Who’s old enough to remember what what this is?

You’ve just noticed?

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My first job out of college had a 1" machine that was so large, they dropped it in while the building was in construction as it wouldn’t fit through the doorway. A few years later, when they were going to get rid of it, Ampex apparently called as the serial number was so low they wanted it for their internal museum. They had to take the machine apart to get it out. This was at a PBS station so their gear was in service a lot longer than most places…we were mastering on 3/4" until 94 or so when we finally made the switch to Digibeta, which was fairly new at the time.

Must have been a Viper (VPR3) Did it have a connection for compressed air?

I used to chew this while smoking at the Inferno suite

I believe it did!

My first online editing job had 3 BVH-3100s. They were cool because they had the “Auto Threading” function!

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Did that one have the built-in TBC?

The 2000’s came with 8-bit tbc boards in the machine. At Post Perfect we spec’d them with the older outboard tbc’s which, though much larger, were 10 bit.

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3100’s were plastic pieces of shit. The man from Sony literally said to us “they’re not better, they’re cheaper.”

So, they were cheap. . . Now it makes sense why Financial News Network let a 19-year-old mess with them along with their ADO-1000! It was still nicer than the 3/4 inch decks and Convergence 195 I had been editing on prior.

Ooh lucky you! Always wanted to play with an ADO but had to make do with a weird CEL Maurice fx unit, then an Abekas A53d.

I’m absolutely positive I could still lace one of those up blindfolded.

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BVH2000. There were 6 of them in my room at one time.

Especially after a couple of lunchtime beers!

Ampex VPR3 was the coolest 1" machine ever

Funny thing is… 8/10 masters/film xfers that received back in the day would have the tab in original position, untouched. As I was training VTR operators they all were told that the very first thing they should do is pop the tab.

Some bean counter at Post Perfect decided to use a cheaper distributor for tapes. Turned out we got a crate load of tapes with the buttons on the side in a little bag. The dubbers were seriously pissed off when they had to put red buttons in every tape before they used it (we went through hundreds of tapes per week, sometimes maybe even thousands)

Still remember cutting tape on a Quad 2" machine. Watch out when they rewind, could take a finger off. And I’m sure the freon we used on those old tape machines to clean heads was carcinogenic. And we used it by the 5 gallon can.

Not carcinogenic, but it was banned because it was a was destructive to the ozone layer. The shit we cleaned film with: that was carcinogenic.

Oh god the perc in the wet gate. When they’d change it, we’d all get headaches. Super glad those days are over…

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