Camcorder, More Like Camcord-RW (It's A Disc Joke)

36,892 views
Premiered Apr 14, 2021
Cathode Ray Dude
38K subscribers
Subscribed
I've seen at least ten thousand videos about videotape and a thousand about discs but I've never seen a single mention of disc-based video recording in my life. Here's all the mentioning you'll ever need on the subject. Support my channel: https://patreon.com/gravisvids One-time donations: ko-fi.com/gravis Chapters: 00:00 Intro 00:17 Problems with Videotape 07:14 The Digital Option 08:49 Into The Digital Millenium 12:43 Disc Camcorders: A New Hope 14:23 Form Factor Musical Chairs 15:56 Media Handling! (AKA Caddyshack) 27:29 DVD Functions 27:39 Video Test 29:01 Still Photography?? 30:23 Disc Friends With Disc Benefits 33:03 Watchin' Discs On The Teevee 35:16 The Finalization Countdown 42:13 Dreaded Simulacra (Power Cords) 43:36 Disc Camcorders: The Downsides 46:49 DVD Bitrates 48:04 DVD Codec Video Tests 50:00 DVD-RAM!!!!!!!!! 55:54 Apologies To Caddies 56:43 The Blu-Ray Factor 58:05 Blu-Ray Video Tests 1:03:27 2010 DVD Camera Reveal 1:05:46 2010 DVD Camera Video Tests 1:07:47 CD Camcorders / VideoCD 1:10:32 CD Mavica 1:13:13 Professional Discs? 1:15:28 Yes! Professional Discs! 1:20:11 XDCAM PFD Video Test 1:23:05 The End Of Evangelion
I’ve waited my whole life to hear those five special words: Let’s talk about disc caddies.
158
I am one of those hyper nerds. My camcorder had audio dubbing capabilities:)
57
I recognize that footage of recording and editing Internet video in 2001. :-) And Sony attempted to bridge the gap with Cassette Memory, a microchip in MiniDV and MicroMV tapes which would store the times, thumbnails, and titles of each scene on the tape, allowing (somewhat) more rapid access to your footage. And with DV's time code, professional editing workstations could play back clips from the tape in a programmed order, and with frame-accurate timing, considerably easing the burden of editing video in the era before computer-based non-linear editing.
48
You know a video is great when after 84 minutes of runtime, you feel like you spent 5 minutes watching, and you want more. Congrats man for your great work.
70
This is why you watch the whole way through, people. If you don’t get to the 1-hour mark, you miss out on Theoretical Blu-Ray Dad™.
38
My father didn't quite live the blu-ray camera fantasy, but he did edit footage of my elementary school Christmas concerts with a video toaster, and burn them to DVDs which were then sold by the school.
65
For some reason I really love the composition in the scene where you’re watching yourself on the TV off the recorded DVD. The hat in the foreground makes the whole scene.
44
"They knew what was coming and they didn't want to wait. And who could blame them?" Hidden sci-fi manifesto right there. The last 2 minutes of this video are pure gold.
26
"You know like how people will just leave their dishes dirty for like a whole —" 😎 he's gonna say week " —day, " 😰
30
The one missing link between here and modern camcorders is hard disk camcorders. I remember really wanting one back in the day, because woah 80 gigs of standard definition video
51
I pity the engineer from Sony's storage department. Every day the engineers from the sensor department be like "Bigger! Faster!"
41
I’m guessing unfinalized discs suffered from the XKCD “now there are even more standards” problem. Probably, in the amount of time it would have taken for manufacturers to agree on a new standard for DVD players to access arbitrary clips without a DVD table of contents as the bridge standard, optical media, or at least DVD, was already becoming obsolete.
28
Over an hour of camcorder talk? This got me to be a patron.
17
those video cd things is how like, i watched vast majority of legal media as a teenager in poland, bc like every magazine had like a movie attached with it as a freebie, and like, i haven't been to A Store in a while but I'm absolutely convinced some paper trash aimed at senior demographics still do it, i had to sit down my mom and explain that the format sucks ass and i can just download a bd rip of anything she wants
51
I hope Blu-ray dad exists. I hope he’s doing well.
11
Wow, I just watched almost an hour and a half of this, and didn't even realise! Great episode!
15
DVD RAM is the perfect format, can't change my mind
41
I like the prominently placed tokimeki memorial box and densha de go(?) controllers next to the TV. Gotta show off when you've got good taste.
16
From what I recall, the reason they tried to make consumer blu-rays use caddy's was because at the time they didn't have the fancy scratch resistant coating that blu-ray would end up with.
8
I was a nerd in the TV lab of my high school back in 1994, starting on prosumer equipment on the SVHS format. Once I hit my senior year in 98, we got a mini DV camcorder that had inputs for our editing devices, but they wouldn't allow us to use them because it might damage the mechanism in the camera. I loved the format, though. It was so crisp and clear compared to SVHS. Then, we became the first school in the area to have Avid video editing software and it was amazing! With the use of my titling box, I was able to produce some pretty nice stuff back then. I never got into DVD camcorders, but I definitely used DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and CD-RW disks. I never knew DVD RAM existed until much later. You got me to watch a video about a pretty tame topic for 1½ hours. Well done.
30
Take my premature Thumbs Up solely for that video title!
19
Oh! the joys of DVD finalization! At a previous employer, we actually ended up "bundling" our DVD camcorders with a rolling cart containing two DVD-DL burners. The full-size burners could finalize a disc in ~10 seconds, rather than the 20 minutes of the internal mini DVD drive. And of course we needed two burners to allow for continuous operation ;)
17
The process of finalizing discs does remind me a bit of rewinding film. Including never developing some because "I can't just waste those three pictures"
11
Your content is brilliant! Nobody else makes as thorough in depth explorations of such niche and specific camcorder tech topics like DVD camcorders or P2 media. Love it!
13
Finalizing creates a standards compliant index. Before finalization, no doubt the camcorders are using a proprietary index which only the camera supports. The un-finalize must be creating supplemental indexes maybe using some sort of no-op sleds on the DVD menus they create which fill from the back with additional skip pointers. There were a number of 'packet writing' formats that supported modifications without finalizing but they were late to the format and not baked into the original standards I don't believe; they needed proprietary 'drivers' to use but eventually windows supported some of these natively. Finalizing a file index takes a lot less time than building out a DVD thumbnail menu which is probably what it's taking all that time to do. Maybe It's baking in DVD-standards-compliant video headers into what were up until that point were naked mpeg streams plus the proprietary index held elsewhere.
9
10:00 "...(and will release a) monster 23GB 5.25" drive" (likely $2,000+) and 25 years later you can drop a 32GB microSD card in the 1mm seam in your car seat and not really care too much about it (as long as you have backups) because it cost less than your coffee. Man I feel old.
19
Well, I'll pour one out for that Mavica CD500... rest in peace.
8
I think this channel could make any subject interesting. 90mins on a subject I have little interest but still highly enjoyable. If this channel doesn't end up with half million subscriber eventually then YouTube truly has lost its way.
17
Tv tuner cards mid 90s and on were the number 1 way around our hood anyways to digitize video back then. Hauppauge
4
This video is like a Christmas gift I didn't know I wanted. Thank you.
2
excellent video - i'd say "as always", but this one especially so! i have a hard time paying attention for too long but this one had me all the way through. i still remember getting my first CD burner and struggling to figure out how the hell to "finalize" a disc to make it play in a CD player - nevermind that burned discs were such a crapshoot with so many of the players on the market when they first showed up. ... nice Tokimeki box!
5
There's actually a reason why PFDs has the caddy/cartridge and BluRays doesn't: the coating that allows the bluray disc to even survive at all wasn't invented yet when PFDs was released. For CDs, the layer that holds the data is a coating that is just below the label. that's why early CDs rot so easily; when the label becomes damaged or wasn't a perfect hermetic seal, air gets in and rots things. On DVDs, they sandwiched the data layer in between two half thickness polycarbonate discs. They can't do that on blurays because the disc itself was deemed too optically imperfect to cram 23 gigs of data onto, so they made the bottom layer 0.1mm thick. as opposed to a cool 0.6mm on DVDs. This means that light scratches could penetrate the layer, thus ruining the disc. Thus PFDs came in caddies. And then when TDK figured out a scratch resistant "hard coating" they didn't need a caddy anymore and the hard coating was written into the bluray standard and the rest is history.
6
That peel was worth waiting an hour for :D
5
Look at captain nostalgia opening the floodgates with a fairly straight forward history lesson.
3
To be fair, Dazzles (and in a more contemporary setting, El Gatos) are still useful for live capture of composite video! I've organized enough Melee tournaments to be familiar with em :P
4
As a camcorder collector, a video like this is a dream, not thought to ever be found... Thank you so much for the amazing A/V videos!
3
Thank you for doing so much awesome research, and I definitely didn’t notice when you swapped out the footage - though mobile YouTube compression likely hides a lot of the flaws when you aren’t actively looking for them.
3
lol, when you were showing the caddies, it looked like those infomercials in black and white, a la "are you tired of x", "does this always happen to you?", xD. Also, MPV is king of the video players. Ah yes, VCD, I remember buying a few pirated movies on that, and they did look like crap lol.
1
i will buy so many random format camcorders from the 90's and 2000's... BUT i will ALWAYS refuse a dvd camcorder. this is my limit
2
33:50 I'm dying on those "wall decorations" in the background.
42:51 my man this was hilarious thanks for the laugh.
1
I just found this channel yesterday and already im hooked
Very interesting:) I had a Handycam with a hard drive and I thought that was the dog’s bollocks! It was around 50 GB or so and I got it way back in 2009.
3
lol "That's a lie..." love it! I m hooked on your videos! Thanks for sharing!
Your channel deserves wayy more subscribers, I love the content.
3
30:18 THAT WAS HILARIOUS
2
We had that exact Round Holder Hitachi. I was pretty good at swapping those dang caddies when I was a kid. I used it at multiple parties, shoutout to my dad for trusting me with it lol. The thing ran out of charge before space on the disc.
your sense of humor in these videos is just perfect. writing, delivery, graphics, it's amazing and I love it.
2
Amazing Tokimeki Memorial flex xD Love the video!
1
From the title alone, it feels like new technology all over again. lol...
1
Love your videos man. I thought I was alone being into random stuff like this. We need to hit up RE-PC together when everything goes back to "normal"
1
9:23 - Current CoD devs: Hold my beer. New update will be 100GB.
I own a Sony hdr-ux7..still working great and i recorded great memories with it..only 20 or 30 minutes recording though
where would I go about getting one of those LGBT VHS covers? <3
The content, the comedy, it's all brilliant (:
just discovered this channel and i am loving it so far! a channel that does an hour and a half on dvd camcorders is literally right up my alley, keep it up dude, these are great!
TikTokers would kill for 15minutes I imagine.
1
So I’ve learnt from this video, stay away from Hitachi!
really enjoyed this odyssey of tech and all of the examples you use/edit into the video as usual~
Yes-with-knobs-on to long-form content like this! Ten minute videos are great and all, but sometimes I really want to get my teeth into a subject. Love this!
Oh no. I forgot all about the Dazzle. I was convinced I could become a youtube person. That did not happen. XD
The first 7 minutes of this video feel like a personal attack on me in the early 00's :)
Dude watching this makes me realize what James Rolfe from cinemassacre had to go through while filming his earlier films and early early avgn
Thanks for showing that BD10ha camera, I've been watching it for a few years just cuz it's so ridiculous -- Multiple SD and HD resolutions onto four different formats. Individually they suck, but here's one device with all of them! That's gotta be worth somthin'.
1
DVD-R is one of the best formats I've ever recorded (and still record) in, it's great to see it get its shine.
what a great video , kept my interest from beginning to end, totally ME, me being into video since 1984, I lived through all this ,..
"You can't...do it". I love the delivery
Wow, I knew that writing to discs in multiple sessions was a headache but I was not prepared.
