Hi All, This arrived on our bench the other day, a Sony DNW-A75P. This is a broadcast machine under the Betacam SX banner. It is a digital machine that uses Mpeg compression. I have put this into the VTR category as in all my years of working on Broadcast decks, and domestic I have never seen this before. Came in with a report "Tape Stuck Inside". Please look what greeted us.
Like I say I have never seen this before.
I have had people rush in from outside in very cold weather and insert tapes into a machine and due to slight condensation on the tape it sticks to the head drum and pulls the tape out of the cassette and wraps it around the head drum. You can usually recover these tapes. This was not the case here. The room is in constant use and never cold.
If you look at the close up pictures you can see the heads. There are a lot of heads on these machines. They have dynamic tracking heads for SX playback and heads for Betacam SP (analogue) playback. 8 non DT playback heads and 4 SX record heads, I'm going of my memory here. I think there are 20 in total. When we had hovered out the tape and gave the machine a good clean it then worked fine. It was then put through a full playback and record head alignment process and all passed! I still have no idea how this came about and the machine has performed faultlessly since its return.
Funny business this as occasionally something comes you have never seen before. Thought this may be of interest, it certainly got my attention!!
Adrian
In the fourth picture, the end of the tape looks lik it has been burned by severe friction. I have heard of tape shredding, but this is extreme.
To understand the black art of electronics is to understand witchcraft. Andrew.
Who is still using SX these days I wonder ?
Very robust format.
Hi All, We are still using DVW's with analogue playback, DNW's, HDW's and SRW's as the company had over a million tapes in its archive when batch ingest started to digitise. There is about 5-8 years of this project left! I have about 200 machines which a lot are used for parts only. Parts are the main problem for these machines. News used the SX format while the rest of the company used DVW. Why this happened I have no idea?
@hurty Ah, Archive, I see, I remember someone saying a few years back that there is more videotape in existence world-wide than there are remaining head-hours left on many formats, don't know if this is true, but the SX and digibetas with analog playback options are still in demand where there are large archives.
Hi Adrian,
wow... what in God's name happened there?! The only comparable thing I've seen was in a particularly noisy Oxtel still store/keyer... and the noise was coming from the hard drive. Opening it up revealed the (stuck) head had sawn through the platter!
Hi, Head hours for playback have always been a worry. Every year I get asked the same question, why are we keeping all these VTR's? I must get an update myself on where we are now with tapes left. The tape ingest department are running all the time. They have three Flexicarts to help with doing this. We used to have 53 of these before the GV Profiles took over for channel playout. Each of the Flexicarts would have 3 VTR decks in them. I have seen, going back a few years now, disk head crashes where there is a pile debris from the disk surface after a bad head crash. It wasn't that common. Disks fail now and we don't do anything about them, just replace when they start to show errors. The Fuji drives used by Quantel where monsters, 160 Mbit or 330Mb, broke your back trying to move them. Yes I saw the tape burn on the tape end and even through we took it out I have no idea what went on in the machine to produce this result? After cleaning up the machine worked fine and all the heads set up correctly much to our surprise. Here are the Flexicarts to look at, these could take VHS decks as well as broadcast machines.
Enjoy
I remember the Flexicarts - or their Panasonic equivalent - in the old NTA at Television Centre. They ran with D3 machines.
I remember the big 8" HDDs used in early Slide Files, but then I also remember the huge removable drive that came with early Paintboxes - RSD? The graphics designers were told never to place them on the floor of a Tube carriage...
Well, I agree, I've never seen tape shredding like this & I've worked on everything from early reel-to-reel Ampex, BVU, BVW, Beta, MII, DVCPro & etc.
Do you know how much of the tape it actually shredded? Very odd. You'll have to fit a small camera inside to see if it happens again!
David.
Could it have been a dodgy tape? Maybe it had gone a bit crispy? Saying that though, I’ve never seen a tape that has gone crispy before!
Regards,
Lloyd
