A TV/VCR With A Wild Past

so a couple weeks ago i'm just sitting around doing whatever and i get this email from ebay that says uh congratulations you've won pay now and i'm like great i won what what did i win i wasn't bidding on anything well i had been bidding on something but it was a joke bid on an auction i did not remotely expect to win so i put a bid down and just completely forgot about it uh here's what i bid on however shocking right yeah can't believe i won that what a score okay so this listing was broken somehow i don't know what happened i've never seen this before but most of the sellers photos got corrupted and you couldn't actually see what it was from the pictures or from the ebay search results but the title of it said that it was a sony evm 8010 which is something i've had a saved search set on for years at this point it's not that they don't show up but they usually go for like pretty unpleasant prices and also they tend to either not work from what i'm told or they'll get destroyed in shipping so i hadn't really pursued this thing all that hard however this auction started at 40 bucks so i put a 45 dollar bid on it and just walked away and i guess nobody else bid maybe they got scared away by the broken images or something but if you flip through them a couple of them actually did work and the device was there and it looked like it was in decent condition so i figured there was nothing wrong with it and i guess i was right because i did in fact get shipped the item i won so here is what i received uh let me explain buying crt displays online is actually really risky uh because they tend to not survive the mail i actually know several people who have bought two or three sony pvms in a row and had them all arrive completely smashed which is another reason i hadn't been actively pursuing the evm because i figured if i did buy one it would probably get destroyed on its way here however this listing said that it included a case and from the pictures it looked like it was a flight case as the name suggests it's a box designed to protect a piece of equipment from the rigors of air travel so it's made out of steel and aluminum and fiberglass and damn near indestructible if it can survive airline cargo handlers i figured it could probably survive usps so let's take a look sure enough there's a thick layer of foam on all surfaces and no broken plastic so it seems to be intact so here it is and it seems to be intact which is really exciting now this has been a beige whale for me for years i i just wanted it because i wanted it i just think they're neat the nature of that kind of desire is that you don't want to do anything with it per se maybe not even turn it on you know it's just beautiful and you like it because it is so there wasn't going to be any big narrative to this video i was just going to show you the device and talk about how much i like it i'll still do that but if you stick around i'll also tell you about the life it's lived because it turns out that this guy has been places let's get acquainted first though as the side here informs us the evm810 is a combination unit now the bulk of it is taken up by a sony eight inch trinitron display now this is not a television you'll notice it has no tuner controls anywhere this is just a monitor and in fact it only has composite input no s video and sad news for the gamers out there no rgb so this is not a replacement for a pvm nor was it meant to be otherwise it would say pvm on it the other component is here on the top and it's a built-in vcr it's not for the vhs format though it's for the much smaller video eight format this was an eight millimeter compact video cassette format i've mentioned it a few times before it was championed largely by sony throughout the 80s they had hoped it would replace vhs in all applications but never quite caught on for consumer home video by 87 when this monitor was first being made sony certainly knew already that this had failed to penetrate the home video market consumers were buying tons of video 8 camcorders but to make a dedicated monitor just for watching camcorder videotapes was pretty silly so it comes as no surprise that this was intended solely for the professional market besides the videotape format other indicators include the two battery bays at the back and the huge for commercial use only sticker that's kind of a giveaway this particular specimen however has one more feature you might not have noticed on the back there's a dc barrel jack input for power supply which is not in itself unusual but below that is a 4 pin xlr socket for power input which as i've mentioned before is a universal standard for power supply in the film and television industries and what's intriguing about that is that it didn't come that way if you look at other pictures of the back of this unit online you'll see they all have a standard iec input there for 110 or 220 volts so this one was purchased and then modified to add that which tells us for sure it was being used in the film or television industries which is interesting because that's not what it was intended for the kind of professional sony was marketing this towards was the traveling salesman the idea is you would dub your presentation onto a video eight tape and then you could take this with you and just carry it from your station wagon into the office of whoever you were trying to bamboozle you didn't have to look around for a power outlet or anything you could just set it down press play and then continue bullshitting the guy face to face while your video enhanced the quality of your lies this