1
Knocking it out of the park with the presentation my dude. Love the production value that goes into your vids
13:00 that would be pretty wild lmao. My imagination immediately came up with a vivid image of what that would look like
go figure that the channel with random broadcast video production hardware would have some of the highest production quality on youtube (but seriously these are awesome thank you!!!)
I still have an analog camera connected to my computer, I use it as my webcam!
Just found your channel the other day and I’m glad I did. I can tell you put a lot of time and effort into it and you have another sub!
It's allways good when your "girlfriend gives you one"...
I love this channel so much, this is epic! An entire movie about optical media! Yes!
I love the Nortel hat. My dad worked there for a long time back in the day
This is one of my new favorite channels. But it took 12 minutes to get to the DVD. Ugh. But I just realized this was a live. And it was very informative.
I thought this video had some really good jokes in it! Another great video!
It saddens me this doesn't have more views.
1
Was that Tokimeki Memorial I saw on the shelf there? A classic 😎
1
This was the media I needed made into a digestible format for my optical receptors to receive.
great vid. its very rare i sit through an hour and a half youtube, and i went through this all the way and enjoyed
1
AVCHD is a pretty neat format. On a full-size DVD, you have enough space for a movie-length HD video. I have a few movies captured off my DVR that way.
Girlfriend?!!! I wish we got to see all the specials in your life. Sigh, Gibbs will do. Bring me Gibbs!! Thanks for another great vid CRD. Hope you’re doing well
Dude, I distinctly remember my local news station had cameras with dvd drives with the clear disk tray. I remember seeing the dvd logo on the disk they put in it because it was before my family got a DVD player and I remember my young self finding it really cool. There is no way you made up that memory, I remember the same exact thing.
1
Ok that was interesting and that twist with the xdcam in the end. Didn't see that coming!
Throughly enjoyed this! Disc-based camcorders are utterly bizarre things and this was a great look at them. I only ever used a relatives DVD camcorder once and found it utterly infuriating, going back to my MiniDV one was a dream, some of the things noted here definitely have that make sense!
1
Dude I love your "random finger scrabbling to show the caddy is caddying" shots. :D
1
I love it. It's a very good documentary about consumer video cameras. Thanks. I think this one could have bloated out into several hours of demonstration footage with a detailed explanation of each media specification.
Technology connections has some excellent videos about different optical formats, I highly recommend watching them
I can really dive into you're videos. Your narration is interesting, informative, and concise. Liked and subscribed.
I still amazed on how I never knew about dvd ram until some time ago, when I was little me and some fried exchanged games emulators videos and we used CDs as single use flash drives, if we knew there was a DVD that could work like that we would have loved it, but I never saw them in our small Italian city
Never knew Dazzle was that old. I used a DVC 100 for VHS archiving for 10ish years until it's untimely death in 2019.
1
New sub here, your video is fantastic! As for the apparent failure of DVD-RAM, they were not advertised as much as +Rs, -Rs and RWs. Every "specialist" would also give you a totally different opinion about the pros and cons of each media. Those were confusing times for camcord buyers...
1
Flexing on all of us with that beautiful copy of Tokimeki Memorial ;)
Impressive. You sir, you are inspirational. Thank you.
damn, wish i could find one of those HD disc cams for cheap :P I always considered them as almost as good as tape when power fails. for the ones readable by a computer, most footage can be recovered.
nice flag in the background! you're amazing 🏳️‍🌈
1
wow what a video dude /me claps for the dedication this must of taken now go and rest for like a year lol i would never want todo another after that xd
loved that friendship with mudasir reference
My best guess, is that finalizing was some sort of media speciffic copyright protection because reasons
Wow that Nortel Networks hat brought back so many memories of my dad working for them in the 90s...
As someone who grew up fascinated by video cameras and is still keen to learn about them, thank you for sharing with your incredible passion (& great scriptwriting skills) for this!
In theory dvd+ r can work with other device without been finalized (in some dvd pvr can be shared with people with similar dvd pvr "maybe Sony + was better than - for this reason 🤔)
How interesting can you make a 125 minute video about camcorders? Apparently you can it was very interesting and informative some things I knew and things I did not nice work 👍
1
Thank you for your hard work bringing us this history lesson about old camcorders I didn't think I cared about until I had suddenly just watched the entire thing and realized that actually, _I really really did_!
At least I remember CD caddies being used early on because writeable CDs were used as a backup medium, and having a caddy meant a layer of security when handling discs.
I remember filming a star wars fan film on mini dv and transferring it to my pentium 3 laptop. When I rendered it it skipped a lot of frames. I didn't win the contest.
In my experience, during the early 2000s, dvd ram was just too expensive, i could get 100 dvd-r for price of 10 DVD-ram disc's and since had already spent several years burning cds that would fail 1/5 of the time during the burning process, i just assumed same thing would happen if i tried dvd-ram.
What version of the Gundam Mk2 is that in the living room? The 2.0?
Talk about long-form content! Thanks! RE: DVD-RAM. I'm sure, someone already posted this, but this vid does a pretty good job explaining why the format fizzled: https://youtu.be/ecH3OU0R4ls
1
News stations around my area used p2 cameras until relatively recently... For some reason
This whole video was fascinating, I'm so glad I watched the whole thing! I love how you admit to what you don't know, speculate but say that's what you're doing, and correct yourself if you've gotten details wrong in the past. These are very rare, valuable traits!
Back in the day i used my own edited mpeg 2 to create dvd's that had 5 or 6 films on that would work on any dvd player and they had menus lol
"Covid Haircut" a sign of 2020 that will most certainly last as some kind of meme LOL
Nice one. Could you do a video explaining how the signal from the sensor gets put onto the tape / CD?
Wow, now this is great fucking content. This is a full on movie. Good shit, very entertaining!
1
Hey, you tell "tape has been gone a long time by now" to my mini-DV camcorder and dual G4 mirrored drive door! (Yeah I did the dual deck thing in middle school, for condensing news for school announcements.) May actually still have the kiddo use that... My parents had an 8mm tape camcorder that was like that view cam kinda: big screen, a few inches thick, with the actual lens and sensor off to the side on a pivot. Very strange ergonomics best summarizes as "use a tripod". Galaxy brain: an SD card adapter is just a caddy for a micro SD card. But at least it helps you not lose it...
2
Poor CD500, my heart broke :(
The first video I ever edited was shot on a CD camcorder and I remember spending a whole weekend trying to read the disk only to learn my friend hadn't finalized the disk on her camcorder before she gave it to me. :c
Hands down, best video ever!!!
Finalize is because that makes the disc standard. Dvd drives in pc can via software read unfinilized discs. It's just software that limits this.
1
Thanks for this very interesting video!
Just to note "Wooo" would be pronounced more like "woahhh" in Japanese, which makes a little more sense, although it's still kinda silly.
I can't say I've come across one of these disc camcorders in the wild when they were new. Nobody I knew had one. Just about everyone I knew went from tape direct to hard drive based camcorders (with those funky VOD/TOD files) or AVC-HD units with SD cards.
2
Man. My first and only VCD was a bootleg copy of Battle Royale. It was high definition in my mind, ok.
1:33 - 1:46 James Rolfe (aka the Angry Video Game Nerd) in a nut shell
I just bought a bunch of mini DVD-R DL out of impulse after seeing this video. I don't really have any use for them, my miniDVD camcorder is long lost in the storage unit somewhere, maybe gamecube game backups?
One of your best videos, CRD.
Since Windows XP times I mostly did not finalize burned CDs/DVDs (+-R(W)) 🤔
Excellent video, 1:30h of niche retro tech stuff!
i just wish normal dvd players could play dvd-ram discs so we could have unfinalized, super stable, rewritable, dvds that could also have data on the same disc!
1
we shot the first season of strictly sega using a cd mavica, i didnt care about the resolution as much back then but now its hard to watch... in 2009 i got a hdd cam and that made it so easy to transfer files and edit.
I really like to see your new haircut, am I the only one?
2
Sick wideo. Hi8 kinda cool. I see these rw corders at thrifftys alot. 1 k likes now yeet.
If you made up the memory of the pro camera taking a full-sized disc... so have I dude. I... think Sanyo? I distinctly remember seeing it on a BBC news cameraman's shoulder. With the disc spinning.
My WinTv card handles Svideo very well from my DSR though of course I use FireWire.
You could also eject tape, insert empty tape and play record. This would solve an issue
TFW you'll never live in the universe where BD-ROM (in a caddy of course) is the dominant storage medium
The ffmpeg mailing list will take your sample files though. I wonder if you could hexedit your way to playable files.
And on 35th minute i actually looked for real length of video. Man, it is extreme, and pretty solid job. Also, i written tons of optical media at that days, and i can't even imagine how it could be understood by man owning camcorder and dvd player, but without PC experience. Giving the variety of low end dvd players producers, I think complability was ENORMOUS rabbit hole of its own UPD Written that comment just before the finalizing countdown, and I can't stop laughing and be in deep horror in same time UPD2 Also, BD burner... I think that most tech nerds will just skip it alltogether UPD3 Fun fact for digital still cameras... It is still hilarious to me that when i upgraded from 5mp to 12mp low end Canon, video was only function that actually got better (noises on small sensor and more wider lenses made that much hit to image quality)
1
Do you have a video on the parallel video capture card?
My mother had the Sony dvd camcorder. I found the discs 10 years later unfinalized. She only had two full discs, I think she stopped using the camcorder back in the day because she didn't know she needed to finalize them. Thank gosh I found the camcorder in storage to finalize them.
1
some companies really want to sell a lot with that high price
57:34 "Nobody got progressive HD in 2008, nobody" 5d Mk2 bitch, and full frame. Camcorders get pwned
2
The divx players and recorders I had would play all these formats except bluray. Including avi.
Thank you for this, this feels like a missing link between eras. My little brother and I had one or two discs for us to use as kids. We'd make home movies and record, delete and re-record over and over. Unfortunately I don't know if I'll ever be able to watch those discs I have them sitting on my shelf, forever unfinalized, doing so meant we'd never be able to use them again so we'd just watch by plugging the camera in the tv. I wonder If its possible to buy another old camcorder that is roughly the same model and finalize it on those.
Great Value Technology Connections
Avery Label Blu-ray Dad is the hero we deserve.
i'm so glad youtube suggested this channel to me. CRD, your videos started off a bit rough around the edges, but this latest "season" is pure quality.
Heh, I remember when Sony had not only a standalone 8MM VCR, but a Video Walkman which worked as the same. 92 was a marvelous age for tech.
I think we had mini VHS camcorder, it used a full size adapter so you could watch your video in a VCR, kinda like a mini SD to SD adapter... Or it could have just been a fever dream. Edit: Apparently it wasn't a fever dream, I just didn't wait to finish the VOD before posting.
1
Just wrapping up. Well done. Do you have any idea how good pacing has to be to get me to sit through an hour and a half YouTube video? 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I swear with this production value I almost thought this video would reach at least 100k views by now.
In regards to the stand-alone DVD recorders, my grandparents had a combo unit that had both VHS and DVD recorder functionality, and they did indeed use it as DVR. When my family later got a DVD player, was actually a bit surprised that the recording functionality was not standard.
I have about 2TB of photos, and 19TB of video And i use m disk BDXL(edit for backup media that is water/EMP resistant)
The round disc caddy was definitely a scheme to break discs so you would buy more.
I WAS one of those hyper-nerds! I hated the way the picture would degrade as I dubbed from tape to tape though.
The finalizing conundrum probably had something to do with copyright protection for movies that consumer recording got caught up in.
The bill nye of media
I've used the Sony Mini DVD cam you don't have it's quite good TBH.
I actually had the Sony Mini DVD Camcorder. Before I had capture cards, I used to record Game Footage directly off the screen with that exact camcorder.
Great and informative video! For growing up with MiniDV and going straight to H.264 on SD cards (now shooting to CFast in ProRes on cinema cameras) and even writing DVD-Video discs back in the day, the DVD camcorder era is quite interesting to me. Perhaps you would be interested in making a dedicated video on the weirdness/difficulties of dealing with interlaced video on PC? I'm a big fan of 60fps playback but quality deinterlacing gets overlooked a lot when consumers deal with legacy formats.
