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The Deep Freeze Story
The above doesn't even include my later adventures at DC Video in Burbank in 2016.
But yes, exactly as you said, and we baked and baked and baked to coax one more pass out of the 45 year old tapes.
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Thanks for sharing that story, I enjoyed the read, it brought back some old memories. Some old names too from the past in there. Modern Videofilm, Dubs Inc. Compact Video, Complete Post. I remember a time long before many of those places were bought up by Technicolor or Deluxe, back when there were dozens of top quality post production facilities in Hollywood. Also AME (Andy McIntyre), Encore, Vidfilm, Anderson, Hollywood Digital--- many more, and all capable of archiving content from old 2 inch Quad masters. As your story describes, original "edited" 2 inch Qaud masters were edited on a splice block in between the horizontal sync pulse and found by using a microscope-- long before there was electronic editing available. Therefore, when it came to old Quad masters you often had better luck dubbing them off of the protection master copies (when available)-- as there were no areas of the tape which had been spliced and then attached with mylar tape to come apart 30 years later as the tape ran across the spinning video head. A lot of Quad masters not that old got eaten up within a few years.
Like film, videotape has pretty much gone away. Still a lot of tapes out there of all types including legacy formats. But even now Hollywood has moved past HDCAM-SR as well. It just costs too much on thinner margins to have remained with the older tried and true technologies, and the many technicians it took to keep those machines running, not to mention vaulting all of those elements. Everything now all digital file based from start to finish, but I miss the old days of sound and videotape engineers. Like steam trains, I like all the moving parts.
Yep, did a lot of baking AND scraping of 2 inch tape in my day. Never recorded any quad tape, but a lot of playback for archiving, especially to D1 back in the 90s
Here is a great video describing what we are talking about, less people think we are crazy