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Betamax If one can stretch their memories back to just a few years ago when HD DVD and Blu-ray were battling it out over who would become the newest video format for the home consumer, a similar war was waged in the mid 1970s between good old VHS and Sony’s Betamax for the next best broadcast-quality camcorder. Obviously, VHS won out and even today some of us are still clinging to our beloved copies of VHS movies that haven’t been made on DVD even though most of us have nothing to play them on. Betacam After the failure of Betamax, Sony introduced the Betacam format in 1982 and it was a resounding success in the professional video production industry. Betacam tapes were available in small or large and had 300 lines of horizontal resolution. The Betacam was portable and while they would be considered quite clunky today, for the time …
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HDCAM HDCAM is a version of Betacam. Digital Betacam, or Digi Beta, is a video digital recording format in standard definition, while the HDCAM is the high definition version of it. HDCAM was introduced in 1997, and it was the first HD broadcast format at the time. HDCAM SR (Superior Resolution) is a newer version of HDCAM, introduced in 2003. The HDCAM SR is more commonly used in HD television news today as a master recording format, although television shows across the world still use HDCAM for shooting. Like other Betacam tapes, the HDCAM is colour coded – they are black with an orange top, and HDCAM SR tapes are black with a cyan top. One of the major differences between the two types of HDCAM is that the HDCAM requires a lower data rate to record the HD footage, thereby squishing the image. The HDCAM SR does not squish …
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Betacam The original Betacam format was launched on August 7, 1982. It is an analog component video format, storing the luminance, “Y”, in one track and the chrominance, on another as alternating segments of the R-Y and B-Y components performing Compressed Time Division Multiplex, or CTDM.[1] This splitting of channels allows true broadcast quality recording with 300 lines of horizontal luminance resolution and 120 lines chrominance resolution (versus ≈30 for Betamax/VHS), on a relatively inexpensive cassette based format. The original Betacam format records on cassettes loaded with oxide-formulated tape, which are theoretically the same as used by its consumer market-oriented predecessor Betamax, introduced 7 years earlier by Sony in 1975. A blank Betamax-branded tape will work on a Betacam deck, and a Betacam-branded tape can be used to record in a Betamax deck. However, in later years Sony discouraged this practice, suggesting that the internal tape transport of a domestic …
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