2
With regards to DVD RAM, I actually had a consumer HP desktop that included a standard DVD+/-R recorder that would accommodate a DVD RAM disc. In fact, the computer even came with a DVD RAM disc. So it may have been more accessible and available than indicated in the video.
1
Coincidentally I was using one of the pdw-f350s for a web stream last night because it was what I could grab from the office.
I remember my school got an iMac back when they were brand new, and that thing was unbearably slow. I can't imagine anyone doing any video editing on it.
As always, fantastic video. Really appreciate the details (all the clips). Also, love the hat :)
59:24 Going by the Japanese Wikipedia Entry, Hitachi's "Wooo" branding is supposed to stand for the "Unconscious expression of surprise when seeing something beautiful" (I presume what you more commonly would write as 'Woah' in English); And/or is supposed to stand for the "Wo~" from the English words "Wonder", "World standard" and "Worthwhile" with I guess the three "o"s for the fact that it's three words... Though there unfortunately is no source given for this. It was primarily a brand name for plasma televisions, but also was applied to digital camcorders and DVD recorders. 【Woooに込められた意味は、美に対する無意識的な感嘆の発声としての「ウー」と驚きがある、世界の新しい基準である、高い価値があるという意味の英単語の「Wonder」「World standard」「Worthwhile」の3つの‘Wo～’という2つの意味から成る造語で、2001年8月からスタートした。 】 - ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooo
6
In my area of the us, the reason why dvd ram wasn't popular was the cost of the burners. They've gone down a lot
1
20:07 OMG I remember that game! It's hard to believe Myst is ALMOST 30-years-old today (28 to be exact -- when the first version came out.) Probably one of the most state-of-the-art video-games of its' time.
That reveal at 1:20:25 or so was awesome.
Love your content!
I liked mini-dv but getting FireWire working on a modern pc is a pita. Dvd-ram should have been more successful - see technology connections -
1
Great stuff as usual 👍
1
Ah, i was wondering what that video frame was.
You used the camcorder to edit, in Back to the future, Marty/ Doc use an 8mm Sony, not playable on typical vhs vcr. Only beta max version which didn't play vhs could play the tapes.
Love your camcorder-type content of your channel man! Ever thought about doing a retrospective of 3-D camcorders of the early '10s?
I love MiniDV. I still use that Canon GL2 for home videos next to my Canon HDV cameras. GL2 gives a beautiful SD pq
My man made an hour and a half long documentary about camcorders with movie-level production quality for youtube... mad respect
my first CD-ROM drive was 2x speed Mitsumi. I'm not sure it was THAT Mitsumi, but it surely didn't need a caddy. It needed a daddy...
At 11:45 camcorders had remotes too,and Sony ones were compatible with the master multi device remotes.
As far as I can see professional disc can't record in 1080 progressive, which keeps 1080 interlaced well and truly alive.
I had the PHILIPS CDR 870 and the finalize mystery is solved by knowing the drives store a proprietry barebones version of the contents data on disc areas not set by established standards.
I possibly missed it but did you ever try recording in one camera and finalizing in a different one? Like are the non-finalized discs readable and playable by the other players? I wonder if there was some pseudo standard for the pre-finialized format on the discs or if such a thing would even be possible.
3
Lol, great, very informative video.
I reject my humanity Hitachi !!!
So, wait, how did you get the video off of the Sony Professional Disc? You said you had to get a USB disc reader that cost an ungodly amount. Did you find one of those, or does the camcorder have a USB connection on it?
7
Christ. I had a Dazzle for YEARS with my hand-me-down beige IBM computer and I had no idea what it was and no real compunction to look it up online. I dont think I ever even hooked it up, it was just something I stored in the same red plastic box as my Sidewinder joystick and USB PS2 Controller adapter. How do I keep learning all these buried memories from your videos?
At the end of the video (1:23:42) you show the Rave:MP, a music player that uses clik disks. I bought one of them off of eBay about a year ago. It's a fun little novelty. The biggest flaw with it, IMO, is that it buffers data and spins the drive down just to spin it back up again after 20-30 seconds to buffer some more; this doesn't sound like a big deal, but the drive spins pretty fast which makes a fairly quiet, but somehow also really obnoxious, high pitched whirring sound while spinning. If the drive were always spinning, the your brain would just fade the droning into the background after a while, but since it keeps starting and stopping it's really noticeable. The last time I used it on the bus, the guy next to me was clearly very puzzled by the noise but he couldn't quite tell where it was coming from.
2
I'm a 3d video geek I'm still wanting to get a Sony 3d td20 or td30 and a fujifilm W1 3d
What an enjoyable video, thank you! But you revealed the mystery of the 2010 Sony DVD camcorder already in the owner's manual screenshot at 46:25 - it says AVCHD in context with DVD. This reminds me of the "Mini-DVD" format where DVD "VIDEO_TS" structure was burnt to an ordinary CD-R.
I only heard about DVD Ram and never SAW them. Were they expensive? I would love a deep dive into this if it interests you enough :)
I remember some CD and DVD drives and software were capable of "multi-session" recording, letting you access the data you'd written to the disc without finalizing it all the way. I wonder if they ever made a camcorder that could do that?
1
Props for mentioning an usual hairclipper you all would be saving lots of money with. Forget about looks, it's the purpose that matters.
2:22 That Apple iMovie ad's from 2000... not 1998... The visual styling SCREAMS the early Mac OSX era.
I know one person who owns and uses a minidisc camcorder and they use it in cosplay for anime conventions
I was hoping you would cover XDCAM (especially the HD version) and I am glad you did. I almost got myself a professional video camera that shot on XDCAM but realized, it wouldn't be logistical. Ended up getting a Sony HVR Z7, which had a memory recorder attachment you could put on it (to record to CF since it only records on HDV tapes). Kind of happy I went that route instead, but I do miss the "thumbnail" feature, which the XDCAM could do and my particular camera couldn't (due to limitations of the recording attachment unit itself). But then again, my camera seems to be the halfway point between recording on flash media and still tape formats. But now I am just rambling on. Great video!
2
BBC's Top Gear shot on XDCam Disk from 2006 to 2011 I believe, starting with the Polar Special. They still used it even before they made the full leap to HD in around 2008/2009.
1
Great video! Thanks! Holy CRAP it was long though. If I may request/suggest: I think a multi-part series would have worked better. Information fatigue kicked in at about the 30--40 minute mark, and I think the info would have been much more digestible as a 4-5 part series. Either way, thanks for putting so much time and effort into this. If the final product was 90 minutes, I can only imagine how many hours and hours of work went into this.
3
Excellent video! Well done
1
Just scored a complete and working Sony DCR-DVD100, now just need some of those little DVDs, lol
I should still have video cds from 2000 around. I captured a lot of MTV music videos with a Windows 98 PC and WinTV Go capture card and burned them on vcd.
1
I recently found your channel, and damn, you're good. Excellent info (and frequently funny), smoothly and rapidly delivered, and garnished with quick inserts of trivia and other sidebars that enrich the video's satisfaction index. As for this vid. you've filled a gap in my camcorder knowledge that spans from hi-8 to smartphone, and I'm struck by the level of effort that I imagine must have been needed to weave this all together. I'm really looking forward to viewing a lot more of your vids, since I'm confident it will all be good, and worth my time (and a bit of Patreon). Thank you.
Wait, Mini DV is 25Mbps? ... ( * checks some old AVI files * ) ohmigosh... you're right. No wonder those files were so big. .... but it looks like butt! :-O
1:14:28 I also have a vague recollection of some kind of professional dvd camcorder (specifically one with a disc "viewport"), but the context of the memory leads me to suspect it was in a movie/show and probably a prop rather than a functional device 🤔
I was amazed to find that my Canon HR10 when hooked to a PC/Laptop with USB cable lets me watch or save the clips to that PC and even delete them on the go without finalising/unfinalising or taking the disc out of the camera.. It stayed on its tripod overhead position while recording workbench..
Disc caddy. I have only seen the. once. My elementary school library in the early 90's had them, when I was in Elementary. I always wondered if it was a different format or what. Now I know.
Seems like audio quality was nearly as important, if not more important as video quality
I would 100% watch Goldblum's crappy home-video edits ... ya just know that'd be a trove of precious and bizarre treasures.
First awesome video that must have taken a ton of research. I highly appreciate the level of detail. A few details: I got my first Hi8 camera in 1992 and have never had issues with tape. Perhaps it was the stuff I was/is shooting or just that I got used to, that any camera has advantages and drawbacks and I have gotten used to - still today - to take advantage of the pros and working around the cons of the camera I am using. Rewinding and transfering a tape is done post shoot so that is in the non issue bin for me. As far as I remember, finalizing a DVD would write a table of contents. DVD might be random access but it has slow seek time and a single TOC is necessary for speeding things up. Why some devices could read unfinalized discs and others could not is only guesswork. Perhaps because unstandardized tricks were used? Perhaps because it would require extra memory or the like, so a standard DVD player would not get this feature. The highest bit rate is only really used when there is a lot of changes in the image. Panning fast is a case but the most challenging is running water (like a stream) or strobe lights. Talking head is the least challenging and can be done perfectly fine with lower bit rates.
Great video! The weird 352 pixel wide resolutions are holdovers from VCD and SVCD. VCD was 352x240 and SVCD was 352x480.
3
i really like that tv set up
And BOOM you finally covered XDCAM! I launched XDCAM for Sony in Australia. It's still widely used in news and production here in Aus. I produced some environmental testing videos about the toughness of the format. I'll find it and share it with you.
1
There was a point when you could only get the original Star Wars trilogy + EP1 on VHS and VCD (with 'no plans' for a DVD release). So I actually have a set dating back to soon before EP2 came out.
I'm glad I completely skipped the DVD era of camcorders and stuff with mini DV until my Panasonic camcorder dropped a pinch roller. then I discovered firewire video and recorded that directly to the PC/mac and loved every minute of it
Kinda sad how today nothing has its own flavor. Cellphones do everything, however they are all the same piece of flat cold glass
WOOO
8
42:51 they are called 'dummy batteries'... right?
I have no idea why I watched this as Ive never owned or wanted a camcorder but it was still interesting. Honestly I have no interest in owning most of the stuff you do videos about and if I ever came across any of it I would probably just offer to send it to you for a video. Ive watched most of your videos at this point and they all make me nostalgic for stuff I never had or wanted at the time.
What a great deep dive
I could explain all the intricate little formatting details and reasoning of the whats and the whys of how the discs work and why you can and can't do certain things with certain discs in certain ways but i just can't be arsed.
Back in 2013 my high schools video lab still had a bunch of Mac Pros (The ones that look like the Power Mac G5) and a bunch of mini DV tape decks that if I remember correctly could copy footage at 2x speed. If this was the case I would have been super stoked because I’ve been through the horror that is transferring DV footage since 2004. We also had a Panasonic HD P2 based camera, and 3 canon DV cameras connected to a newtek tricaster for all your SD live video needs. Oh also DVD ram was heavily used in the professional audio industry. Before ProTools workstations were actually affordable, there was a standalone nonlinear audio workstation called a radar 24 that used DVD RAMdisks.
Ah... The "finalization"... God knows how many discs I've ruined by this bizarre process.
Here’s how I think finalizing the disc works (this is a guess from prior knowledge). Video is recorded on the disc by the camcorder in a proprietary format. When you finalize the disc, that video is copied and also re-encoded to a standardized DVD-video format (MPEG-2 I think it is). Then, the camcorder marks the portion of the disc that has the proprietary video with a flag that says “there’s nothing to see here”
VideoCD camcorders were probably impossible because real time MPEG encoders simply did not exist during the mid 90s - at least not in a portable / low power / consumer priced format.
You should try out that component out from the PDW, I have a Sony HDW-F900 that it's way older than it and it works really well with no problems and is a tapeless solution so I don't worry if the tape deck fails.
