Beta vs VHS. A world in which Beta won.

The video format wars. One cassette has a long term future. One pushes out all the competition in its market. One has a successful future including high definition digital, the other is a technological dead end full of marketing failures. Why Beta won.

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Music “Let It Run” with permission, copyright Cristie/MacFarlane.

Sorry I do not offer an audio or video equipment repair service.

00:00 Introduction
00:55 V2000
02:50 VHS and S-VHS
04:26 M and MII formats
06:57 Beta
07:34 Betacam and BetacamSP
09:19 Wall-E
10:05 More BetacamSP
11:56 Digital Betacam
14:24 HDCAM and HDCAM-SR
16:20 D9 or Digital-S failure
18:40 PCM digital audio
19:59 Beta leader tape, auto-stop
20:57 Conclusion

[nostalgoteket.tvogradioark]

Danmarks radio TV also started out as the BBC by digitizing their oldest material 2 INCH tapes on the D3 format from 1992. But when Sony launched Digibeta in 1993, Danmarks Radio TV purchased the first Digibeta and then transferred to this new format. that was much more stable than the D3. Digibeta used the 4:2:2 encoding. I'm quite envious of your HD Cam SR. I would love to own one like that 🙂

[glenwoofit]

Interesting. I worked in a TV studio for 10 years and was a vision engineer so I used DIGI Beta a lot. I got out in 2005 so didn't see the HD version of Beta. Sony lent us a full HD system in 2003 to shoot a episode on when HD was new and I remember seeing for the first time a Sony HD 1080p CRT, It was huge but mesmerising to look at as it looked perfect. It was on a trolly in the CAR (room) while all the editing and transfers were being done so every time I passed I had to look at it.

[jkmac]

It wasn't just Thames that had MII, Anglia in Norwich did too. I went for a job interview at Anglia in 1996 and their videotape area had Panasonic MII decks and a single Sony BVW-75 BetaSP deck sat on a bench, presumably for exchanging tapes in that format. At that time Anglia's transmissions came from Meridian so it's possible they had some MII decks too.

I was told one reason the BBC went with D3, apart from the fact Digi-Beta hadn't been invented yet, was being Composite Digital rather than Component Digital the "new" D3 machines (AJ-D350s) could easily be swapped with an existing 1 inch reel to reel video recorder. You've got to remember at the time (1991/92) places like BBC TV Centre were all wired up for PAL analogue signals, so there was no infrastructure to take advantage of component video. Sony's competing format at the time was the 3/4 inch D2 format, in fact the digital video inputs and outputs on a D3 VTR are called a D2 interface. So the choice at the time for a composite digital VTR was either D2 or D3 and they went with D3. There was an even more obscure format called Ampex DCT that was being tested, which I believe is similar to D2 with 3/4 inch tape.

The D3 format wasn't just used to archive older 2 inch and 1 inch tapes, the format was also used to make new programmes throughout the 90's and into the early 2000's, so yes there would have been a vast collection of D3 tapes to be digitised in the BBC archives. Although by the late 90's the 1 inch archiving project were making simultaneous recordings on both D3 and Digi-Beta rather than two D3 copies.

Digi-Beta was being used for post production work at the BBC during the 90's but it only became a transmission format in 1998 and exclusively for 16:9 widescreen programmes. D3 continued being used for regular 4:3 programmes, which is why it was still going in the early 2000's. As more productions changed over to filming in widescreen the D3 format was used less and less, and towards the end of it's life just used for archive programming.

Channel 4 also went for D3 and then onto D5 (not sure about HD-D5). An optional board could be fitted to D5 VTRs (AJ-D580s) which allowed them to playback D3 recordings for backward compatibility. Some ITV regions also adopted the D3 format, I think one of them was Thames (the MII connection) and possibly Tyne Tees. I used to have a BKSTS wall chart back in the 90's that listed all the videotape formats and which UK broadcasters used them.