was not actually a novel idea in the late 70s i think technicolor and funai collaborated on a product called cvc a compact video cassette format about the same size as this and the first player they made for it was based on the same concept of traveling salesmen adrian black gave me one of these um thanks adrian it doesn't work unfortunately but i know it was used for this purpose because it came with a whole stack of tapes actually have presentations on them so this was a thing businesses wanted to do so being from that in between market it makes sense that it's an evm and not a pvm otherwise would have more inputs and controls this just has the single composite input and the controls are just basic analog potentiometers for brightness color etc and then on the back there's three trimmers so you can adjust the individual colors of the crt the vcr is also not super sophisticated the controls are mostly rewind play fast forward stop pause and record it does have a memory button which i don't understand i can't figure out what that does i can't find a manual for this thing there's also an insert button which seems to be for doing fairly accurate insert edits which is a neat feature but this is still missing a whole bunch of stuff you'd find on any high-end vcr like audio dubbing for instance so nothing about this thing is really all that astonishing except that it works accused the manufacturers of this it actually works top to bottom the crt itself is functioning picture looks great better in person than it looks on camera and in fact the deck even works i'll put in my one commercial video eight movie oliver stone's jfk 1960 senator john fitzgerald kennedy of massachusetts looks great sounds great records great too here's a tape i dubbed over from tv earlier again it's kind of hard to tell on the camera but this looks fantastic so 15 minutes out of the crate i could tell this thing was an above average video 8 deck coupled to a typically high quality sony display and that it was all in great condition and that as i suspected all along i would have killed to have this as a kid i could have stopped there thanks for watching but there were some elements that made me think this had had an exciting life so i kept looking into it when i first saw this monitor years ago my immediate thought was that sony must have been selling it as a video assist now i'll have to explain a little bit about how film motion picture cameras work uh and i don't work in this industry i've never used one so i'm just going off what i've been told and what i've read so bear with me motion picture cameras have been in use for over a century and certain inconveniences are just unique to film for instance if you've just finished shooting a scene and you want to see what you shot you're going to have to wait at least several hours for the film to be taken away developed printed brought back and then projected of course after videotape was invented that started to look a little silly by the end of the 60s virtually any television producer could see what they just shot by pressing rewind and then play so it goes without saying that hollywood wanted that capability and so the video assist was invented the idea is that you put a beam splitter on the viewfinder of a motion picture camera and while the camera operator looks straight through it the image is also split and directed upwards into a video camera which connects to a videotape recorder then after you've shot a scene you could just rewind the video tape press play and see at least what was seen through the viewfinder it's not as good as seeing the final product but it beats the hell out of nothing this offered lots of new options among them instant dailies i actually found this term in the text of a lawsuit that's very relevant to this topic we'll come back to it later dailies had always been the film prints that the director got to look at at the end of a day of shooting after they'd been developed and printed but with videotape you could of course see them right away a completely new feature was the ability to pause the video tape on the last frame of a shot and then set up a new shot to look almost exactly like it so you could do much better matched eye dream of genie tricks my impression is that video assists became popular very quickly and who can blame them one of my favorite earlier production stills is from rocky which i think was about 74. it's one of the first movies to use a steadicam and in this scene you can see the steady operator is being followed by a guy carrying a quarter-inch akai reel-to-reel vtr i've always wanted one of these they're super cool they basically record on audio tape and this thing takes batteries and has a little built-in crt so if they wanted to check a shot they could have rewound and played it right there on the spot without having to have the steady operator get out of all of his gear and go sit down somewhere they must have loved it so to my eyes the evm seems like a slam dunk for video assist it's got everything it's compact portable built-in recorder runs off batteries who could ask for more well apparently sony since they never sold it for that purpose in fact i can find almost no references to the 8010 being used like this except in the text of the aforementioned lawsuit this suit concerned a man named alan landicker who worked at burbank studios in the late 80s and allegedly used company time and resources to modify a set of evm 8010s to produce what he called the autovid system apparently film motion picture cameras of the era didn't output any kind of simple on off signal to indicate