Rock on!
Hey CRT dude, have you considered editing out the sub-bass from your videos? I don't know if you're aware of this, but someone keeps stomping around upstairs in most of your videos (especially this one) and I keep thinking it's my own neighbors!
I interned at one of Australia's biggest TV newsrooms in 2017 and they still used PFD! One of my jobs was running the discs up to news control to be ingested into their CMS. I always wondered what they were. Makes sense given they produced everything in SD and then upscaled it to 1080p.... eugh.
Sorry for the double post, but I think my favorite format is the Minidisc, I had one in 2002 and left it in a rental car, never got it back. I know mp3 is easier these days, but there was just something I thought was cool. To get the model I had then today would cost $1200+ for a used one. I guess I'm not the only one who thinks they're neat with prices like that. Everytime I see a brick of MDs in the store, a small part of me dies.
IIRC some computer drives could indeed read unfinalized discs! Usually it was only drives that natively support DVD+/-RW. And there's also the whole concept of "sessions", where you could write the same file onto the disc multiple times. :) (Edit: I see you did eventually mention sessions. <3 this video!)
I really like your contents and this video is one of your best in my opinion. I have a great idea for you next topic: Reviewing the Panasonic LQ-MD800. Please get one somewhere. 😁
1440x1080i is basically double interlaced
with the instant dvd playback, could there be some sort of clock/counting circuit that keeps track of how many sectors of the disc have been written since recording started? That way, if you want to replay your recording instantly, the camera just instructs the laser to jump to the correct position on the disc without having to finalize the disc. I don't know much about optical formatting, so this is purely minimal-thought speculation on my part
I also want the gadget dad with his Blu-ray burner to exist. Wait PFD runs through a taPE SWITCH?!? IT"S ALL I COULD HAVE DREAMED AND MORE!
I think the "finalization" process writes standardized Table-of-Contents/menu/metadata/etc information to the disk. Without it, the data may or may not be compatible with other devices. The reason it takes so long on the camcorder is probably it converting the proprietary codecs/formats and what-file-is-where map(s) to the standard DVD format. This makes it work elsewhere at the cost of reencoding everything and being unable to further edit the disk.
1
so thinking in evolution of video now what in the next step? or sd card are the best technology for a long time after new technology is invented?
15:15 Woah, you didn't need to go full on chroma key there, but you did, and I appreciate the extra effort. Also, can confirm that standalone DVD recorders were used for DVR-sort of purposes, or for (poorly) copying DVDs. I imagine that clipping videos writes in/out times for each clip?
37:11 So, without having done literally any research, I have an idea about finalisation/unfinalisation: All the data files you know of have a header (which are x amounts of plusses and zeros), a data component (again, plusses and zeros) and a checksum/endOfFile marker. The data component may contain inside of itself a smaller header + dataComponent combo and there may be x amount of these, based on how much data can fit into the data component. this doesn't change the fact that unfinalisation is probably separating the layers of the cake to reharvest the jam (the data/movies). It'll be more like that, instead of unjuicing the orange from the carton, back into its unpeeled fruit. You can spot how they did this by reading the spec for DVD and comparing it to the spec of the dvd r in camera (if you can get the spec for it, it's probably pointlessly protected info) dvd players need to read consistently header, datacomponent and have an endOfFile markers. This is the fault of whoever invented the dvd format. Why didn't the cameras just make this happen automatically? it causes unresponsive behaviour from the os every time you finalise. I'm sorry if this didn't make sense I have comms issues
Wait, how did you get the files of the PFD disk???
That was (nearly) an hour and a half? I barely could tell, and I still want more. Great stuff as usual, glad to see how much you've progressed in video production quality, yet the same strong passion as when I started watching! If I'm not mistaken, didn't Sony make a line of cameras with 2.5 and I think maybe even 3.5 inch mechanical hard drives? The 3.5 inch HDD thought might be a false memory, but I remember seeing them on the website a few years back when I was looking. If I had to guess they likely didn't sell amazingly well. They would be super cool to take a look at if you happen to come across one someday.
8:15 I don't know if that's strictly true, since SD cards, like many things, are burst-oriented. Getting the byte just next to the last one is usually orders of magnitude faster than getting a random byte somewhere. But, yeah, nitpicking. For all practical purposes, it's always instant, haha
Really enjoyed the video, it’s right up my alley! Two technical points.. it’s important to remember the DVD codec (MPEG-2) uses temporal compression. So while the lower quality 3mbps setting looked fine in that test footage, there was very little motion for it to encode. The camera was fixed on a tripod and the background didn’t change at all. The difference between 3mbps and 8mbps would be far more substantial when shooting anything handheld and especially content with a lot of motion like sports. Also, That 704X480 resolution is actually the true “image” resolution of SD broadcast video. For technical reasons I won’t get into (unless someone wants me to lol) there are 8 “blank” horizontal pixels on both right and left sides of the SD broadcast spec. They function as a buffer and are black. Where this gets tricky/confusing is that 720X480 and 704X480 were used interchangeably. Most computer software detects and automatically removes those 16 black pixels. So it’s very common for video software to say something is 720X480 when effectively it’s actually only displaying or encoding 704X480. This confusion is further compounded by the fact that those aren’t square pixels. The spec is for 4:3 which means a computer monitor is squishing the 704X480 image down to 640X480. All this messiness is where the analog standards of old met digital
1
Caddies would make CD autoloaders (like in low-volume burning duplication) easier to make, as you could mostly scale up the existing floppy designs. I think they also made early multi-CD automatic libraries easier. My parents' first CD player in their hifi system actually took cartridges, with one for a single disc, and another that held six discs. We only had one of each, though.
Also, you should def say how much the various things cost. I mean I know some ppl feel strange talking about how much they plunked down for things, but unless it could somehow queer the market it would help collectors who watch your videos be aware of ballpark prices without having to pull open a second eBay tab.
A neat fact I always found interesting is that non-caddy Bluray discs were used in Casino Royale (at least as props) for the security camera backup media. Bluray as a home media format just barely hit the market when the movie came out so for many it would have been their first time seeing them, as it was mine.
3
pulled out the hf r800 and i thought i was having a stroke because im not used to seeing that camera outside of my room
You need to look into the camera lens and not the viewfinder when you do these videos.
@44:05 Truth.
You say VHS(-C) for camcorders was pretty much dead by the 2000s, and while I imagine that’s true for most people. I absolutely got, probably one of the last, VHS-C camcorders as a kid in like 2003. Those adapters to a normal VCR were absolutely still a thing in my house.
At Magic Memories Box, by far the most common format we see for digitizing and archiving is VHS-C. We get more VHS-C tapes than all other formats combined. After that is Video8, then Video Hi8, then Digital-8, then Mini-DV, and then, rarely, we get a DVD from one of these kinds of camcorders.
1
Great video. And I really liked the point at the end: We can envision how the device should, but it can take awhile until the technology is there. But is there anything like that now? What is something where we can imagine how things should be, but it simply isn’t there right now?
Can a $100 - $150 USB HD Webcam from 2007-08 connected to a laptop record videos with better quality than a DVD/MiniDV camcorders from 2007-08 ?
Why does this guy sound like 8-Bit-Guy and Technology Connections mixed together? I love videos like these. Thanks for an awesome historical retrospective!
I do video archiving to digital as a business. I get quite a number of unfinalised mini DVD's to recover data from. So I would say many people just recorded on the camcorder and watched it direct from there.
My guess about the finalization is that the Camcorder Recording the disc Knows exactly which Data it has written where on the disc. This is why the camera can Play Back the Video and a Player can't. Finalizing the disc them writes the Table of contents to the disc, which in Turn gives the Player the ability to know where the Data is.
Also that Sony HDR-UX5 looks like what George Lucas shot the phantom menace with.
Also the original 1st generation IPod Classic from 2001 used a small mechanical hard drive for it’s storage and at around the same time the first hard drive based camcorders were also released! A friend of mine also had a camcorder from 2005 that had an inbuilt hard drive so they definitely were also around from the early 2000s! :)
It's crazy to think that we've gone back to not-being-able-to-just-watch-what-you-recorded-on-your-TV without using the Internet or multiple conversions or weird apps. What a shame.
Finalize is most likely there for security or how the CD PC reads it. Remember DVD standard was for commercial movies on disc
Hi, can you recommend some pro cameras for beginners? They should be to get for a price that is reasonable for non commercial reasons, they should be a little bit up to date with video and audio quality, otherwise a modern consumer cam would be doing better, it should be possible to get memory discs, or cards or whatever, as well as batterys and so on still easy. Would be grat to see a video about that.
so what was the difference between Magneto-optical and DVD-ram, I always though, Magneto-optical was like half CD-R, and half Hard disk, using A Laser, warm a part of the disk, the using magnet, set the 010010101 data to the Disks, I thought DVD-RAM used in a similar way, the Magneto-optical drives to record there digital (VIDEO) data?
I wish disc caddys became the norm, instead of a bunch of easily scratchable discs, you get a disc that's inside a holder, effectively acting as it's own jewel case. although if you keep your disc in the case that comes with the thing, it's not super necessary, more of a wish than a need. all they needed to do is include the dang discs inside of a caddy!
YES new upload! been in dire need of a new CRD vid to binge. then i saw this one is FEATURE LENGTH! yes pls
6
Did you know that Sony created Blu-Ray discs! I did not know that they made a separate version for professional camcorders before they finished the consumer Blu-Ray format, however I would like to add that Sony forced Blu-Ray over HD-DVD by A( Owning a movie publisher company and B( Making the PS3 have a Blu-Ray player and allowing the playing of Blu-Ray movies.
37:10 This probably indexes files and re-writes lead-in and lead-out areas of the disc with the new TOC (table of content) to indicate disc session is still open so files can be added to it. 35:50 This was for historic reasons. As DVD standard evolved it was important to maintain compatibility so that new discs can be read on old players which expected certain disk structure (lead-in. data, lead-out). This typically means if you want your disc to be playable in your home DVD player disc needs to be writted as SAO (session at once).
I'd really like to have a look at the raw files from your Hitachi Bluray camcorde - I think it's just using a really early H264 or even MPEG2 encoder.
To be honest I don't feel that DVD camcorders fully replaced minidv growing up in the late 90s and 00s I remember that most people still used minidv only till the late 00s I started seeing more DVD camcorders but by then flash memory was taking over
Have I owned a camcorder? No. Was this a good use of my time? Maybe? Did I just watch a 90 minute video about camcorders, disk caddies and their flaws? Apparently, yes. Did I enjoy that video? Definitely.
I would wager the reason why so many companies wanted to use caddies in their cameras was because of patent related reasons. Maybe they hopped that their caddies would catch on and force others to have to pay them to use it. That is my guess.
Plenty of old DVDs put their special features on in different qualities. I don't think a lot of people noticed unless they were ripping a lot of dvds like I was. It's much more pronounced now with Blu-rays having straight up DVD standard def files on them.
9:26…. Looks at Call of Duty Cold War “He’s talking about you!”
I didn't think I'd be able to watch a video about this subject for nearly 90 minutes, but you made it interesting enough for me to do so. Bravo!
i love CD Caddy, i like to put music Cd's in them and put nice album-art in the transparent part. It makes me think of a world where Jewel Cases never exsisted and as you mentioned cd caddy was cheep and just came as the case of software and music. only devices with cd caddy slot, imagine a car radio :D i also have a Pannasonic PD drive, it is like DVD-RAM but back in the CD-ROM days. it is wired - it has a drawer that accepts the Cartiges and bare CDs but it is incompatible with CD Caddy it is a really old meme by now indeed. 90s tech trolling me in 2020 :O enjoying your Chanel a lot, helps with projects with Crt's and video in general. i am for putting up SD Video in 2020 BTW -> it is nice to have content to view on my old rear projection 4/3 monster <3 for now it is 90s music videos on YouTube :D best regards lara craft :)
1:09:22 let’s be honest... if you were ripping movies and putting them on VCD because you didn’t want to pay, you probably couldn’t afford a big screen. I should know. Biggest screen I saw my VCDs in was 21”
Many later DVD set top boxes played AVI files on UDF CDs. From around I had a (Hitachi? Toshiba? I don't know. It was silver, and full width) DVD player which also had 'upscaling' and a USB 2.0 port together with a HDMI port on the back in addition to the usual SCART (remember SCART?!)
