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Tapeheads and the Quiet Return of VHS
Hugh Pickens writes "Joshua Phillips writes that something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams as browsing aisles is no more and the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country. Future generations may know little of the days when buying a movie meant you owned it even if the Internet went down and when getting a movie meant you had to scour aisles of boxes in search of one whose cover art called back a story that echoed your interests. Josh Johnson, one of the filmmakers behind the upcoming documentary 'Rewind This!' hopes to tell the story of how and why home video came about, and how it changed our culture giving B movies and films that didn't make the silver screen their own chance to shine. 'Essentially, the rental market expanded, because of voracious consumer demand, into non-blockbuster, off-Hollywood video content which would never have had a theatrical life otherwise,' says Palmer. While researching the documentary Palmer found something interesting: there is a resurgence taking place of people going back to VHS because a massive number of films are 'trapped on VHS' with 30 and 40 percent of films released on VHS never to be seen again on any other format. 'Most of the true VHS fanatics are children of the 1980s,' says Palmer. 'Whether they are motivated by a sense of nostalgia or prefer the format for the grainy aesthetic qualities of magnetic tape or some other reason entirely unknown, each tapehead is unique like a snowflake.'"
.. VHS was such poor quality that the fact that it won out over Beta always amazed me. Chroma channel of such poor bandwidth that the best you could say of VHS color is that you'd maybe get a blob of more or less the right color around that black and white object in the luma channel. Longitudinal audio tracks that did a record wipe effect any time a kink in the tape went over the audio head (granted, the RF audio on later stereo VHS was somewhat better). I thought about trying to edit on it once, but decided I didn't want to bother without any way to implement a timecode track. Even the 2 hour mode was crummy enough to not be anywhere close to broadcast quality, and that was in the analog vestigial-sideband 480i SD NTSC-M days of composite video.
And cleaning tape heads, and aligning transports, and dreading the day the pinch roller got a bit too sticky and unwound your only copy of your favorite movie into a rat's nest inside the VCR. (And yes, I've extracted a few such tape nests from family members' VCR's. Entirely too many of them learned that I knew how to fix the things.)
Beta was better. 3/4" U-Matic showed me what good was when it came to videotape formats. I was happy to leave VHS behind when I was able to record on Digital-8 format in broadcast quality, and once I got a camera that would record on an SD card in 720p I never looked back. I have heard that VHS tape makes reasonably good magnetic card stripes, though ..
I partially moved back to VHS (but still have plenty of DVDs). It was more because of my 2-year-old who likes playing with the disks - around half my DVDs are scratched to the point of being barely watchable. Honestly though, after starting to pick up VHS again, there are some upsides. Videos sell for a dollar or less and they're just about invincible to kids. Of course, I still use DVDs though. I just have to keep them in high places.
It's not a film, but a very significant example of being trapped on VHS is CNN's Cold War documentary. 24 hour-long episodes covering the whole Cold War, start to finish, with an unbelievable roster of interviews including Fidel Castro, Walter Cronkite, Henry Kissinger, Robert MacNamara, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lech Walesa, Aldritch Ames, Mikhail Gorbachev, and more. Never released to DVD, because the series came out in 1998. Then 9/11 hit, and material in episodes 19 and 20 that covered the Russian Afghan war were re-classified by the Bush administration; CNN would not be allowed to republish that material. The DVD market went big-time shortly after, and CNN decided not to transfer an incomplete product. If you ever get a chance to see it, do so. It's worth your time. It's a pity that you pretty much can't obtain it legally anymore.