ProMax Shutting Down

Word came over various mailing lists and forums today that Promax, longtime VAR to the video industry and sponsor of the NAB Digital Media Cafe, is shutting down. Lots of people are justifiably lamenting this, and wondering what it represents to the industry as a whole.

Personally, we hadn't order anything from Promax in close to a decade, after some bad experiences with them selling us removable media (Jazz cartridges, when they were all the rage) that were clearly used, some even containing other people's data. The first time it happened I wrote it off as a simple mix up. But it happened again, and Promax never was able to provide a decent explanation, or, for that matter, an apology. So, needless to say, we stopped ordering from them.

Our situation must have been the exception, however, because Promax had a reputation for integrity, something that isn't always easy to find in the cut-throat world of hardware sales. Charles was a good guy, always friendly and gracious when I'd see him at industry events.

The industry has changed a lot since Promax opened in 1994. Building hard drive arrays is no longer the black art it once was back in the SCSI days, and technical information and support is readily available online, making it much easier for people to build their own systems without having to rely on VARs. Margins are razor thin, competition fierce. Our faltering economy only makes matters worse.

Interesting times...

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Cool Tools a Decade Later

I recently stumbled across this article from Digital Content Producer

It's a listing of some of the exciting tools video folks are using - in 1998!

Oh, let's see...Photoshop - check! After Effects - check!

Oh, the Digital ICE cards. These were cards you could plug in your Mac that would accelerate certain rendering functions, particularly blurs and glows. They were expensive, and we never had them, but I knew plenty of people who did. Many got their money's worth, but Moore's Law meant the computers were getting faster and faster, and these didn't stay around very long.

Speaking of computers, the article mentions the speedy PowerMac G3, the computer they were hoping would save Apple. Yes, there was much hand-wringing over Apple's fate back in those pre-iPod days. Back then, the PowerPC chips were touted as being destined to far outstrip the Intel chips, which were going to burst into flames at any moment due to the heat they generated. That never quite happened, and of course Macs now run quite happily with Intel CPUs.

Times change, and it seems the rate of change keeps increasing as well. I wonder where we'll be ten years from now?

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My Very First Camera

Going through some old tapes in our warehouse recently, I came across a bunch of old Hi8 tapes. Remember Hi8? I sure do. In fact, it's the format that started my career. Sit back, my friends, and I'll tell you the tale. Yessir, right about near the end of the last century, oh, about nineteen hundred ninety, as I recall...

I was in the midst of my college career at the University of Maryland (go Terps!), and had recently switched from being a vocal music major (I'm not kidding about having a lovely singing voice, you know...) to RTVF, Radio Television and Film. I'm working at the RTVF Tech Center, the campus TV studio, having a blast, learning all I can about the TV engineering world. It's a fairly well-equipped facility for the time, with 1" machines, betacam decks, a Chyron Scribe, an ADO 1000, and a brand new Grass Valley 200 switcher. Two studios, one for the students to beat up on (equipped with Norelco PC-70 cameras!) and one for the "real" production work, primarily the athletic department's coaches shows.

I was getting some freelance jobs, tucking away some money, and I knew I wanted to buy a video camera for myself. But what to buy? (Cue the choir music, the footage of the clouds parting and beams of light shining through...)

Sony had just introduced a new tape format, Hi8, and the flagship model of the Hi8 line was the CCD-V5000. Full sized, shoulder mounted, VU meters on the side...hoo boy, this baby fed my naive techno-lust by the shovel full. I saved up my money, got on the waiting list (they were in very short supply at first) and eventually got the camera.

Dave was a very happy boy. Ignorance was bliss. I didn't know what a nightmare Hi8 would end up being in terms of dropouts (Fuji eventually came up with a tape formulation that worked, but it took a couple of years), didn't know that the initial run of these cameras had backfocus problems, didn't know how limiting it would be that the camera was single-chip.

Nope, all that stuff came later. This thing was the bees knees, it looked so dang professional, and as long as there was plenty of light it really did make some fine looking pictures.