Dude I like your video a lot I think your almost as good as techmoan 8-bit guy and technology connections. But the one thing kicking your ass is EDITING, like I bet if you look at metrics for the video that people get bored part way through and either skip around or stop watching(sucks, because this is a good video).
Camcorder recording format can get better. If there profit margins on the memory cards are too small, streaming camcorders might be the next must have things.
One thing I will say that is an advantage of tape-based formats over random Access file systems is that if the camera is damaged or battery dies unexpectedly mid recording you do not lose the first 90% of the video because the video file wasn't finished being written.
You asked why we didn’t use DVD ram. Reason is, they were stupidly expensive at the time.
1
I suspect that the cadies and holders solve some sort of mechanical issue securing the optical media in all orientations and when under acceleration. It was likely necessary as a quick way to solve issues with bad burns from camera movement. That used to be a real issue for the first few years of CR-R/DVD-+R.
oh my god THANK YOU for addressing how RAM only came in caddies at first. I thought I had a Mandela Effect moment when I discussed seeing them sold in a standard pancake and everyone getting confused AF. Good to know it was actually real in this timeline.
I took a mini dvd camcorder of my dads to a supercross race in San Diego back in 2011. I recorded a couple hours of footage and it had an sd card for taking 480x640 digital pictures. I flew back home to my moms and tried to play it in the DVD player at home. Oh, wait, it’s like a CD-r and you have to fucking finalize it. I still have that mini dvd disc and have yet to rewatch the footage I shot 10 years ago. I also was part of the huge boom in miniDV consumption thanks to skate punks shooting footage for videos. I always wanted a VX2000, GL1 or XL1 to shoot. My friends and I were never at the level to need that advanced of a camera. I shot on a Canon ZR45MC.
1
MiniDV was my education and a lot of what I did professionally before I gave up on video, so I'll always have a soft spot for it. You lament how sad it is that the CRD-10 may just be using a consumer-level transport, and while I agree with you, I'm also willing to play devil's advocate here and wonder if this wasn't a loss-leader situation where they developed it for pro cams, but other issues took some time, and the mechanism itself was viable to slap into some consumer gear with shitty UX, call it a day, and wait for tech calls as you fine tune your prosumer monstrosity? Even if the timeline doesn't line up, perhaps this was the intent and... Foo... er, Alan Turing's law just caught up with things and, well, pop off what we've got?
I do think they did fill the disks as part of the finalization. There was a minimum 1GB that some dvd players required.
cons of battery replacement plates: they're god awful pros of battery replacement plates: they're big enough to 3D print a dc jack adapter for with some nickel strips
I own the Saturn version of that ps1 game on the shelf
to make optical discs not work, you need to scratch the other side, actually.
I did video "editing" using two VHS VCRs back in first grade of high school (I'm from Poland and back then regular high schools had 4 grades starting at age of 14). There wasn't that much people back then in Poland that could afford camcorder (late 90's which means first decade without communism) but I was lucky enough to have a Hi8 at my disposal. This was an educational movie about CPR done as a school project (the class name could be translated as something like "civil defence"). Sadly the only copy staid with the teacher, I would love to take a look at that now. Me and my friends crashed a Fiat 126p a little too much into the tree for the purpose of this footage and had an intensive hammering time afterwards :D I did few more school and other video projects in late 90'/early 2000 but after this CPR one they were all done on PC - I think I was one of under 10 people (nerds) in the city I lived back then that had a PCI TV card. I remember I had to wait over 2 weeks to get it and in first few weeks of using it and trying to get composite video capturing to work properly I was reinstalling Window 98 twice a day :p Yep, drivers back then weren't great. Most of the work had to be done in 384x286 resolution as otherwise you got yourself into very unfair fight with interlacing. Besides video on hi8 wasn't that great for people to care when watching this most likely on a PC anyway :p In 2002 I even had quite successful "extreme sports" film called "Adrenalina" in the Internet (by many compared to jackass but it wasn't at that level of stupidity) - yes that was at lest 3 years before anyone has heard about YouTube and boy it was hard to put a 25 minutes video on the internet back then. I actually had a second PC in my room (I was still a teenager) that acted as both internet router for some other flats in my block and a file server. It was put together with anything I could come by cheap or for free, with 133MHz "586" processor in first version and K6 300MHz in later instance. It run a small Linux that at beginning was fitting a standard 3.5" floppy! Once I got my hands on a stunning 250MB hard drive (I think my main PC hard drive back then was 6.4GB later upgraded to 30GB which was definitely above average) I wanted to share those video files (I had a DSL connection with external IP). With little I knew about Linux I was struggling to put it on the drive and run the server or mount the HDD and still run it from floppy. So in the end I have installed windows 95 onto the HDD, removed it entirely leaving just the boot sector and some startup file which was loading a direct copy of that floppy disc with Linux image now put on HDD :D Somehow the welcome screen of Win95 remained in a hidden file or some weird sector and it still showed when you stared the PC and intermediately after you could see Linux loading ;-) But it worked great and I could share video files through my website and people were downloading those few tens of MB files directly from my bedroom ;-) I've called the movie successful as it got quite a bit of attention from different media and me and my teenage friends had a number of interviews in newspapers and few appearances in TV shows. Heh late 90s and early 2000... those were the days XD
Very interesting video.
54:30 and now some of us have ALL of our video on computers...
Love these old school vids... so what would Sony DSR-250 be worth, and a DHR-1000 deck ya know , the DV Cam media , accepts Full size DV and mini dv. ,,,
i remeber the commercial for this cameras that use dvd and cd, i always wanted one
cd caddy rant, My first CD rom was a 1x that the entire 5.25 inch bay popped out and it clam-shelled like a diskman (but boxy and beige) , my second one was a NEC mulispin 4x external scsi brick that used caddies, I had 2 caddies in the days where 7 cd rom's for a point and click game was common. It was AWESOME, I would take a disk out of its case and put it in its case then put it in the drive. Some time later I would take another disk out of its case to put it in its case, then remove the disc case outof the drive, remove the disk from the case and put it back in its case. Simple
There must be a small time slotted in there with the DV cameras. I still have my Sony camera, admittedly I haven't used it in a long time, but I do remember being able to import DV video much faster than it's play back speed. It definitely didn't take an hour to import an hour video. I know this for sure because that's exactly how long it would take when I imported my VHS tapes when I had my VHS player hooked up to my PC.
DVD-R vs DVD+R.... In my experience using blank DVDs as data storage for final exports of photography shoots to customers. I found more compatible issues with the DVD+ format. So switched to DVD-R and didnt look back no issues. Now the cost of USB storage is super cheap i tend to use USB flash storage. Loved the write once optical formats. Stops dumb people from deleting stuff.
Thanks. Cool video.
The plus or minus were the difference between pioneer and sony patents on dvd and the diffrence was laughable as it was weather the start point of a disk was ment to be a land + or a pit - basicly weather the data started with a 0 or 1
Oh the joys of fire wire. I don't know how many broken fw ports I experienced in my life. These had a tendency to break so very easily. And if they broke on your tape machine that was an expensive failure. Sometimes all of our tape machines were broken or busy at the same time and I had to resort to using a camera to capture the footage into the computer. Unless their fw port was broken, too. Which it often was. I am so glad I'll probably never have to deal with fw again in my life. Also: if something went wrong while capturing via fire wire the file was often corrupted. You had to rewind the tape and start again. Not to mention that the computer could not do anything else while capturing. You just sat there waiting for it to finish. Same when recording back to tape to archive your work. Man did we have a lot of pauses back then.
Have to remember, with those tapes holding 11-12gb of video each, it was very impractical to actually transfer them to hard drive back in the day. As much as I would have loved to do that immediately, I had to put it off for years as a “someday” project. Now that it’s 2021 and digital storage is cheap, I would love to go back to my old MiniDV and HDV tapes, but I have nothing that will play them... turns out the machines can be real finicky with tapes recorded on other decks! Tried eBay, tried repair services, no luck... Now I have hundreds of unrecoverable miniDV tapes.
I used to edit video as a sideline a long time ago. All SD, VHS, 8mm, miniDV, digital 8 and so on. I curse disc camcorders and their stupid data format and crappy compression. Sh*t format. MiniDV and digital 8 rocked.
I wonder where HDV would fall in this history? As my Canon HV20 has most of the problems fixed from the early dv era. Infrared remote, HDMI output, it was even built so the ir port was on the front and the HDMI is on the back. You can basically treat it as a standalone deck with extra features. It even uses mini sd cards for still photos you can edit onto the video later on. I find it the perfect consumer camcorder at the tail end of video tape media.
Funny thing is I’d rather use tape cameras then DVD any day. Yes tape you capture later in real time so that’s a pain but DVD was great if you record something then only want to play it in a DVD player. However if you like me want to edit these recordings dvd flops hard. Only way you can get those videos off a DVD camcorder is to RIP the disk and that again takes time to do and I’ve found it always looses quality. Plus randomly I feel these units though more modern seem to all be so low quality. Never seen a good picture from a DVD camcorder while tapes later went to HDV and clearly HD to much better. But yes even forgetting HDV most SD tape units have better picture then a DVD unit. So many formats I’ve used over the years 😂
1
It's probably because how the DVD players worked. You know that until DVD players started to eat DVD-R discs with *.avi files on them, they could've only read the DVD Video. DVD Video file structure is completely different than DVD-R formatted for file storage. Camcorders probably just read the raw data they recorded and that's how and why they can read non-finalized discs. Because without finalization, disc does only contain raw data.
I'll just keep using my digital8 camera
You keep saying DVD-RAM is not rewritable but it is.
When comparing bitrate you did it with a pretty static scene, wouldn't bitrate differences be more noticeable if there's more happening?
Holy crap I had a USB dazzle as a kid. I had no idea they were around in the 90s. Crazy. I think I still have it somewhere
1:05:00 disagree. Most stage takes(performances) work in under-2-minute takes(heck 2 minute takes would be like a very very long monologue) so this would be excellent for amateur movie companies(and porno companies) to shoot HD on a budget. That's the porno cam!
well I have to hand it to you, you did a lot of research on the technical aspects of the media of the day. I have to give this a thumbs down though, because all your melodrama , and opinion is not necessarily based on the true consumer thought process of the era. It is based on your Interpretation of the limited technology of the day , being unfairly judged and held to a modern standard. Of course the tech of the day was inconvenient , and sometimes ridiculous " By today's standards". However this was completely usable , exciting , new and state of the art to us in those days. You make it sound like we all were frustrated , unintelligent puppets wandering aimlessly through the sea of a technology we didn't understand back then. You being as young as you are , are looking at this in a biased direction of course. You were not alive or at least not old enough in those days to be a good spokesman on the mentality of the tech users of that time. The truth is . We as consumers were for the most part smart enough, and savvy enough to have read, and understood the documentation of the devices we purchased in those days. We never questioned their usability, or lack of , because there was nothing else to compare it to.. It was all new and innovative to us then.They may be "Janky" by your standards...but then ..I knew no one who was wandering around frustrated , lost or pissed because we had to take 5 steps instead of the one step it takes to accomplish the same result today. It was all New and fascinating to us then, and we for the most part did not live for the future when we didn't have to be saddled with such lame technology. We loved it , we knew EXACTLY how to use it , and we used it well. It was what we had, and it was the state of the art for us , regardless of the complexity of use. We simply grew as time went on and as the technology advanced, we advanced with it . Please try to stick with research and facts which you are excellent at. but remember just because this is all (lame) by your modern standards does NOT mean we at the time felt that way. Please do not speak for us when you were not there to experience it first hand.
