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betacamsp[1]Regular-8: Regular-8, or Regular 8 mm film, was developed in the 1930s by Kodak. This format of film was more portable and less expensive than 16 mm, which had been introduced earlier. It was intended for creating amateur movies, but many popular major motion pictures were released in this format so people could watch them at home.

VHS Tape: Most of us grew up with our movies on VHS tapes. They were introduced in the 1970s, and until DVDs became more prevalent, VHS tapes were the go-to format for video recording.

Betamax: Beta tapes were first introduced in the 1970s and were a rival format to VHS tapes. This resulted in a giant format war, which VHS eventually won in most parts of the world. Before that, they were quite popular for recording home movies and independent films, and were also smaller and lighter, meaning the VCRs that played the tapes were also smaller and lighter. One of Betamax tapes’ biggest downfalls was that it’s camcorders were record-only, meaning one couldn’t play back their recording on the camcorder itself and the filmmaker would have to put the footage into a VCR to see it.

VHS-C: In 1982, the VHS-Compact, or VHS-C, was developed. This much smaller cassette would hold between 60 minutes and 180 minutes of footage, and could be used in very small camcorders without having to be converted to watch on a VCR. In order to play the tape on a VCR, all one would need is a mechanical adapter – essentially, an empty shell the size of a regular VHS tape that the compact one could fit into.

MiniDV: The term “DV” means a storage format for Digital Video. MiniDV are a type of small video cassette that were originally introduced for home or amateur use, but later were adopted by professional productions. They are sometimes called S-size cassettes, as there are four sizes of DV cassettes; small, medium, large and extra-large. MiniDV are the smallest size. DV tapes were first introduced in 1995.