A few years later Sony came out with the UVW betacam decks, which allowed us to enter the "big leagues", format wise, and later miniDV was introduced. We used to jokingly call miniDV "Hi8 that works," since they filled the same general niche in the production world. These days it's DV50 and HD, with no-excuses gear that makes drop-dead gorgeous pictures, runs without a hitch and never complains.

But that first camera, well, I suppose it was partly the fact that it was mine, my first investment in trying to make a real go at this professional video thing. That camera was pretty special to me.

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When Betacam Ruled the World

I've been shopping around for a new smallish-HD camera (the Sony EX-1 is the current top contender) and it got me thinking about how we're in an era now where there really isn't a dominant HD tape format, the way Betacam SP used to be in the analog days, and it's quite likely there never will be one again. Of course, I'm dating myself merely by using the term, "tape format," since there probably will never be any new professional video tape formats. Data formats, yes, codecs, yes, but the days of running strips of rust-coated plastic by spinning tape heads are coming to and end, slowly but surely.

Back in the late 80s and through the 90s Betacam SP was the dominant, universal tape format. Everybody had it, and the quality was high enough that most felt is was acceptable for mastering. Digital Betacam, or "digibeta," as we used to call it, was a (surprise!) digital version of Betacam SP, with measurably higher quality. Problem was, digibeta decks were around forty grand each, making them a tough sell for many smaller shops like ours. And Sony, in a classic "let's protect our high end products and in the process keep ourselves from owning the larger market" move, never introduced a more affordable digibeta deck. Shops like mine were begging for a simple digibeta player/recorder, something that could be controlled by a nonlinear system (remember, this is the mid-90s, so non-linear systems were still in their adolescence...), but all Sony offered was a full-featured deck with all kinds of cool stuff broadcasters needed, but that was overkill for hosing up to a nonlinear editing system.

In the mean time, Sony released the UVW series Betacam SP decks, which were affordable (under ten grand, as I recall) and perfect for nonlinear systems. They sold like crazy, and further cemented Beta SP as the universal format for analog video. They're video wasn't as clean as the broadcast-level BVW-series decks, but for many users that didn't matter. As long as you could hand over a Beta SP tape, you were good to go. (Actually, with some of the early nonlinear systems the noisier UVW decks yielded better final video quality, because the noise in the signal helped prevent banding.)

But time marches on, and soon digital formats started to gain popularity. miniDV was huge hit with pros and consumers alike, Panasonic made major inroads in TV news and the general production world with DVCPro, followed by DV50, which delivered digibeta quality at a fraction of the price (and was our in-house mastering format for many years). Sony released DVCAM, a DV variant, but claimed it was an "industrial only" format at first - true pros would never lower themselves to use anything other than digibeta for broadcast work, according to the Sony literature of the day. The tragically named Digital-S, later rebadged D9, was a great format (technically comparable to DV50) but large physical tape sizes and being JVC-only really kept it from catching on.

Still trying to protect Digital Betacam at the high end, Sony released Betacam SX, a lower bitrate digital format. It suffered from image quality problems and never caught on, although a number of news stations used it for a few years. In the mean time, Panasonic's DVCPro/DV50 cameras continued to win market share from folks who years earlier would have laughed at the idea of using anything but a Sony camera. (One of my college professors had a funny, fake ad on his bulletin board. It said: Sony - Because everything else is crap. And at the time it was true.)

I'm willing to bet that Sony could have owned the high-end digital tape formats had they introduced a simple, nonlinear-friendly player/recorder Digital Betacam deck. But, like Walter Donovan, they chose...poorly. And Digital Betacam never achieved the wide acceptance it could have.

Enter HD, memory cards, disk recording...and here we are, with tape formats becoming less important, and your shop's internal IT infrastructure and digital archiving strategies becoming vital. (We'll address those issues in more detail in future posts.) Heck, one of the things I like about buying a Sony EX-1 is that I won't have a buy a deck to go with it!

Still, through it all, it's fun to look back and reflect on how easy it was, back when having a Betacam SP deck meant you never had to worry about compatibility when exchanging tapes.

What do you think? Have any fond memories of tape formats from long ago? Still pine away over the sound of a 1" machine coming up to speed? Share your thoughts in our comments section!

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