I got my first burner back in like 95-ish, it was Acer brand, 2x max. If you tried to burn at 2x, it would almost certainly fail, trashing the disc, usually after an hour or so. 1x it was.. It would do a full test phase at 1x, then 1x burn, then finalize and test. Holy.
For my family, it's like we just... skipped home video during the 2000s. Too expensive or impractical, or something. I was a kid so I couldn't care less, so I don't remember very well. Only when smartphones got cameras did we start taking video and photos again. It's like, we made all these formats for playing movies and/or recording off the TV, and then had to utterly bastardize the shit out of them to do home video. Even with VHS, the ultimate mini VHS format is a bit of a hack. I think the advent of cheap flash memory was basically the resolution of like, 50 years of continuous hacks and bullshit.
on the DVD recorder thing, I had a couple of them over the years before I actually got a DVR. Seemed quite widely available here in the UK, I have one with built in digital TV tuner etc. My dad bought one when they were hella expensive specifically to digitise and save the footage on his 20+ years of rotting tapes. It also had firewire to take a DV camcorder, and since RGB SCART is a thing here in Euroland I think it would do that too, so even with D>A>D conversion it still looked pretty good. My school did the same thing, though they'd just play the raw video files off a network share way back when this was super cutting edge One of the main advantages was that it wasn't controlled by the TV provider, and hence no DRM-type crap over what you could do with the recordings. I wonder how compatible an unfinalised camcorder disc is with one of these recorders - I remember seeing DVD-VR (and +VR where applicable) in the documentation. I still have a Panasonic one somewhere that takes 8 and 12cm discs including caddied DVD-RAM. I have a few uncaddied RAM discs (and that gives the benefits you describe when used). I'll have to dig them out and see if they are still readable. Some slot-loading drives don't accept 8cm (and have warnings everywhere to tell you to not even try). The Wii is an exception cause Gamecube discs are that size ISTR 1440x1080 was actually a broadcast standard for HD here in the UK too - the purists kept complaining about how it's not full res.
I would like to have BLU RAY mini disks. Where can I find them?
finalizing a disc is like putting the icing on a cake. Unfinalized discs do not comply with the DVD standard and and devices that can play unfinalized discs do it by understanding the open sessions that were wrote to the disc So in reality a DVD player that has been taught by the manufacturer to read the unfinalized disc would be able to do it trivialy. But the thing is different devices leave unfinalized discs in a different state making it a clusterfuck to understand them. So compatability with each products unfinalized discs isnt garenteed even on players that do support unfinalized discs.
You and Technology Connections should have babies*. Or maybe not. Not sure humanity could handle the sheer engrossing nature - we'd all end up in a Black Mirror-esque world, glued to our screens. You (both) are abso-effing-lutely riveting. * I may or may not understand basic biology.
I was working in broadcast television at the time both Panasonic's P2 cards were introduced, as well as Sony's XD Cam disk systems. As to the question why anyone would go with P2 over Sony's disc system, considering the costs, you have to remember that TV stations wouldn't just by a single camera or piece of gear at a time. The corporations that owned local stations would often enter directly into agreements with Sony or Panasonic to purchase cameras, media readers, edit systems, and other supporting gear. Sony was also trying to use their professional broadcast solutions to push their own news management software and media management platform (I can't remember the name of it right now). While Panasonic's solution in this regard was typically based on Bit Central for media management, which was already a known entity as they were handling media management for some news wire services, and also used the stand news management software ENPS from the AP. These were proven and reliable solutions for broadcasters, unlike the brand new systems that Sony was pushing. This made Panasonic the safe choice, and required less training and time to switch over, as many stations were already using ENPS and Bit Central in some form.
1
My uncle had a split VCR, so could LUG IT AROUND in a PURSE, attached to a bazooka-sized video camera ON HIS SHOULDER, back in the 80's. Full-sized VHS, a battery pack the size used in cars, fully cabled in RCA. If there was this dad that would be dubbing their kids soccer game into blu-rays, he'd be the one.
I always recommended staying with video tape until SSDs became cheap and plentiful because for portable devices subject to shock and/or sudden movement, optical and HDD-based camcorders were not ideal since shock at the wrong moment can ruin your recording and/or the whole device (in the case of HDD models). MiniDisc and CD recorders had the same complaints: shock the deck when it's recording to the TOC area/finalizing and it can wipe out the whole disc. Not much of a concern for studio use but still a problem if you go outside with the things.
1
I miss firewire.
UDF format supposedly fixed all the writing issues. It's been a while since I've messed with it, but I remember old systems had compatibility issues with the format. Also, unfinalize sounds like it's writing a new data track. It will show up in PC burning software. There are compatibility issues with old things. More prevalent with CDs though. I'm not a camera guy, but I did burn a lot of CDs and copied DVDs, like ripping rental DVDs to 4.7. Which was a process. I know a lot about disc burning. Been years though. You can do a lot with compression. Divx allowed you to burn DVDs to CDs, but only new players could play the format.
Amazing a lot of camcorders and cameras I have had in the past I don't bother anymore trying to keep I have what I know works and use that love your videos I have just take care see you soon ❤️
I had a DVD RAM drive in the 90s for video and data storage. I was doing CGI rendering which took up lots of space. I absolutely loved it and at the same time despised it because I couldn't plug my discs into a home DVD player. And just like you, I learned the hard way that you never, ever touch them and always keep them in the caddy. I killed some important DVD RAM discs this way.
1:18:23 There is a reletively easy way to turn any disk into a "RAM" disk and i suspect how most disk camcorders allowed instant playback/scrubbing without finalizing, you just need software and firmware capable of interpreting it. If you pause writing video to disk, store that video in a memory/flash buffer, then write locating 'blocks' at speciffic intervals, then finish writing the buffered video, you've made a sudo ramdisk with locating bits that arent defined at the time the disk is manufactured. Heck because these arent hard coded into the disk, you could do something as simple as placing those locating blocks at the start and end of the file with information in each end block as to the location of the other end, then a master location table for these blocks at the end of the disk(or reserved space at the beginning)
Why was finalizing necessary... ... sigh ... OK. So, there were these things called sessions... Since discs were primarily designed to be a write-once medium, and the write-many media had to play by many of the rules set forth by write-once media to be accessible to existing equipment, the structure of a pressed or fully-recorded disc was set in stone. It's made to catalog the contents of that vast amount of storage space because scanning it for content would take a long while, unless the layout of that content was known in advance (like in the case of a dedicated video recorder) where shortcuts could be taken. Take audio for example. CD Audio is a very specific standard. One session of 1 to 99 tracks, each with 0 to 99m 59s and 23f of audio (subject to physical space on the disc and pitch of the recorded grooves), separated by 0m 2s 0f (or more) of gap space .. which was, of course, a rule made to be broken. The timecode of each frame of that audio is written alongside the audio itself in the sub-channels, but unless you want to wait for your 1x audio player to scrub the entire disc to catalog it all, you need the Table of Contents to index it and deliver on that promise of truly random access. That TOC is a very simple format, in linear order of tracks and time, because it needed to be accessible to very simple embedded computers installed into consumer appliances in the early 1980s. When writable discs came out, the (apparent?) need to tack more data onto existing discs resulted in a new paradigm of multiple sessions. Each session was kind of like a complete recorded disc, except it could refer backward to the content of previous sessions. Early drives that weren't aware of multiple sessions may not understand that additional sessions existed, because they were never taught to look for them, but that shouldn't prevent them from accessing the first, at least. (Hence mixed audio and data discs, with data in the second session, to avoid the problem of ignorant audio players trying to "play" subsequent data tracks.) Now carry this forward to video and DVDs. We've got a bad case of feature-creep, so we're not going to accept a video disc that operates like LaserDisc -- which operates like a video version of CD Audio. No, we're not content to have a single video stream broken into a series of chapters. We need interactivity, and side-loaded data storage, and multiple video programs, subtitles, audio tracks, etc. This requires a MUCH more complicated system of tracking the program data (the video clips) on-disc, and the content within (video stream, one or more audio streams, and 0 or more sub-picture streams). Plus some method of dictating how the user should access these multiple streams, like a menu system. The DVD Video specification handles this through IFO files. The VOBs are mostly just interleaved streams of video, audio, and graphics. A camcorder can lay down those VOBs directly on a disc -- either R or -RW - because it's just a collection of temporal data in a linear allocation of sectors. But, how do you represent those clips as files? In FAT, the allocation table of which sectors are used and which are free... that's all at the beginning of the volume. On a -R disc, once you've written an area of the disc, it's there forever. So you can't write that first and go back and update it later. Similarly, the directory tree has to be capable of having entries appended to it. So the need for more flexible file systems. But even those need some way of marking that there's nothing more to parse. And then, for a set-top DVD Player to comprehend that disc as a DVD Video disc (vs. just a normal DVD data disc), those IFO files need to be written out. One (plus the spare .BUP copy) for each title, and one for the disc itself to collect those titles into a menu system of some sort. Again, with a -R disc, once you write those, that's it. Now, you CAN close the session, write the directory trees, space allocation bitmaps, IFO files, and so on.... but it will take a little while to do so. You can then open a NEW session, import everything you want to keep from the previous one, and add more. But again, to use it on a playback device, you'll need to close that session and write all the accounting stuff. Doing this every time you hit STOP would be laborious and waste a lot of space, so it isn't done like that. The session remains open until you've signaled that you're ready for it to be wrapped up. So how does a camcorder know how to access those clips w/o the session being closed? Because it has unique awareness of how the un-cataloged video is recorded. It can do this by writing accounting data to a specific region of the disc, and just appending updated versions to it that obsolete the prior ones. This is similar to finalizing, but can be much looser, since some awareness of the format of data recorded is a given, being a single-purpose device. Ergo, it can be a quick top-off instead of a long drawn-out process. How exactly this works is up to the manufacturer, and why you can't just pop a disc from one unit into another and carry on. It has to be formatted in the universal way that DVD Video recognizes to be accessible to the least common denominator. Or, you end up with the scenario you describe, where the unit doesn't write partial accounting data, and just re-reads the entire disc to find and catalog the stuff it wrote. That's ... actually a surprise to me. I knew how discs worked -- basically, random read, linear record -- so I never saw them as realistic targets for incremental data storage, and thus never used them like a digital video tape. I digress. So anyway, why isn't the partially-recorded data visible to computer DVD drives? Well, it is, actually. But whether that data means anything is another matter. Your burner will see the session-in-progress. (A DVD-ROM may see it, but know not to bother looking at it, since it can't do anything with it anyway.) Can your OS make heads or tails of what's in there? Probably not. Only very specific partial-write systems that are supported across platforms (like UDF packet writing) are visible to average hardware and software. This ended up being a diatribe, but I tried to use only as many words as necessary to explain it correctly and accurately (enough). :-)
1
I was at a thrift store looking for blank CDs for cheap and they had a case of 100 CDs for 10 dollars and 5 CD-RWs for 10 dollars. I went with the CD-RWs and it turns out my drive couldn't read them. And when I went back, the 100 CDs were gone. Which is why I use cassette tapes
16
1:03:10 I'm reasonably certain the weird colours and artefacts here are a rendering issue - if I recall correctly, setting up video output on a Windows system is a very messy, fiddly process, and it wouldn't surprise me if whoever wrote the shovelware in question half-assed it, and baked in some assumption about pixel formats that stopped being valid ten years ago. This tracks with the mp4 conversion working fine, too.
My grandma bought a Sony Mini DVD Camcorder then a new one a few years after that. I’m wasn’t a fan of them when I was young, and now I have a box of Mini DVDs to do something. Before that she had a Zenith VHS-C Camcorder which I liked better, I was sad that she pitched it because it was at least 20 years old and still going.
DV-NTSC at 720×480 only shows 704 pixels wide.
These videos are fucking fantastic.
