Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

Back on topic, Digital8 may have been the shortest-lived format of them all.

I recently looked for my nice Sony Studio Hi-8 deck with TBC and all; I was somewhat relieved *not* to find it! What a boat anchor. Musta' lent it to somebody. Maybe I sold it here - sorry! The next time I need it, I'll see if I can locate a Digital8 camcorder...

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

Charles.

The tape transport on those camera-recorders may have been similar to the Sony TCD family of DAT audio recorders. Very many of those failed due to a simple issue, drying of a lube which caused a swingarm with a guide pin on it to lock. It had a very light hairspring to return it during the eject.

The arm and pin would move in under positive mechanical pressure. On eject, the pin would not fully return due to sticky lube. The tape would load but would initially be erratic, then eventually munch the tape when ejecting it.

In the DAT TCD10 PRO series, it was a dog to get at but once freed and relubed, all was fine. If the lube is just draggy, leaving the cam in a warm place for a while before using it may help.

Hunting down a service tech with the necessary skills might be a mission now.

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

OhBoy another load of junk on the way out (it will never ever end)
Panny introduced their new fujifilm developed tech for a fantastic new cmos which will make even the newest cameras obsolete - excited and pissed at the same time me

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

Bruce, so we can expect some exciting new Hi8 cameras then...?!

Bob, thanks for that info. I have located an appropriate service facility and let's see what happens.

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

I can't seem to discard this thing, as it changed my professional life in such a profound way. What the hell should I do with it? I know what I should do with it -- drop it off in the recycle bin at my local Best Buy. But I haven't been able to let go of it for twenty years.

They say admitting a problem is the first step to recovery. I say "vive le DV-Rex M1!"

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

At least it’s small!

I’m thinking about art projects made from obsolete video technology... I think I have a couple lesser DV converters to cast in resin or whatever. In the waning days of Firewire/DV, I couldn’t find my converter. I called people I’d previously loaned it to, looked in the garage, everything! Finally I bought another ADVC100. I did the job, then found the original converter a couple days later. That was my last such project... now I have two of them!

Is there a prize?

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

[Oprah mode]

So, Chris, tell us how this profoundly changed your life.

[/Oprah mode]

Andrew

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

Easy! With that DV-Rex M1, I said goodbye to non-linear analog tape-to-tape editing, and hello to real-time digital video editing on a computer.

Up to that point I had been doing assembly edits on 3/4" U-matic, Super VHS and Hi-8, and cringing at the 2nd-generation loss of what little quality VHS had to offer on the customer copies going out the door. Ouch!

Everything changed for me with the Canon XL1 and the Canopus DV-Rex M1. Suddenly the edit master was equal in quality to the camera master; customer copies went from second-generation to first which was a huge improvement, and editing became more enjoyable and a whole lot easier.

I had never paid attention to NLE before this as it all required rendering time, and for me it was just faster to build with crash edits from tape to tape. I didn't have time for rendering and didn't give a damn about Final Cut Slow. But then Canopus came out with this card that could do cuts in real time, on a PC platform like I wanted, and that was it for me. It changed everything.

I wound up working for Canopus at trade shows and I did their US website, and I helped with their forum moderation. All of which laid the groundwork for DV Info Net.

And that's why I can't find the nerve to throw away that breakout box!

Man, I hadn't thought about all that in a long time, so thanks for asking.

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

Do we want to get started about my collection of obsolete video equipment ...

Sometimes you need to understand the past, to explain the technologies of today. Like drop-frame timecode.

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

Just yesterday I fired up my old $5,000 P4 workstation with the Matrox RT.X100 and Parhelia GPU only to discover my creative 5.1 sound system S700 has gone bad and is blowing fuses. Then I discovered my best s-VHS panasonic deck now had a terrible picture and my sony digital 8 deck with time Base corrector intermittently goes on and off.
Someone wanted a VHS to DVD transfer that would require editing and since it's still connected to most of my tape decks it would be easier to use the old system. Plus for nostalgia I wanted to use the old system I spent thousands of hours using but now sits unused.
Anyway using premier pro 2.x I captured the tape and was going to copy the avi off to my current workstation but after seeing the file was over 10GB decided hey, why don't I go ahead and do the whole project on the old system like I used to. So I plugged in some lesser speakers and got to work. So it took a minute to fumble through premiere but it all worked great, 4x3 monitors, 4x3 tv monitor and all.
Yeah it's hard to part with stuff.
I do not miss tape at all

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

Unfortunately I learned that putting my old junk in the attic is easier than getting rid of it. I try to avoid the emotional attachment however - aside from a small trunk of vintage film cameras from my Dad's collection, going as far back as the early 1900's. Maybe once a year I look through those. Got out my old aluminum PowerBook G4 a couple years ago and was having fun playing with the old software for awhile (although my real reason was to access some very old MacDraw II files). Went out of the room for a few minutes and when I came back it was dead, never to be revived. The next day I dragged an ancient Power Macintosh G4 tower down from the attic and the exact same thing happened, but that time it only took a few minutes before it died. Of course, both went back to the attic anyway.

My first video system was a Power Macintosh 8100 with 48MB of RAM and a Radius VideoVision Studio board. But the $10,000 grant I got wasn't enough to also afford a disk array so I could only do something like 320x240 (the VideoVision board alone was almost $3000). This was 1995 and I was mainly using that machine for 3d modelling and CAD however. Was going to throw it away many years ago and a friend said he wanted it. Ran into him recently and he laughed and said it's still in *his* basement! :-)

Then there was my original Apple ][ that I got in 1978 (serial #4546). I left it in my shed in a second home. Everything in that shed was gradually ruined by the leaky roof and rodents, and finally it collapsed when a tree fell on it. I still have all the original manuals (part of them look like xerox copies stapled in the corner), and also the original software on cassette tapes. At least they don't take much room to store!

Re: Once expensive, now junk, but still hard to throw away?
 

I may still have one of those big expensive old hi8 decks. It never worked right and my D8 decks were so much smaller and better with FireWire. Maybe I need to see if I can find it since maybe it's worth something Afterall???