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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.'"
Courtesy of the Onion:
Blockbuster Offers Glimpse Of Movie Renting Past
Wannabes. The religious hipster cool kids have been getting their media via STONE TABLET for several millenniums now.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
I have no desire to "go back to VHS" or even to own any VHS tapes. But as the article points out, there are several good movies that have not been released on DVD.
In those cases, I'd much rather have someone's mp4 conversion off piratebay than a fresh VHS tape because VHS tapes do not last the way digital files do.
Same is true for a number of good movies and TV series that were never released on VHS. You want to watch the original Batman '66? Be prepared for some TV Land logos in your mp4s.
The only reason every video ever made is not available on demand is idiotic IP laws and greed. That is what we all want, not this piecemeal idiocy.
Advice: on VPS providers
While home video was certainly a net gain in availability of obscure films nationwide/worldwide, at a local level it destroyed many local cinemas who ran classic art films. It used to be that you could go to a screening of, say, an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior, meet other cinephiles in your neighbourhood, and walk out of the cinema having passionate discussions with your peers about what you just saw.
Sure, nowadays you can torrent the film or get it from Netflix, and then go on IMDB or Flixster to post a review or get into a masturbatory flame war with anonymous people who can't spell, but that in-real-life community aspect is gone except in a very few places.
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
Ownership means you can do what you want. Like make copies and sell the copies of the contents of the tape as an example.
You were a share cropper in the tape days, just like now.
Grainy? Has this moron ever SEEN a video off VHS? How about blurry with messed up tint? How about seeing annoying streaks across the screen from where the tape has worn?
I can see the motive behind records and audio tapes (not my thing), but this is RETARDED.
TFA (http://techzwn.com/2012/02/interview-filmmakers-tell-of-the-home-video-revolution/ ) says "Something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams. Browsing aisles is no more, as the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country."
So the submitter actually changed it.
Sigh.
Stupid article, stupid person, stupid premise, stupid argument. Stupid stupid stupid. Video has followed the same trajectory as audio, from analog to to digital physical to downloads. Except that analog video sucks just as much as, if not more so than, analog audio tapes. I know there's something of a vinyl resurgence, and I even think there's something to it (not audio quality, experience), but there's a reason nobody ever wants to screw around with audio tapes again. They're a pain in the ass, there's static, you need to rewind them, etc. Except video is even more finicky. Remember screwing with the tracking? Pulling the tape out of the box and finding it not rewound? Finding a particular scene?
And is he seriously arguing that obscure films are *more* obscure now that you can watch them online, as opposed to finding them tucked away somewhere in the local video store? I'm also pretty sure that those obscure films have been digitized and are easy to "acquire" if you wanted to watch them.
DVDs are superior to VHS in literally every respect. You don't have to rewind them, random access is as easy as sequential access, quality is better, audio is better (5.1 channels), smaller media, smaller players, quieter players, no static, no head cleaning, no moving parts in the media, cheaper media, extra features... the list goes on and on.
Stupid.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Although VHS was very useful back in the 80's and 90's for recording various TV shows there was always playback issues between various brands of VHS machines simply because of how one machine recorded the show, the next one might have issues with grainy playback, fast forwarding or rewinding, or even audio issues. And remember the fun of buying the VHS cleaning tapes to try and keep the head(s) clean for optimal playback? Fun times!
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I guess this means me. I fit the demographic. I was born in the early 1980s.
There is something 'missing' in the digital remasters of films, though arguably it's of a non-quantifiable aesthetic. Arguably, it's something of nostalgia, and I'd grant someone who argues it that way.
I remember, as a child, watching The Lone Ranger. Not the black and white, but the movie made in the 1980s (or early 90s). It'd come off television and had the start and finish of the ad segmens; my grandfather had recorded it for us, carefully stopping/recording at the appropriate parts - but we still had parts of he "We now return you to USA's Friday Night Movie".
My brother and I also had an VHS 'copy' of the original Batman serials from television in the late 1940s ( I think). The cars were big, there was no color, and the "Batmobile" was no different than any of the other cars. (Much better than the 1950s Batman, IMO.) The same goes for the b&w Superman, which we recorded off of reruns off TV, at some point. The Batman serials, we'd somehowmanaged to record about 20 seconds over the middle - some Micromachines commercial, right in the middle of a fight scene.