I seem to remember that premiere had the ability to not only read miniDV footage off firewire, but also control the camcorder itself? Like rewinding, stopping etc. Sometimes i just think about that. Like the experience of clicking buttons in premiere which would put a tape mechanism in motion. Hitting "render" upon which the tape rewinds to the point in the footage where your proxies point to and starts playing back and fast forwards thru the cuts, as if driven by some black magic. Anyway, great video my man
3
Video? On the internet? Huge if true.
7
Not enough people talking about 42:51 lmao
I'm glad you took the effort to explain the complexities of camcorders & home video technology in a 1 hour+ long video on YouTube. I'm only in my early 40s but have used camcorders for three decades on various formats ranging from VHS, Hi8, Digital8, MiniDV, HDV, AVCHD (HDD & Memory Stick), AVCHD 3D, XDCAM EX on SxS cards, XAVC-S 4K (XQD & SD cards), to 4K h.264 & h.265 on SDXC cards, but I have never bought into any of the disc-based formats despite my awareness for them. The people who'd usually go for the disc-based formats are the ones who'd favor convenience over image quality (they're the same type of consumers who'd go for VHS-C over 8mm in the 80s/90s, despite 8mm being technically superior, but VHS-C allowed convenient foolproof playback). It's interesting that you showcased Hitachi camcorders a lot in this video for their ingenuity, despite not being a big name in the camcorder market, albeit, my Hi8 camcorder was a Hitachi and is a well-made machine. Regarding early HD formats using resolutions below 1920x1080i, it all came down to the technological limitations of the time. As you alluded, even pro HD formats didn't record the full 1920x1080i, particularly in the videotape era. The first professional digital HD videocassette I'm aware of is Sony's Betacam-based HDCAM format from 1997 (yes, I'm aware HD existed earlier, but those were analog and most were recorded to Type-C-based reel-to-reel VTRs), Sony's HDCAM recorded 1440x1080 which stretched out to 1920x1080 when played back, exactly how their XDCAM HD (2006) & HDV (2004) formats worked; Panasonic's DVCPRO HD was lower at 1280x1080. The same year that Sony released the disc-based XDCAM format in 2003, Sony also upgraded HDCAM to HDCAM-SR, which did record 1920x1080, and bumped the recording bitrate from 144 mbps to 440 mbps (or 880 mbps in 2x mode). As for XDCAM, Sony finally offered 1920x1080 full HD recording on their SxS line of XDCAM EX camcorders (the most popular of which was the PMW-EX1 which came out in late 2007/early 2008). When AVCHD came out in 2006, its HD raster was only 1440x1080, Sony didn't offer 1920x1080 AVCHD recording until 2008 with their HDR-SR11/12 camcorders, but interlaced. Sony didn't offer AVCHD progressive until their 2011 line which one of the models was the HDR-CX560V, AVCHD progressive HD recording had only been finalized in the AVCHD 2.0 standard which included 3D recording. I believe it's been a good decade since major manufacturers (Sony/Panasonic/Canon/JVC) released high-quality consumer camcorders due to the market shifting in the 2010s to smartphones for majority of consumers and DSLR/mirrorless for content creators; the four manufacturers have offered 4K camcorders from the mid-2010s onward at a time when traditional camcorder sales declined. Another interesting tidbit about DVD camcorders, particularly ones from Sony, was that before AVCHD, some high-end models could record Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.
Is it bad that half these cameras I bought OR have almost bought??
2
My experience in that time era is just that writable and re-writable disks were unreliable and subject to bit rot even new. Of course at the high-end maybe that was less of an issue, but I think professionals are also risk adverse, and tapes have consistently been reliable ways to hold large amounts of data and a well known quantity. The ingest time wasn't as big a deal because you'd have machines dedicated to the task. It's one of those ironies that modern high speed ingest has meant rather then faster ingest time, people are shooting more and more footage.
Sometimes there's a weird low frequency hum in the audio. 51:40 for instance.
If the finalization is writing something to the entire disc regardless of content, is it just some kind of content protection that readers require be written to the disc before they can play the disc? Maybe there's nothing special that the cameras are doing to play the video, it's just the disc players were programmed to read the header or whatever the finalisation is writing before playing or even recognising the content. I don't know how the optical media read process works, would the reader need some kind of intro data to make sure the content wasn't malicious or badly formatted? Whereas the camera doesn't care, or maybe it would if you gave it a disc it hadn't written to? All babbling conjecture but it's got me interested why it would be done that way. Great video!
Video was a pain in the arse. Before SD cards and hd video, all else is garbage. I'm still fascinated by how amazing old analogue tape formats work but there is no practical advantage to them.
Re the 704x480 mystery at 48:40 — I’ve always wondered about those odd 704/352 sizes myself. I didn’t find a definitive answer, but I’m reasonably sure these resolutions stem from the H.261 CIF (Common Intermediate Format) and SIF (Source Input Format) standards, which tried to solve the practical problem of PAL/NTSC conversion by using a PAL-ish resolution at the NTSC frame rate. For DVDs that are commercially released, you’d get the full 720x480 or 720x576 resolution, but PAL/SECAM would run 4% quicker than for NTSC. Movies typically shoot 24fps; NTSC 60Hz displays alternating 3 frames for 1 film frame then 2 frames for the next, but PAL 50Hz would look awful interpolating 24fps, so they speed it up to 25fps to display 2 frames per film frame. What problem does this solve for a DVD camcorder? I’m not certain, but perhaps it was a shortcut for globally released products to produce a “good enough” DVD for anyone’s TV, and they skirted frame rate conversion by figuring it was unlikely people would share home DVDs across region boundaries?
1:12:05 OHO. But there were in fact DivX players and the likes, which were "smart" in the sense they would let you browse the actual filesystem and play files - provided appropriate codec of course (XviD sometimes worked too for instance) :-) - admittedly not everyone's DVD player... but it was a thing, hehe. We had plenty of DivX's on CDs at home... no comment on legality of course >__<
Wait you have a MSN Clock? Where the hell did you got that?
Why they never made a camcorder that records on a full size DVD disk? Increased record time & quality would be achieved.
I think caddies are a good idea when it's stuck with. Sony was smart to never abandon the caddy on MD and UMD for cost reasons, especially UMD since it is possible to play a disc without the caddy. My family's first DVD recorder was DVD-RAM capable, and it took the caddies (and it ignored macrovision on vhs tapes *cough*). It also took bare discs too, but not the mini caddies. If Toshiba released the camcorder that took the caddies and a dvd player/recorder that took the same mini caddies and played DVD-RAM...it would have been a much better thing. Especially if they sold caddied discs.
Wasn't that parallel port thing for still capture only? I have a Pro Movie Spectrum (ISA) hanging on my wall. 120p and the picture isn't stable even from a perfectly good live camera feed for some reason. 49:03 320x480 is approximate digital equivalent of VHS, so I guess they were going for that.
What is complicated about that chart???? According to that chart all RW formats would function practically the same. The VR format had the added functionality that you could edit or delete images directly on the device. The minus format had two record modes. The plus format had only one. Some devices may allow playback of non-finalized discs in the plus RW format only. The non RW is self explanatory and apparently there was something called a DVD+R DL that I have never seen. According to the chart it carried a RW symbol but was not RW and allowed for longer record times. Also I have never seen this chart before or used RW DVD media. The chart is just perfectly clear.
Nobody got progressive in 2008 that's not true... HVR line and older 1080i pro camcorders had a 60i to 24p internal/HDMI output cost as much as new consumer ones at that point - A HVR-Z5E owner and user *with external atmos recorder
1
From what I remember DVD-RAM was designed as a computer data only format. It was made for data usage and designed and targeted to PC users. My first DVD burner for my PC had come with a sample of each type of disc. An R, RW and RAM. That sample RAM disc was the only one I ever owned. They just were not sold in the local Walmart and benefits were never really worth hunting it down. Most people like myself used a dvd burner to either copy movies or to backup files. Cheap DVD-R worked fine for backups.
I almost shot water out my nose at the Sony DCR DVD7. I know some person tried to solve a problem, but ...
Easiest way to describe the 8mm disks is GameCube size. They’re the only thing beyond the camcorders that really used the format
16
Quick question. Are you guys pissed off at how the quality of camcorders has gone to shit recently? Cant get anything decent under 300 bucks and thats absolutely insane for the technology we have now at our disposal. Image stabilization isnt that difficult and having good lighting settings off the bat would make most modern camcorders extremely usable but heaven forbid we can get that for even 100 bucks. its absolutely ridiculous.
You should put some black foam blanks in those VHS just boxes behind you.
optical media had a thing called "sessions". Every batch of recording could be done in a "session", after which the disc was finalized but still could be written on with another session. So it could be read in-between sessions. Every session chunked away some free space though (50MB on a CD-R as far as I remember). So did the camcorders record video in sessions? Or not? Or was it an option?
I had used Sony DCR-DVD610 and HDR-UX20 they are both hybrid recording system. I'm always using DVD-RW and they are cheaper than buying MS Duo cards. We can record disks continuously and finalize disks later.Most time i'm finalizing disks at home, with DC adapter plugged in. Because if battery dies in finalize process there's not anyway i can get that footage back.
Even know flash memory was bananas expensive wouldn't it be funny if all the data was written to 2GB flash on the camera first and only minimal indexing was written to dvd, the user did whatever they wanted then when they where ready to "finalize" the dvd, the 1x dvd burner burnt the hole flash to disk, 1x speed means 30 mins to copy over 30 mins of stuff which is all these mini dvds hold I think...
I didnt do it, dont respect me, though i have several different Dazzle models
Some of these are so bad, they make film seem user-friendly.
1
I wonder, why are multisession discs not a thing? They never gave me issues, even DOS works with them, and you can add files and make another session later
I'm that guy who's a media format enthusiast. I've read tonnes of Wikipedia weird formats. (Ever heard of BROLD [Blu-ray on Laserdisc])? However, I only heard about AVCHD Disc (HD on DVD) from the Star Wars Despecialized Edition project. (It's Star Wars without the new changes). They were releasing the movies in 3 formats: 20 GB .mkv, a 4.7 GB DVD and a 8.5 GB AVCHD. I've taken advantage of the AVCHD files to burn on disc and play on my Blu-ray player. I've been quite happy with the 720p picture and 5.1 sound.
Oh god, what if the reason it takes 30 minutes to finalize a disc is because it is indeed writing blank information to the disc... Then you have to wonder "Why?" I wonder if the manufacturers anticipated people finalizing their 2 minutes of footage to their DVDs just to look at the bottom of the disc and go "What the fuck?! I just used this whole disc for that tiny sliver of footage?!", so they just hid that by wasting 30 minutes of your life O_O
P2 cards still had a few benefits over Pro Discs, and they were significant enough that Sony also had their own version of the idea at the same time (SxS cards). Namely, yeah, the disc media is a lot cheaper, but Sony's drives for it were very expensive, while card "drives" were pretty cheap - or, if you had the right laptop, free. So if you weren't archiving the raw footage discs, it could make more sense to just rotate through a few cards and have everything else be cheaper. And in a pro environment, you definitely aren't using the drive in your mid-5-figure dollar camera to ingest footage (one, unnecessary wear, and two, it's not earning its money when used as a drive). Also, as far as I'm aware, Sony never made small-ish Pro Disc cameras, and even professionals can't or don't want to bust out the shoulder camera 100% of the time. You could get card cameras about the size of your GR2 (ex.: PMW-EX3), and then you could use the same media for all of them. Some additional things I'm not certain on: I believe the copying process is generally faster with cards, which might be important to newsrooms and such, which is where P2 achieved some success. And I also think that while the caddy protects the disc, they and the drives are still considered more susceptible to humidity, though that may be at least partially superstition to be honest.
I came here for serious video content and Wooo, disc jokes!
Sony PDW-F335 "no way to get quality video out of it" AJA Kona LHe "Am I a joke to you?"
fun fact: average youtube 720p? thats about 1.5 to 2mbps 1080p is around 4~6 mbps so the BD cam is shooting pretty okay video if you wanna toss it on youtube
3
37:11 Isn't this conceptually a multisession disc? I'm not quite sure on the details of how those work either, hehe :-) EDIT: What made them kind of magic in the same way is that the finalization wasn't actually final, but IIRC you lost some space in the process? Either way you could keep incrementally adding data, reading it in between, and that was really cool!
