10-08-2020, 04:46 PM
(30-06-2020, 04:11 PM)ppppenguin Wrote: Great story about the golf and caber tossing.
Today's TV and film programme makers must have little idea how technically tough it was back then. It still takes a lot of skill to edit well or to mix a good sound track but the technology is usually no longer an obstacle.
I hope my first post may fill in some blanks.
During the days of physical splices of Quad tape everyone mentions the Smiths tape splicer with its use of Edivue solution to develop the video and control tracks. But it was not the only splicer. A company called EMT which many here will remember for their professional audio equipment also produced a physical Quad tape splicer. In the EMT model's case it was not necessary to 'develop' the video and control tracks, instead it was equipped with a small rotating head that scanned the control track along its axis and produced a display of the resultant waveform on an integral scope. The tape was clamped into position and held there with a vacuum aperture and moved fractionally backwards and forwards whilst observing the trace to view the control track and edit pulses to accurately position the tape linearly in the tape path. At the desired edit point a guillotine was then brought down across the tape to cut it. Otherwise it was similar to the Smiths splicer. The vacuum was derived from some sort of vibrating relay system - it was not any sort of piston or pump and I believe this was a popular technique when only small quantities of 'vacuum' are required.
Not many of the EMT tape splicers seemed to have been sold in the UK. I know of only few examples as the years go by. In fact, I obtained one myself when the company I worked for was downsizing and needed space - it was nearly put in a skip. After some consideration I donated it to the people who run GoldenAge TV. I'm sure you will have heard of them - I thought the splicer had a better chance of long tern survival with them rather than me. On the earlier link to the BBC Oldboys website you may remember they mention the EMT splicer in passing saying how difficult it was to now source a picture of it - if only they had contacted me!
This general editing technique was reasonably quickly surpassed by edit tone techniques once Ampex and RCA had mastered the electronic sequencing that was required to selectively erase and record on the video and audio tracks. By this method a tone laid down on the edit machine Quad Cue track drove the editor to preview and perform edits as well as rolling ancillary equipment in sync with the master Edit machine. Ampex called their editing kit 'Editec' whilst RCA called theirs 'TEP' (Tape Editing Processor).
I was going to suggest to 'Spot Wobble' that if he is still playing back tapes from the late 60's through to the mid-80's at the BFI, that it might be interesting to listen to the Quad Cue track on occasion to see if he can hear the audio editing Cue tones, they are very distinctive!
With regards to the quote above - absolutely. In the days of PAL colour for example you had to be on your toes to maintain the PAL subcarrier sequence over the edit point if you needed to (animation editing for example) and editing was as much an engineering function as an artistic one.
I was once talking to a top flight editor who told me the following: "You can fool the audience about a terrible video edit with a good audio edit - the audio edit will disguise the poor video edit, but you will never disguise a bad audio edit with a great video edit - the ear is much more sensitive to discontinuities than the eye". I never forgot that because, well, its true!
I hope these bits may may be helpful. My personal timeline of tape editing was Cue tone through to timecode, but by then the computers had taken over and it was no fun anymore!
