 40kg and is, as you said, full of electronics. BTW, those cards not only contains all the adjustable resistor you mentioned, but also lost of configurations switches. Depending on your need, you can configure the VCR through dozen of options available in the menu visible on the monitoring output. More lower level options are set by those switches on the cards.

  6. Thanks for placing units also in metric, also for some reason I found better the VHS video quelite, also I'm too young to side towards any of he technologies (not a fan boy)

  7. That Betacam L cassette is ridiculous in another way too. 90 minutes of footage on one, yeah? For one, you can easily work out the length of tape inside it from that – 2250ft (3x as much). If Betamax used cassettes of that size (let's call it an L2250), they could at the Beta I speed hold 270 minutes (again, 3x as much) – 4.5 hours – of footage, which is the same as an L750 (so, an original Betacam S cassette) at Beta III. This hypothetical cassette would at Beta III hold 13.5 hours (810 minutes) of footage, which is over 5 hours longer than a T-160 VHS at SLP. Looking at it like this really puts into perspective HOW MUCH tape there is inside those things, it's ludicrous.

    There is probably a parallel universe where Sony used these cassettes (or even ones with half as much tape) on launch for the Betamax system and absolutely crushed VHS in the format war. Beyond being interesting, I think this hypothetical also shows how much different (and better) Betacam is from Betamax.

  8. at 14:00 didin't the vhs looked more transparent overall than the betamax? the gaussian out-of-focus blur on betamax, with less "color dynamic range", while both have similar aliasing on the hounds tooth jacket doesn't the higher contrast of the vhs definitely shows more detail overall?

  9. My experience with metal oxide was when I had to export data for III . It emerged CJIS couldn't read metal oxide. That's fun

  10. Can you make a video comparison with video 2000, I heard very often that video 2000 not only had a long recording time but also some technical specialities.

  11. Worked with the biggest cheap guy back in the 1980's and we got tried to tell him to only purchase a VHS system but he got a good buy on the Sony Beta Max. A few years later when all the local vidio rental stores stopped renting them he tried to sell it in work. After he left a for sale note on company bulletin board we put a price of around $25 including a dozen movies and his home phone number. Can remember when they extended the VHS taping to 6 hours and Beta Max did not match it.

  12. Either you're so spoiled by H.264, but I don't remember VHS being so extremely awful. I still have many many cassettes which partly also contain family recordings. Somehow I'm still horrified by your direct comparison.

  13. I cannot imagine how much work this was for you, but seeing you seamlessly transition between current digital technology, and Betamax, VHS, and Betacam, really great work! Thank you so much for your work.

  14. You know…I am not an audio or video phile. BUT I am a tech junkie, and even though I do not seek out your content I am a subscriber…and enjoy learning things I did not know I needed to know. Keep up the content, stay sane…and be safe.

  15. Beautifully done! Also, the best part about the Betacam SP VTRs (the DVWM2000 and similar models) was that each of the channels – Video, Audio, and Time Code were individually editable whether manually, or remote. You could mark-in, mark-out and record over the channel or channels you want to edit and for the duration – it was freaking amazing! When I was editing on these monsters, it felt as though I was operating a nuclear silo, LOL.

  16. I spent years trying to explain this exact thing to people but Your explanations absolutely nailed it! The only thing I experienced that You didn't touch on was the cameras. I ran an offline edit suite and used BetaCAM SP gear, the cameras were properly hefty, especially when You add on the weight of the PAG belt external audio recording gear and of course all those dang cables! My pals with their fancy VHS cams used to take the p*** out of me pfaffing with the heavy and more complicated gear and fighting with all the cables with what appeared to them to be weird connectors, but they simply could not get anywhere close to the quality of BetaCAM gear. Of course they could SEE the difference when they visited my edit suite but still didn't get it. Thank You for doing this and setting the record straight Excellent work as usual. Keep doing what You do so well.

  17. This feel a lot like the industry could have rolled out a way better color TV signal decade sooner if they just dropped black and white broadcast from the standard.

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