Why do all of your examples involve somthing being on fire? lol
re DVD RAM - the disks were about 5 times more expensive. That's why they were left behind.
In a context where bare disc platters are the norm, the caddies are pointless. But I wish non-detachable caddies had won out as a standard because I am neurotic enough that I find handling bare discs unnerving, and when I clean one I am always worried that a small particle will come between the disc and the microfibre cloth, and I will leave the disc worse than it started
I absolutely HATE miniDV. My parents had VHS-C and in the 00s mini dvd. My grandparents where on the MiniDV train.... For years I've had about 50 miniDV tapes just sitting as I have ZERO way to convert them or play them. I have the orginal camera, but it doesnt play them correctly or play the audio on any of them even cleaning it just no luck.
3
Some serious sploogers on the girlfriends tv there.... nice.
Large amounts of data 700 mb 😁.
Turbonerds is vernacular now
1
Digital video isn't the only storage space consumer. The other big one is games. At one point, Call of Duty Warzone was over 100 GB in size. A dozen or so AAA game releases will chew through a terabyte. But if there's a multi-terabyte drive in a computer not belonging to a gamer, there's about a 90% chance it's either almost entirely empty or it's full of video.
This might be a weird comment to leave but i am having a... Like... A dissasociative episode watching this? Because i just realized that in my heart, its still 2010. Like, time stopped. Because i keep thinking "dont people still use these? These arent that old." But they ARE! I know intellectually that this shit is old and obsolete but i cannot emotionally accept it hahaha.
Can't agree that analog video is "horrible". It has one thing digital will never have which is character. Subjective indeed but there nevertheless.
I had a friend who "did it" I got dragged in as cameraman or can I borrow your sony VCR
I like this sort of thing
About 720x480 vs 704x480, it turns out that a 720x480 image is actually slightly wider than 4:3 (or 16:9): the 4:3 portion is close to 702x480, which is rounded to 704 to be divisible by 8. When digitizing analogue video, 16 pixels are added in total to prevent the potential loss of image because the timing is not precise. But when the video is converted back to analogue to be displayed, only the 702 center pixels are used. Anyway, DV use the full 720 pixels because the it’s the standard D1 resolution. But DVD allows for 704x480 and 352x480 resolutions as well. And since mini-DVD has a space (and this recording time) problem, there needed to be a way to reduce the quality to allow longer recording time. I guess that is the reason why DVD camcorder shoot at 704x480: because the circuitry to reduce the resolution to 352x480 is simpler that if it had shot the full 720x480.
25:25 are you kidding me dude
LOL regarding the 8cm disks - you're pretty much screwed if you have a slot-in-drive (Mac) :D
Cellular phone has taken care of all these issues.
yes that true i have a old dvd very very scratch and the video in that dvd plays fine
It's probably already in the comments, but the weird format that only worked with certain players and could erase clips would be using the UDF filesystem. It's way too long ago for me to remember anything more than that, but surely there's a lot of rabbit holes to head down once that is mentioned. Also, I definitely fitted into that "an caddy" category. Granted I only came across caddies a decade after they were obsolete due to my interest in obsolete esoteric computer hardware. But by that time the few things that came with caddy style drives had long lost their caddies. Also by that point, caddies were near impossible to find. Just so happened to get lucky that one day I came across someone throwing out an old pc that still had the caddy. That one then got used across the few drives I had (for example, in a sparcserver 1000 which for some reason had one, but none of the other sun gear I had ever used one, go figure). /rant-ish-thing
1:12:05 "AFAIK there is no box you can put this in that will play the video on a TV" I would bet that the DVD players from the mid 2000s that were "DivX compatible" (with a logo and all) and similar would play random AVI files saved on a DVD without problems. In fact, I had one of those (sadly, I threw it away a few months back because it wouldn't read disks anymore) and I even updated its firmware in its day to make it region free and to allow it to play .srt subtitles and some more improvements (the update shuffled all the remote keys, too, but I could live with it). But perhaps these "piracy-facilitator" DVD players weren't common in the USA. Anyways, great video.
The Professional Disc is a funny Thing. It is in Fact a further development of Blue-Ray. Technically just a Regular BD, its build with better and slightly different Materials and uses better Hardware for read/write. All to minimize Errors and Failures. The created Files are also not BD compatible and so not compatible with actual BD Equipment. There is in Fact one write only Version of the Disc, a 4Layer 128GB Disc, which hit the Market in 2011. But, its only compatible with certain Recorders (not Camcorders). I only can speculate that Sonys Idea of this Disc was as some sort of Library- or Master Disc.
Interestingly nowadays with current/recent UDF in Win10 you can put a DVD+/-RW in a PC and use it like a flash drive just like DVD-RAM, it will reuse the freed space when deleting files. The markers probably helped, maybe sped things up but unsurprisingly they weren't absolutely required. Also I have a 2007 combo VCR/DVD recorder that records as DVD-VR and Win10 will read the unfinalized discs just fine (Explorer will show the used space bar as empty but the files are there and you can copy them / play the disc with VLC just fine). The DVD recorder can also cut/delete clips and reuse the space on +/-RWs. It has both the Finalize and Unfinalize option, the latter just deletes the DVD menu that allows you to play the disc on a normal player, you can of course refinalize after recording more clips and it makes it again, and of course you can only unfinalize RW discs. Also has a DV in that you can record to DVD (or even the VHS if you please...), neat. If you looked into it more the 2010 camera might actually support deleting clips and reusing space, and the discs when initialised as DVD-VR should play on your laptop without finalizing. It's kinda interesting that all of this eventually came, just... once nobody needed it anymore. About DVD-RAM being ignored my memory is that they were just too expensive, like $25 a disc when it was $1 for a -R and maybe $5 for an RW at the time, at least the full size discs.
2:52 PLEASE I wanna see that thing in action!
You have a Dreamcast under your TV 🙂
Finalizing is needed because it's the iso standard. Reading while not finalyzing is possible, but it is a proprietary standard. After finalyzing it, the menus and stuff are added, before it's just raw data. It's the same with DVD-RW recorders. Mabye you could read unfinalyzed DVD with the same brand of DVD-writers?
I still have VHS camcorder
i'm here for the disc jokes
Haven’t finished the video, but I will say that early-to-mid-2000s pro DV cams could be PC controlled and dump their footage at faster than 1x. So you could plug the camera in, press the download button, and get your hour of footage in 20 minutes or so. It would rewind for you and stop automatically at the blank part of the tape. The model I used also kept track of where the blank part was (in internal flash, which it erased when you ejected the tape, I assume), so you could press a button to get to the blank part quickly and then begin recording onto it. Where quickly was still tens of seconds though. Better but still not great. It looked a lot like your Canon DV cam, just it was a Sony and a bit larger.
underrated channel
I have many camcorders from tape to Memory card
I did not ask to watch your channel. You get a like anyway, because I watched your channel. I might watch another. I hope you're happy now.
720x480 means the pixels on DVDs aren't square regardless of widescreen or not, doesn't it? I wonder how they picked that format. I wonder if the player in the Hitachi software works with a specific video driver they tested it with and it's getting the pixel format wrong or something on modern machines, like 16-bit vs 15-bit or something. On searching for "BD-RAM" I found a forum thread from 2004 suggesting that BD-RW would have good enough random access features, unlike DVD-RW, that there was no need for such a thing.
The CD250 and CD350 CDMavicas were actually better than the CD200, 300, 400 and 500. Not technically - the CD500 could actually take some pretty impressive shots, and I kinda want to strangle you for ruining one - but because of the lens on the side, making them much narrower. I owned a CD200 waaaay after it was obsolete, and it was a HUGE awkward lump to carry around. You ended up using it like a DSLR - carrying it only when you knew you'd be shooting, and on the shelf the rest of the time. A -50 model on the other hand was much easier to toss in a backpack or sufficiently large bag, so you could actually do enthusiast photography on the go. And let's not talk about the CD1000, which was - as Daniel Rutter from dansdata.com described it - basically a trench mortar. I own one too. You need a whole backpack JUST FOR IT.
Round holder is Robocop!
on the CDs being almost indestructible front, I had a prodigy - Fat of the land CD when i was younger that when i had a friend round he was dicking around with my air rifle and accidentally loaded and fired a pellet through the CD near the edge, which i was somewhat annoyed about as it was my favourite album to listen to, that was until i put it in my ps1, and even with a chunk missing from the corner where the pellet had taken about a quarter inch chunk, the CD played just fine, well except for the last track, that would result in the PS1 throwing a hissy fit. which was annoying as fuel my fire was a pretty good track, and this was before i got a 128Mb MP3 player for my birthday, and money was hard to come by as a 9 year old, so had to put up with only 9 tracks on my CD, but ever since then ive not been super concerned about finding scratches on CDs, a bad trait to have, but ive never really worried about it
In my house the the vhs camera until mid 00's then we jumped to dvd camera and then cellphones.
My photos look great after you bin each pixel.
Do you know how to remove protected music files so they can play again I have a bunch of music files does not work because there are protected I guess i downloaded a bunch of music from a music service long time ago can you help me
bring on the laserdisc camcorder....
DVD bad? you should have tried FILM, no...not super8, double 8, (16mm thread into camera, 90SECONDS of filming time, FLIP IT OVER, another 90SECONDS!), then SEND to get processed, (They split & splice the "2sides" 16mm into 8mm for your 3minutes of video..I meant film), processing? wait 3 weeks, or give me DVD-R with finalization any time OK so super 8 was a cartridge no threading no flipping, 3.5 Minutes at 18FPS or so, but it WAS HD!!
why did Sony in 2010, as the main proponent of Blu-Ray produce a camcorder that shot HD-video to a DVD? what the hell? I mean the Hitachi one that is from 2008 (unless I misinterpret your comment about 1080p/i in 2008) and shot to Blu-Ray
My families 2008 Samsung dvd camera still works but it no longer want to take photos and I’m not sure why but it dose record well on the dvds it also had a SD card slot
BD-REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Why you can't get out to get a haircut?
I seen a disc camcorder once
An "LGBT" brand VHS tape (58:51)? :D
Big Disc Energy
6
Umm... batt-plugs?
7:18 hehe my camera make the same noise
I have 2 Sony Mavicas
I watched a video that was how long?
hence the hat
the LGBT flag in the background :) ❤️
20:55 AN Caddy?
Your head is pretty wacky, how did you get a girlfriend?
info on sony mini-disc camcorder DCM-M1 is available here: https://www.sony.jp/CorporateCruise/Press/199911/99-1101/ (google chrome can translate from japanese). Data compression method: MPEG2 method (video), ATRAC method (audio) Image data format: VideoMD compliant 704 x 480 MD Data2 data rates: read: 9.6Mbps, write: 4.7Mbps minidisc.org has interesting page on its information and more. https://www.minidisc.org/md_data_table.html
haha why all covid hair cut are so bad? and why people bother for stars i know all people have different taste and people cant stand long hair but if you started whit short hair 4 month is not so much and i dont know but is preferable to have long hair that a bad hair cut. For me that problem in inexistent i cut my hair like 2 times on a year, and it dont grow so quickly and badly and i used long for starts no crazy long but is long like Bale in batman/American psycho or a little less taht Keanu in John wick one
I'll ignore the politics in the background
Consider: your optical nerve is ballpark 10 Mbps. Your ears aren’t even 1 Mbps. Two eyes, two ears, your skin, etc all added together is easily saturated by content under 30 Mbps.
I “watch” virtually all videos at 144p bitrate in about 2” of screen space (~350 pixels high). Higher bitrates are a waste of bandwidth for most types of content. It’s not common I want to see fine detail.
1
Why can't people just upload stuff like they used to I'm honestly pretty frustrated when my sub box is filled with content I can't even watch yet
5