Flashing forward, I saw most of my favorite movies first on VHS: Die Hard, The Saint, Braveheart, Terminator, Commando. A favorite VHS had character, of sorts. You could tell it was well watched when the colors had started to fade and there was static or muddled audio. There was no jumping around randomly for favorite scenes. Many of them had been recorded off the TV by one person or another and passed around amongst friends. It wasn't until over a decade later that saw the full, non-edited-for-TV version of Commando (awesome!).
And then there was rainy days, snow days, or really-bad-storm days. You'd sit at home with the generator on (if you had one) and maybe watch movies while someone made food. You'd sort through a dozen different movies to find one that didn't suck, and you'd look for something to like or something to make fun of: it'd end up becoming a favorite for one reason or another.
That said: most of these people need to get a life. :) While I will grant you that the 1980s was the last great decade of America (for some time to come, at least), if you get too wrapped up in 1980s VHS films, you've got something wrong with you. I believe the term is "reality avoidance".
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
$HIPSTERS and the $MEANINGLESS_ADJECTIVE return of $OBSOLETE_KITSCH
I am not a VHS fanatic. Even in the 80's, I hated the format. VHS tapes are/were made to the cheapest possible materials, so they wore out very easily and were highly susceptible to heat warping. Much like audio tapes, the sound tends to warble and even distort on overly bright video frames... such a kludgey format!
I do think we need to preserve the content of these tapes, but not the medium itself. I've been an all-streaming guy for 8-9 years and have no desire to go backward.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I have several VHS tapes from 1980s I need to transfer as magnetic tape does not keep its contents forever (and pushing 30 years is risky). Few months ago I viewed one, a movie shown on late night TV from a Los Angeles station. One of the commercials has Cal Worthington and his "dog" Spot (car dealer who had various animals from armadillos to bears). Probably can no longer do that these days. Tape also has when CNN had a interview with astronauts on the Shuttle, they only had a short window via ground stations as this was before TDRSS. Much of it was ironing out some technical issues. Crew could not hear audio from CNN though CNN anchors could hear them. They eventually got it to work. It was interesting because it seemed more authentic. Nowadays it's seems so staged. What I noticed is how anchors were more like journalists rather than celebrities. Other commercials had Federated stereo stores with goofy antics, and a lawyer commercial that begins with a car accident (staged with stills and sound effects of a crash) followed by a lawyer who says, "If your involved in serious accident, you need to seek legal advice immediately!" [don't bother calling paramedics]. Fasinating stuff of what was and used to be.
mfwright@batnet.com
http://kingtapes.net/index.php/faq/2-do-vhs-tapes-degrade-over-time
VHS degrades very quickly at room temperature and regular viewing... I know I could not stand watching some of my old ones after watching DVD for a few years, the color was so faded, it was awful!.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
.. 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 ..
That's not what he's talking about. Those people who don't know how to behave are not going to Ingmar Bergman films or even English-language arthouse/indie films, so the experience is only ever positive if you find a place showing such films - because for people who really like movies, the theater experience (including the film experience, which can't practically be replicated at home) is a big part of the enjoyment.
There are still such places - theaters that show classic films, new foreign films, and indie and art films. The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House in Rochester NY (where I went to university) is my favorite, though I don't live there anymore. Yeah you can get it all on DVD, but it's still worth going if you're into movies - and if you're not into movies, you're not watching those kinds of films anyway.
"Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (Part Two) (#9.2)" (2009)
Dave Lister: What are these things?
Kryten: They're Digital Versatile Discs, sir. DVDs for short. They were very popular in the early part of the 21st century before they died out and were replaced with what we use now.
Dave Lister: Oh, you mean videos?
Kryten: Precisely. Back then no one knew that the human race were utterly incapable of putting the DVDs back in their cases. Case in point: over 2 trillion went missing in just over 20 years. Videos are just too big to lose.
