Betamax is/was still a thing?
I thought this died off in the 80's...
Ohhh... We're talking about Micro MV tapes. That makes more sense.
Sony says goodbye to Betamax tapes
The firm revealed on its website that it will also stop shipping the Micro MV cassette, used in video cameras.
It has not produced a compatible camera for the Micro MV since 2005.
Sony launched the format in 1975, a year before JVC's rival the VHS cassette - which eventually became the market leader after a long battle between the two brands and their fans.
Although many felt Betamax was the superior format, most cite the longer recording length of VHS tapes - three hours versus one - and the cheaper manufacturing costs for VHS machines as the main factors as to why VHS eventually won out.
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I kid, of course. I'm shocked cassette tapes were still being manufactured, actually.
I know one local TV station around here that, at least as of about 6 years ago, had 2 betamax players. One was hooked up, and every so often they'd actually grab a beta tape out and grab some archive footage from it. The other was actually still new in box, in case the "production" one died.
Ideally they'd like to digitize all of that content, but the reality is that it is a pretty manual process that has to be done in real time, so it is kind of hard to do.
They don't have interns? Summer interns are the best!
They probably would, but when you consider that there's probably at lease decade of content where there's on average of around 7-8 hours of footage per day, that would take... a lot of summers to digitize. Especially when you consider that again most of these TV stations probably have 1, maybe 2 players left. You can't even do more than 1 or two tapes at any given time.
When I was a kid my parents had one. And then local video chain liquidated their entire betamax collection, so they got several large boxes of movies for like, 20 dollars.
So then if our player broke, or someone broke into our house and stole it (happened at least 3 times, but the jokes on them!) we got a new one because 95% of our video collection was betamax.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
It was Tango and Cash.
It was awesome.
That's really the only contribution I have to a conversation about the Betamax format.
In professional video work all digital processes being the standard are very new. Like last 5 years old.
bbc.co.uk/news/business-34667380 There it is.
It's barely related, but something weird I've noticed is that fax machines are still nearly mandatory equipment in American businesses (at least in my part of the country), if not outright mandatory. Academia much less so (which is surprising, you think it would be slower to adopt new hardware since otherwise it almost always is).
Yeah, probably. Obviously animation, particularly in high-budget, short-running OVAs, are an entirely different beast. In middle school, I learned how to do video editing with VHS cassettes because, well, doing it from DVDs wasn't viable, and forget about video legally procured digitally (much less illegally, of course, which was still somewhat novel 15 years ago). It wouldn't surprise me it took this long for all the standards to catch up on the production side either.
Which themselves are really driven by lawyers, generally.
Not really surprising they get built into so many printers in retrospect.
Does make me think if it is something more shady like the Texas Instruments Calculator thing in US schools?
Except I'm pretty sure a very wide number of companies make fax machines, or at least used to. I can't really think of a particularly dominant one that stands out.
It doesn't need to be a single company making a product to be involved in this sort of thing, however, I doubt it would be quite as bad as the calculators.
Hey now, the TI-83 played a mean game of Tetris and helped me through the desolate hellscape that was AP Physics and AP Calculus.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
My dad is an engineer, and when I started taking advanced math in high school he bought me an HP calc and taught me how to use it in lieu of the TI calculators. Damn there is a world of difference between them.
Drug wars man, it was all about drug wars. I learned more about economics from that game than I did in an actual economics class.
I'm kidding. Maybe. Kind of.
FTC: HONK.
PAX Prime 2014 Resistance Tournament Winner
Carly Fiorina, shit person, calculator genius?
<Nerd Rant>
Carly is a f@&%$#@g marketing weasel! Its her and her ilk that gutted HP's R&D section insuring that they will never again make anything that anyone will consider 'cool'!
</Nerd Rant>
It's obviously digital and HD nowadays.