Even JVC's Digital-S (D9) format was used for number of years as a cheap alternative to Digi-Beta by one major BBC production until they switched to HD, while others saw BetaSX as the cheaper digital alternative. DS/D9 was still in regular use when JVC released the later decks with 4 audio channels and front panel jog/shuttle control. The 4 track machines could playback older 2 track recordings, but I remember a warning sticker on the top of the 4 track machines (a JVC sticker) warning about the audio insert editing compatibility between the 2 variants. I never saw a DS/D9 deck fitted with the firewire option only SDI. Firewire didn't even come fitted as standard on Sony's broadcast DVCam decks (DSR-2000, DSR-60 etc), so firewire wasn't commonly used in broadcast TV. The DSR-2000 did have a way to copy the DV data directly between 2 machines without the optional firewire card, but it was done using a BNC connector/interface. I didn't see firewire in regular use until DVCPRO-HD arrived, as it was the only way to access the original 1440x1080 image as the HD-SDI output was upscaled to 1920x1080.

[aegisofhonor]

M was actually first developed by RCA but was such a massive flop that they gave up on it right away. Panasonic picked it up and made M-II or M-2 or whatever it was renamed as and it was 'slightly" more successful in the commercial space but betacam blew it out of the water in proliferation.

[JimTimber]

In fact DAT won the battle.. even though SVHS was lurking.. it was the industry standard for television before the digital pen drive age.
Great video.. very interesting !!

[SFtheGreat]

The enthusiasm of your progeny is what I needed to start the day with joy and the will of life.
And regarding the question at 0:40, the answer is D-VHS obviously. I have a brand new release scheduled for 2023 in that format, the first ever PAL D-VHS prerecorded cassette.

[zamiadams]

Great video man, just subbed, I love video!

[dirkdeweerdt]

I don't agree on V2000. I worked in a repair shop and in it's time most of the V2000 vrt's worked fine and they needed no more time to service as VHS. Most service time was for Beta, aligning mechanicly and electronicly after head swap. Now you do a terrific job but the units are now more than 30 y old. I repaired (1980's) every day vrt's (Belgium), most VHS followed by V2000 and than Betamax. The systems preform more or less the same, being Beta most expensive and a tiny better as the others.
I like your video's!

[stanislavnepochatov]

Well professional market is a totally different beast. For home video you can cut almost any corner and get away with it as long as it selling out. Maybe several formats with many-many competitors. Professional industry tends to cut formats instead of corners. And collaboration between manufactures even for single format is unlikely cause equipment quality may vary. But pros likes consistency.

Also in my opinion Betacam is separate format from Betamax. Even if Betacam decks can play Betamax tapes. When Betacam was introduced forwat war was still going so maybe they just was hoping to support Betamax by saying: "look it's professional format".

[tekvax]

The D3 format was introduced several years before DigiBeta was released. I worked at a large network in Ontario, and they had hundreds of D3 tapes. The format from Ampex was of excellent quality, however, the transports were very labour-intensive. We also had the D1 and D2 formats. D5 and HDcam are still in service today, for some distribution of movies, and long-format shows.
The Digibeta heads were extremely expensive and had 17 flying heads on the drum. they were a nightmare! We used BetaSX in Sony Flexicarts for over 15 years, and still have several machines, and a large library, that we are slowly transferring to file-based XMF formats.

[gideon]

Great Video. I have been hoping you would do a video on the consumer to Pro video tape format evolution for some time and this didn’t disappoint.
I was gifted a non-working Sony SL-C6 MK II around 1989 when doing work experience (which I subsequently got repaired) and this got me into using Beta at home.
I actually got a Sony SLF-25 Beta from Thames TV in the auction when they closed.
Latterly I used the Pro Beta derived formats at work, mostly DigiBeta and HDCAM.
Rather unsurprisingly I have a lot of love for Beta.
Very interesting to learn more about the Pro VHS derivatives as I never really came across those.
Curiously I see a slight connection between the last consumer and Pro physical formats I used;
Blu-ray recorders at home and SONY XDCAM HD disc recorders at work that use the Sony “Professional Disc” format (this being a disc format using blue-violet lasers like Blu-ray).

