How They Sold Us Home Video Recorders In 1970. Do You Remember The Pitch?

I had every one of these machines and really couldn't have done what I did without them. Today as an independent documentary filmmaker and YouTube Creator, I still can't do without video. I love that I can record what I see and hear so easily and with such extraordinary quality. With only a GoPro and a separate microphone I can record nearly professional quality. Certainly the results are good enough for presentation on my YouTube channel.

But back when this video was made as a report on home video recorders, although I had one of these Umatic (we call them three-quarter inch) machines (in fact I had a dozen of them), I still preferred 16mm film primarily for the look of it and also I just liked the feeling of touching and editing 16mm film.

The marketing strategies used to promote home video recorders were largely centered around the idea of bringing the cinema experience to the home. U-matic and VHS were the two primary home video recording formats available in the 1970s. They used marketing to promote these formats including product demos, Advertisements on TV and in print (the ads featured sleek designs and emphasized the convenience of watching movies at home), promotions - (like free movie rentals or discounts on movies with the purchase of a home video recorder), plus rental stores like Blockbuster and Video Rental promoted to encourage people to rent movies to watch on their home video recorders.

In addition movie studios released movies on U-matic and VHS formats. Manufacturers offered home installation services that helped consumers set up their home video recorder including providing instructions on how to use the recorder and helping consumers connect the recorder to their TV.

As a young filmmaker I began recording TV shows and family members. I also recorded people for my documentaries when I didn't really care about the look of film. And yet today, without those old umatic videotapes that I recorded (which I have now digitized), I wouldn't have anywhere near as huge an archive as I do of content that I filmed or recorded from various media venues or was given to me by other filmmakers.

U-matic is an analogue recording videocassette format first shown by Sony in prototype in October 1969, and was introduced to the market in September 1971. It was among the first video formats to contain the videotape inside a cassette, as opposed to the various reel-to-reel or open-reel formats of the time.

Sony originally intended it to be a videocassette format oriented at the consumer market. This proved to be something of a failure because of the high manufacturing cost and resulting retail price of the format's first VCRs. But the cost was affordable enough for industrial and institutional customers, where the format was very successful for such applications as business communication and educational television. As a result, Sony shifted U-Matic's marketing to the industrial, professional, and educational sectors.

A recurring problem with the format which I still experience frequently when I attempt to digitize my old videotapes is damage to the videotape caused by prolonged friction of the spinning video drum heads against a paused videotape. The drum would rub oxide off the tape or the tape would wrinkle; when the damaged tape was played back, a horizontal line of distorted visual image would ascend in the frame, and audio would drop out. The format video image also suffered from head-switching noise, a distortion of the image in which a section of video at the bottom of the video frame would be horizontally askew from the larger portion.

Audio quality was compromised due to the use of longitudinal audio tape heads in combination with slow tape speed. Sony eventually implemented Dolby noise reduction circuitry (using Dolby C) to improve audio fidelity.

U-matic tapes were used by professional broadcast television systems and by independent filmmakers partially because it was so easy to transport and set up the equipment. Several big-time Hollywood movies have surviving copies in this form. The first rough cut of Apocalypse Now for example, survived on three U-Matic cassettes.

Some television facilities the world over still have a U-matic recorder for archive playback of material recorded. For example, the Library of Congress facility in Culpeper, Virginia holds thousands of titles on U-matic video as a means of providing access copies and proof for copyright deposit of old television broadcasts and films.

If you found this of interest, please click the Super Thanks button below the video screen. Your support allows me to pay professional rates and get more and more of my thousands of my old videotapes digitized.

Видео How They Sold Us Home Video Recorders In 1970. Do You Remember The Pitch? канала David Hoffman