whether they were recording the only thing they produced was a 24 hertz pulse every time the shutter actuated which is weird i don't know why that would have been the case still in the late 80s but apparently it was just a constant hassle and every production had to have a guy whose sole job was to sit there and just press record on the video assist so alan saw the gap and modified a fleet of 10 evms to recognize that 24 hertz pulse and start and stop recording automatically completely eliminating that entire position from the set so he started renting these out under the nose of burbank studios who then found out and got pissed off and sued him i don't know how this all turned out who won and what happened to autovid but this does not appear to be one of those devices sadly although it was still used as a video assist i don't think i've shown this in any of my angles so far but there's a huge sticker on top that says tyler who's tyler well there's a sticker on the case that explains it this was tyler camera systems a company that's actually still around and specializing in helicopter mounted camera systems that's what this was this went up in choppers tyler of course is one of those companies that sells the same product unchanged for half a century and unsurprisingly this thing is still on their website i don't know if they're still producing it or what but there's actually a manual up there on how to install it and in the flight case along with like 150 feet of bnc cables i have the original manual from 1985 when this thing was first made and it's unchanged the version on their website is the same manual they just added a few pages to it typical for this kind of company a really exciting thing about this is that the ordering information says that they sold this camera mount system along with an auto record enabled combo monitor and if they're not referring to combo on the side of the 8010 i would be astonished so i think they actually did have versions of this that were modified to be auto vids even if they weren't literally auto vid and i opened this up hoping that this would be one of them but other than the wires to adapt the xlr power input i couldn't find any obvious aftermarket modifications so i don't think this is set up for that which is a bummer it would be so cool if it was but that doesn't really change the fact this is monumentally awesome i'm a huge nerd for filmmaking so this thing is such a cool artifact man it went up in helicopters to shoot movies and it would just be awesome but but there was a tape in it it just says number two on it it's not a pro grade tape or anything like that sony actually made pro grade high eight tapes see yes in that wild this could be saturday morning cartoons that someone dubbed onto tape so their kids could watch it while they're out camping for all we know no this is the real thing it is exactly what i hoped for i have here 50 minutes of unedited video shot through the viewfinder of a camera that spent most of its time in the air shooting a tv show or a movie or something now i went through this and watched it cover to cover i had a blast if you want to do that you can click a link in the description to go see it on my side channel in its entirety but if you stick around i'll show you some of what i thought were the most interesting things in this video and at the end i will tell you the end of the story so let's check it out as the tape starts the very first thing we see is this strange circular shape that almost looks like a cancel sign and i'm fairly certain that's actually a viewfinder screen with a split prism focus assist similar to what you'd find in a 35 millimeter still camera that seemed odd at first because as i understand it the dp or cinematographer the person who actually handles the camera and looks to the viewfinder generally does not handle focusing themselves there's someone else to do that but then i remember this is up in a helicopter the dp is probably working entirely on his own and having to focus by hand so the symbol disappears and an image takes form and then they get ready to take off we have a couple blurry shots of the ground dim images of the crew moving around and then we see the rotor spin up and we're taking off now it almost looks like the operator is just shouldering the camera since you can see it pointed at his shoes here and it's pretty shaky overall but i had assumed that helicopter camera mounts were usually controlled remotely but apparently this one you actually do just grab and point around by hand it just provides a nice stable base and a counterweight also you can see now the picture is in black and white which i'm guessing is because a monochrome camera would have had better resolution than a color one and as has been discussed before color viewfinders are not as important as sharp viewfinders so we take off and get moving we're clearly in the american southwest somewhere and within seconds we can see our subject a bunch of cars and a semi stopped on a highway i'm going to warn you now that from here on there's going to be a lot of flickering and there's nothing i can do about it so if you are photo sensitive please don't watch the rest of this video in fact starting right here the image starts flickering and this tells us that the camera is shooting let me explain a motion picture camera shows the operator the exact image that's coming through the lens by bouncing it off a mirror and up and through the viewfinder system if you've ever used a 35 millimeter slr or digital slr you'll be familiar with this technique you'll also be familiar with the