A long, long time ago, long before they had DVD players, and yes, even long before VHS,
a huge whinning dinosaur ruled the world..... and his name was

QUAD

The first quadruplex video tape machine I ever saw was in 1972. There was some guy in Bayonne NJ teaching video classes under the pretense of a part time job. It was an old Ampex 1200. From 1956 to 1978 Quad WAS KING! Before quad, TV was recorded to film, by shooting a CRT < Check out the end credits on an old Jackie Gleason Show>. Ampex was credited with the development of the quad (thank you Bing Crosby). Ed Sullivan was one of the first to be shot on quad and edited on quad. Then with no computers or time code, no CMX, no Avid, magnetic tape developer was sprayed on the quad tape and when it dried you could see the control track pulses and you physically cut between the video tracks. At least with film you could see the pictures you were editing with quad at that point it was dead reckoning
In a world of DCRs how do you describe a quad machine. The machine itself was the size of a Toyota Camery, it ran tape that was 2 inches wide and and a 2 hour of tape weighed about 40 lbs. No still frames or slow motion and when CMX came out it took 10 seconds to lock up. It was called a quad because it had four video heads in it's drum. Not allot of heads if you look at a DVW-500. The other odd thing was the heads rotated perpendicular to the tape instead of the familiar helical tape paths of today. The tell tale finger print of an old quad recording is banding. Each video head needed full setup, color, hue, etc. They almost never matched perfectly so you would see bands of slight variations in the picture. Hence banding.
In the early quad heads the standardization was so bad they use to ship the heads and the tape together so it could playback on a different machine.
Does anyone remember the IVC-9000 or the Sony MV-10000? These were also lost 2 inch formats.
I’ve heard MV10000’s caused some problems at  EUE in NYC, (cause they didn’t fit in the elevators).

Harry

An Actual Ampex Quad Machine
I took this picture in Nov 2000, this baby still works and MIV was thinking of buying it.
But we were looking for one with doors on it with all the covering intact, and rebuild it into a wet bar and fridge.

 

If your really interested in early electronic editing history take this link to the Editing Museum

This is an AE-600 editing console, I edited on one of these, you had to figure the match cut calulation yourself, like on a piece of paper....

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