[doskungen]

Hey Video99! WOW Video2000... I remember a kid in school (back in the 80's) whose family had moved to Sweden from Holland. They had one of these machines. The one and only time I got to experience it. Horrible picture quality from what I remember. Kinda interesting to get to see those weird audio tape looking cassettes again. 🙂

[rpb]

Your comments about D3 and the BBC are way off the mark in terms of branding it a failure. Around 1990 the BBC was nearing completion of its new Post Production Centre in Stage 5 at Television Centre, and needed to settle on a digital cassette based format to populate it, replacing the large and aging C Format based machines (Ampex VPR2 etc.) used for editing and transmission up to that point. Digital Betacam was still a few years away, and formats like Sony D1 were hideously expensive, so D3 was chosen to fit within the new infrastructure, and ran successfully for more than a decade as the main editing and TX format. Included innovations such as Preread were a game changer for fast turnaround operations such as sport editing. There were a lot of D3 problems early on being a new format, with heads wearing out in a matter of maybe 50 hours use, but these problems were quickly ironed out. Panasonic even had their own workshop within the Post Production Centre in the early days.

I say this from the point of view of being one of the senior engineers who ran and maintained all this throughout that time. As for D3 archive content, by the end of this year we’ll have got through all the tapes that we intend to preserve, and even after that we are designing and building some D3 preservation capability right now for the odd tape that will crop up now and then.

[TTVEaGMXde]

D3 records a digitized CVBS signal, with which one can save Quadruplex and B or C format unchanged. But that actually only made sense when a BBC employee invented the Transform PAL decoder at the end of the 90s. The alternatives would be comb filters like in the Canopus ADVC-100 (SAA7114) with mediocre sharpness and usable CrossColor interference suppression, or a comb filter with excellent CrossColor suppression but extreme crawling dot formation (Terratec Grabby PRO). There is supposed to be a software solution against crawling dots, but I haven't tested it.

[richclips]

Excellent video as always, very informative and interesting. I think you might have forgotten Sony XDCAM, although quite short-lived... I might have missed it if you mentioned it :) I used to work at framestore in Soho, we had umats a plenty, D1, beta, betaSP, digitbeta, hdcam, hdcamSR, XDcam, Panasonic D5 as well as clipstations and clipstationpro disk based systems, another from Edifis, and a whole host of film kit, rank cintel telecine and Philips spirits... All good fun :) yes indeed the old D1 machines were about £100, 000 and a HDCAMSR started at about £75, 000 plus options. Mind you, the old SGI onyx 2 computers were about £250, 000 and I looked after 8 of those 😅 let alone Sony broadcast monitors at £20k plus and Dolby 40inch grading monitors at around £40k. Madness really. Thanks again Colin.

[laustinspeiss]

6:55 Blooper tapes were often done undercover - using loaner equipment that was on trial by a facility. The mainstream gear was often too busy, so the techs used the updike demo equipment to ‘play’ in their spare time.

[stevecps]

Ha Technology Connections has just released a video on Beta too. Great video of yours though - really enjoyed it! Some things there I've never heard of.

[MrBetaByte]

Interesting video and I so get the point on *Beta* lasting for so long too. Interesting comparing this to Technology Connections who brought out a video that contradicts some of what you say and at the same time I think misses the point that Beta did last as a domestic format until 2002 with machines still being released up to this date but the cassette format lasting up until 2016. Betacord didn't last nearly as long and in the UK, at one point in the early 80's, Sanyo produced the cheapest video recorder money could buy. Quality wise, NTSC is a different beast and I do get the negligible difference in quality when using B2/3 and VHS SP/LP but in PAL land Beta was one-speed and the quality was, in my humble opinion, better than the contemporary VHS units - so much so I recorded school shows on both Beta and VHS, VHS to the school and Beta for the archive for future release. A very interesting take on the whole Beta vs VHS battle. A really great video and great to have the kids involved too.

[andrew]

I used to make timecoded transmission masters of feature films for national broadcaster in Malta. Amazingly they selected S-VHS as their standard transmission format!

[Petertronic]

Great video Colin. I love all the history behind the various formats.