fact that the viewfinder goes black when you take a picture because the mirror is in the way of the image it has to flip up so the picture can get through to the film or the sensor movie cameras have the same problem except they shoot a lot faster at least 24 frames per second this means that the mirror system can't work the same way it does in an slr instead they use a clever system that combines the shutter and mirror into a single component in this video courtesy of the slo-mo guys thanks guys you can see how this mechanism works the shutter is a rotating metal disc mounted at a 45 degree angle and the back side of that disc is mirrored so that when the shutter is closed the image is directed upwards and through the viewfinder which of course means that when the shutter opens again the viewfinder is going to go dark and this is going to happen 24 times per second whenever the camera is shooting some video assists offer flicker-free performance and i'm guessing they do that by just buffering the image so that when the shutter is open and the viewfinder is dark they just continue showing the last good picture obviously nowadays we're shooting a lot of stuff on digital so this is completely moot but my understanding is that it was always a problem for film cameras so anyway when you see clean 60fps video on this tape that means they're not actually shooting when you see that flickering that means they're actually taking a shot let's move on the next thing that happens is that we hear and see a voice now i'm guessing that that was the dp the guy actually hanging out the side of the chopper holding the camera his voice is the only one we hear in this video and also whenever he talks the video wobbles based on that i think i know what's going on here i don't think we're supposed to be hearing his voice at all i don't even think that the audio input on the recorder was connected i think what happened is that he brought up a radio from the ground so instead of using the one that's built into the chopper that has an external antenna he's using a walkie-talkie and the antenna is right here next to the recorder so when he keys up his high power signal is passing through this unshielded equipment and being picked up by the audio and video amplifier the audio is being imprinted onto the tape because it's just normal audio but when it hits the video portion it causes this distortion of the image there's also a high pitched wine in the background that i suspect is 400 hertz i'm not very good with the spectrum analyzer but aircraft power systems run at 400hz ac and i'm guessing that sound is just leaking in from the chopper here the dp says they're changing their film magazine and then the weird shape comes back consensus from people i've asked about this is that you probably have to open the whole side of the camera to change the film and that swings the viewfinder away from the camera which is why everything goes blurry you can actually see the film strip in a couple of these shots where it's dangling in front of the viewfinder and from the perforations i'm guessing it's 35 millimeter so at this point they've done a few wide angle shots and then they move in closer and you can actually see their smoke pouring out of the semi after getting that they move in to try and get a pass down the center but if you notice there are two huge rock mounds on either side of the road so the chopper has to pull up sharp to get over them this is kind of terrifying i've got to climb over the hillside right down the center of the road that said he does a pretty good flyby a minute later i'm not sure what the following message means you guys need to look at this we're going to land and take a look at the video i wonder what he needed them to look at so urgently now after that things get kind of weird suddenly the same camera is in a chase car driving down the highway in front of this sedan that's being followed by a semi truck later the footage will go back to the chopper so while i suppose they could have rewound the tape and overwritten an earlier segment i suspect what happened is they borrowed the camera out of the chopper put it in the chase car shot a couple scenes and when they were done discussing whatever they had to discuss they sent it back up in the chopper i thought this car was a ford taurus at first but i was later informed that it's really a kia sofia which plays an important role in the outcome of this story they shoot a few different angles of it and then a drive-by that reveals the kia is actually pulling the semi with a chain i doubt that's truly the case but that's the narrative after this the crew have a chat and then it's back up in the chopper this time they're trying to get low pass shots moving perpendicular to the canyon but they start running into issues with wind and we need to do that again i've redesigned the shot a bit because of the wind so we're going to crab into it from this angle out here and get that perspective viewpoint so give us another chance he says he's going to try to crab into the shot industry talk for moving the camera sideways at this point a passing truck interrupts the chute uh they're apparently shooting on an active highway so this actually happens quite a few times we need to stop some of the civilian traffic though we're just going to let this traffic clear now we've got one more truck a lot more car and i'll slide into position andrew do we want to get this ranger and this other car out of the way now we enter dennis pilot of the second helicopter yeah there's two of them it's a bell jet ranger 206 by the way and the camera