Videotape
The early 2000s saw the introduction and rise to prominence of high-quality random-access video recording media such as hard disks and flash memory.
In development by John T. Mullin and Wayne R. Johnson since 1950, the device gave what were described as "blurred and indistinct" images using a modified Ampex 200 tape recorder and standard quarter-inch (0.635 cm) audiotape moving at 360 inches (9.1 m) per second.
RCA demonstrated the magnetic tape recording of both black-and-white and color television programs at its Princeton laboratories on December 1, 1953.
[5][6] The high-speed longitudinal tape system, called Simplex, in development since 1951, could record and play back only a few minutes of a television program.
The color system used half-inch (1.27 cm) tape on 10½ inch reels to record five tracks, one each for red, blue, green, synchronization, and audio.
The black-and-white system used quarter-inch (0.635 cm) tape also on 10½ inch reels with two tracks, one for video and one for audio.
[7] RCA-owned NBC first used it on The Jonathan Winters Show on October 23, 1956, when a prerecorded song sequence by Dorothy Collins in color was included in the otherwise live television program.
[10] BCE demonstrated a color system in February 1955 using a longitudinal recording on half-inch (1.27 cm) tape.
CBS, RCA's competitor, was about to order BCE machines when Ampex introduced the superior Quadruplex system.
[13][14] On January 22, 1957, the NBC Television game show Truth or Consequences, produced in Hollywood, became the first program to be broadcast in all time zones from a prerecorded videotape.
On December 7, 1963, instant replay, originally a videotape-based system, was used for the first time during the live transmission of the Army–Navy Game by its inventor, director Tony Verna.
Subsequent videotape systems have used helical scan, where the video heads record diagonal tracks (of complete fields) onto the tape.
While much less expensive (if repeatedly recycled) and more convenient than kinescope, the high cost of 3M Scotch 179[13] and other early videotapes ($300 per one-hour reel)[19] meant that most broadcasters erased and reused them, and (in the United States) regarded videotape as simply a better and more cost-effective means of time-delaying broadcasts than kinescopes.
Some classic television programs recorded on studio videotape have been made available on DVD – among them NBC's Peter Pan (first telecast in 1960) with Mary Martin as Peter, several episodes of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (late 1950s/early 60s), the final Howdy Doody Show (1960), the television version of Hal Holbrook's one-man show Mark Twain Tonight (first telecast in 1967), and Mikhail Baryshnikov's classic production of the ballet The Nutcracker (first telecast in 1977).
Sony continued its hold on the professional market with its ever-expanding ½ʺ (1.27 cm) component video Betacam family introduced in 1982.
In Europe, Philips had developed the Video 2000 format, which did not find favor with the TV rental companies in the UK and lost out to VHS.
Videocassettes finally made it possible for consumers to buy or rent a complete film and watch it at home whenever they wished, rather than going to a movie theater or having to wait until it was telecast.
Whereas a VHS tape can be erased though degaussing, DVDs and other optical discs are not affected by magnetic fields.
[25] The format was later renamed MiniDV to reflect the DV encoding scheme, but the tapes are still marked DVC.
The DVC or MiniDV format provides broadcast-quality video and sophisticated nonlinear editing capability on consumer and some professional equipment and has been used on feature films, including Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002, shot on a Canon XL1)[26][27] and David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006, shot on a Sony DSR-PD150).
Yet videotape was still used extensively, especially by consumers, up until about 2004, when DVD-based camcorders became affordable and domestic computers had large enough hard drives to store an acceptable amount of video.
Consumer camcorders have switched from being tape-based to tapeless machines that record video as computer files.
Small hard disks and writable optical discs have been used, with solid-state memory such as SD cards being the current market leader.
Despite these conveniences, tape is still used extensively with filmmakers and television networks because of its longevity, low cost, and reliability.
Master copies of visual content are often stored on tape for these reasons, particularly by users who cannot afford to move to tapeless machines.
During the mid- to late 2000s, professional users such as broadcast television were still using tape heavily but tapeless formats like P2, XDCAM and AVCHD were gaining broader acceptance.