While home video was certainly a net gain in availability of obscure films nationwide/worldwide, at a local level it destroyed many local cinemas who ran classic art films. It used to be that you could go to a screening of, say, an Ingmar Bergman film from several years prior, meet other cinephiles in your neighbourhood, and walk out of the cinema having passionate discussions with your peers about what you just saw.
I'm really not sure VHS is the sole cause of this. There was another concurrently-developing technology - cable television - that may have had a hand in it as well.
Back the 1980s I fell in love with a channel called "American Movie Classics" - at the time it really was showing classic American films (okay, obviously that doesn't mean Bergman) all the time, and with no commercial interruptions! The host, Bob Dorian, would lead into the movie with a little 2-minute piece that would sometimes be about the movie's place in cinema history and at other times be some back-stage story. Over the course of the 80s and 90s I saw lots of John Ford, lots of post-1940 Alfred Hitchcock, Astaire and Rogers, film noir classics - all the sorts of movies you used to have to go to a movie house to watch! It was great. I will admit I taped a lot of it for no quantifiable reason... (and the tapes are still around, gathering dust out in our family room)
I realize AMC technically still exists; but it's not even close to what it was back then.
#DeleteChrome
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.
Better than cassette? Ya sure, but then that's not hard. "Just below DAT?" no, not so much. With Hi-Fi enhancements yes it could get about 70dB SNR (CD and DAT are 96dB) on a new, unused tape. As with all analogue, it degraded over time and suffered generation loss.
In terms of digital it isn't hard to do better than DAT/CD if you like either. You can use DVDs, but not like you think. The DVD-A standard allows for 6-channels of 24-bit, 96kHz audio to be stored. 144dB SNR, DC-48kHz response. In other words, way beyond human hearing, and also the limits of recording technology. Blu-ray players all support it (the MLP coding it uses is what Dolby TrueHD uses) and for that matter you can get more audio and even higher sample rates on Blu-ray discs.
It is just more hipsterish bullshit of "Oh analogue is better." No, it isn't. You can have digital formats that capture more detail, and more importantly don't suffer from playback degradation and generation loss.
But we have youtube. And there are a lot of people who have taken pains to put up such documentaries on the site. The Cold War documentary that you mentioned can be seen at Cold War Full Length Documentary
Turner Classic Movies channel still exists and presents classic movies (as in ~1930's to ~1960's with the occasional contemporary film) commercial free.
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I'm surprised that so many people are complaining about their tapes. Sure, the cheaper brands sucked but then they would, they were cheap. I only ever bought decent/high grade Fuji, Sony and TDK tapes and I'm finding I'm pleasantly surprised as I work through my VHS tapes (going back to 1981) as to how good they still look as I copy them to DVD. There were very few that had gone super grainy anbd those were typically cheap tapes. Like eveyrything, if you paid for quality, you got better results. Ditto for the decks themselves. If your only experience of VHS is a £40 machine from Dixons, no wonder you think it sucked but if you had say a Panasonic £500 deck, you'd find it wasn't too bad. That said, colour bleed on the reds still looks awful :-(
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
VHS is inferior in EVERY WAY to DVD. From the format it's self, you need at LEAST SVHS to get even 1/2 way to DVD. to the durability to the workflow for editing and creating a movie on tape.
Only complete morons would be "gong back" to VHS. I'm glad it's gone, dead, buried. Hell I'm happy that DV, HDV, Umatic, and Beta are dead.
Tape sucks, After working with Tape for 20+ years... I am glad it is dead.
Head alignment causing the camera to not record correctly, crap tape clogging heads, head maintenance, belt replacement, pinch roller replacement, oh god no.
Plus let's look at resolution. Regular VHS records and plays back 320X240 resolution MAX. SVHS doubled that. It's why all recordings looked smeared compared to the live broadcast. By the end of it's life Mass produced VHS was a lot better but still nothing like even a crappy made DVD. A SuperBit DVD will fake someone into believing they are watching a BluRay.
Shelf life of Tape is horrid, I have had to spend days trying to figure out how to get a tape to play one last time after sitting in a controlled vault for 12 years. Many tapes would adhere to themselves.
I can see an advantage with records, I can see an advantage with some other older stuff, but VHS was crap from day 1. It wasn't even the better format from day 1.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.