ship appears to be the same one the dp gives him his marching orders and they get ready to camera shoot like over the uh northbound lane of traffic and then you'll take us right into the scene this whole sequence is fascinating if you've never thought about this imagine that every time you've seen a helicopter in a movie unless the camera was pointing up it was probably being shot by a second helicopter that had to coordinate every movement with the first one which isn't easy for the next half hour the two pilots dance back and forth over the scene trying different angles and speeds just like every scene being shot on location in a movie trying to get everything they can before they have to leave very normal practice except that it's helicopters doing it eventually they do this shot where they're racing up the center of the canyon over and over and i can't get a good sense of scale but it feels like they're no more than a dozen feet from the ground 10 feet from the canyon walls and hardly any further away from each other this this must be scary work in one shot the dp actually plans to hover in place while dennis flies under him so what you're saying is what i said earlier today i'm going to hover and dennis is going to come underneath me he'll come under my belly and we'll do the same exit good enough he even asks if there's enough room the tolerances must be close i can't imagine doing this let alone doing it again and again and again eventually though they're happy with their work and they go to sit down so there it is this tape almost holds the crown as the coolest thing i own i actually have a few things that are more useful so i got to give it to them but i would have paid 100 bucks for this straight up the monitor is a bonus if i'd known this was in there i would have just bought it for that getting to see this much raw detail all this behind the scenes of the problems the helicopter cameraman faces and how they have to solve them priceless to me now it goes without saying that i wanted to know what this was used for was it a tv show a movie did it end up going into anything or did it just go in the trash i'd love to see the finished product but there's not a whole lot of hints nobody uses a clapperboard nobody says the name of the production even the date is hard to pin down this could have been made anywhere between 87 and 2008 a lot of film production equipment ends up getting used way past this expiration date as long as it's still functioning so i did my best but i couldn't figure it out however i did decide to put this video up early access for my patrons after all they helped me buy this thing and since the sort of people who would give me money to do this are almost by definition high caliber nerds they figured it out from the most tenuous trivial details from the make model and tail number of dennis's chopper and the years it was delivered and when it crashed to the specific shape of the grill badge on the car and the years that was used in the us market these lovely people were able to track this video down to a specific 1993 kia sofia commercial for the korean market only in other words this was an ad for a car that wasn't sold here but was shot in california i guess this is sort of a thing with commercials but it's definitely the same commercial no question you can make out the shots that you see in this tape so here's the finished product for your enjoyment will codes [Music] [Applause] m [Applause] [Music] so there's its life story got bought by a company that makes movies with helicopters got used for god knows what and then eventually probably got replaced by something lighter weight lower power sat in its box for 27 years before finally going on ebay and now i have it how cool is that so that's that um i hope you enjoyed it as much as i did if you really enjoyed it uh please subscribe remember to turn on notifications because i upload kind of irregularly and if you really enjoyed this consider supporting me on patreon i don't think i need to reiterate that i couldn't do this without the financial support of everyone on there and obviously the research assistants as well i can't believe you all figured this out you're ridiculous but thank you so much and to everyone else thank you for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude

Views: 79,892

Rating: 4.9291787 out of 5

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics

Id: OgOwTm2XTkU

Length: 25min 19sec (1519 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/UnacceptableOrgasm]

That was far more engaging than I was expecting. I really like how he doesn't waste time or add filler.

[u/lunchbox_tragedy]

The payoff with the commercial is perfect/hilarious.

[u/Smudded]

This guy is a great content creator. As he tells us more about what came with the monitor I feel like it's fairly obvious that the order in which he gives us information is not the order in which he discovered it, which makes it feel more exciting. He probably got the thing, turned it on, and immediately discovered and watched the tape in it. He also would have seen the manual in the box and known that it was used in a helicopter.

If he simply retold the events of him getting the monitor exactly how they happened it wouldn't have been as interesting, and I certainly enjoyed his enhanced version.

[u/Raceworx]

Really enjoyed that. Intresting no filler on point tech knowledge. 10/10 loved the commercial aswell.

[u/pickled-egg]

Love this guys channel. He doesn't half ass anything he shows, you get like a 45 minute complete run down of an obsolete camcorder etc.

Fantastic stuff :)