Do you remember VERA?

[Terry]

No, not Lynn - this one stands for Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus.

I came across this on the uk.tech.broadcast usenet group and thought it worthwhile repeating here:

Subject: VERA's parentage.
From: Adrian Tuddenham
Newsgroups: uk.tech.broadcast

Last night I gave a talk on the history of sound recording to a group of
engineers.; in the course of the talk, I showed them a picture of the
Marconi-Stille tape recording machine. Afterwards one of the audience
introduced himself as a retired BBC engineer and said he had been
involved with the development of VERA - and did I realise that VERA was
built from one of the old Marconi-Stille recorders?

It had never occurred to me before, but looking at photographs of them,
it is obvious that the tape transport and structure of the two machines
are the same.

[beamcurrent]

Very little of Vera survives. This is one of the tape spools.

[ppppenguin]

Like Terry, I hadn't thought about any possible similarities between Vera and the Marconi-Stille recorder. About the only things they really had in common was a high speed tape transport with huge spools. The M-S recorder was an early attempt at a pre-war tape recorder using steel tape. A bit like clock spring. Lethal if it broke and flailed around though I don't think anyone was killed by it.

Vera was one of those unfortunate dead ends. Since the early 1950s engineers in various compnaies, notably one owned by Bing Crosby, had been attempting to make a practical video tape recorder. 2 main problems: recording very high frequencies and the number of octaves needed. The output of a magnetic replay head rises at 6dB per octave. OK for 7 octaves of audio but utterly hopeless for 18 or so for video. The solutions were either to record the low freqencies separately or to modulate the whole lot on to a carrier. This only made the high frequency problem worse, needing an even higher tape speed to make it work. The critical breakthrough by Ampex was to move the heads, not just the tape. Ampex demonstrated their first Quadruplex 2" recorder in 1956. It worked and became the sole broadcast standard for over 20 years. Vera didn't see the light of day until 1958 and was used a hadnful of times. Wrong technology, too late.

All subsequent video tape recorders moved the heads, the familiar helical scan of VHS, Beta, Umatic etc. (Except for the Fisher Price toy "gimmick" system). Now all repleced by solid state memory.

[chriswood]

I have a dim memory of reading in magazines such as Television of several attempts at linear video recording using multiple tracks all which seemed to disappear without trace, the claim was usually less complexity and possibly getting round patents. The only one that I remember ever being launched was the Philips DCC which was audio only.
Chris

[ppppenguin]

There were 2 failed early (late 1950s, early 1960s) attempts at domestic video recorders, Wesgrove and Telcan. Both used high speed linear recording. I think there was a Fisher Price or similar toy video recorder that used high speed linear recording, possibly on a standard audio cassette.

BBC Research made an experimental linear scan digital VTR in the early 1970s. It used an instrumentation recorder (1"?) runnng at high speed. I saw it running in 1974/5. AFAIK it was purely a research tool for investigating digital TV systems.

Going the other way, digital audio was recorded on both Umatic and Betamax video recorders. The digital audio was processed to make it look like analogue video. Both were successfully employed by major recording companies. They could outperform any analogue audio tape recorder. Their performance was limited only by the quality of the ADC and DAC.

PS: Here's the Fisher Price camcorder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000 Apparently it now has a cult following.

[decowoodie]

I remember in the ch4 programme 'the secret life of the video recorder', Tim Hunkin went to the science museum stores and they brought a marconi-stille tape recorder down for him on a pallet to examine, and then they showed the familiar 1956 Richard Dimbleby article on Panorama. 

Secret Life of the Video Recorder

[DrStrangelove]

Then there was the Bing Crosby linear VTR:

http://www.vtoldboys.com/bing.htm