Re: [Avid-L2] Re:So you young whippersnappers might know where we're coming from...

Not steam, but an air bearing.

From Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadruplex_videotape
When it was in use, 2 inch quad VTRs required ongoing maintenance,
usually 3-phase power to operate (as mentioned earlier), plus an air
compressor to provide air pressure for the air bearing that the
spinning transverse headwheel rode on due to its high rotational speed
(some quad VTRs, such as the portable Ampex VR-3000, used ball
bearings instead due to the lack of availability of compressed air,
but these wore out quickly). They also required constant calibration
of the discrete electronics used by the older quad VTR's in order to
maintain a high-quality picture suitable for broadcast. The operator
was a much more skilled technician than today's "pop-in-a-cassette"
operators. These machines required quite a bit of set up in order to
make a quality recording and a broadcast quality image for playback.

--
KP
Hey, I like only having to 'pop-in-a-cassette'! I don't miss having to
align repro, playback, record, 24-48 tracks of SR, and a couple of mag
dubbers....
I do still have tweakers stashed at least five different places,
though...

On Oct 9, 2009, at 11:32 AM, chlowden wrote:

> I am certainly not as long in the tooth as some, but when I started
> in Soho, London, my first job was to dubb 2" Sony reels to 1". I
> remember the head tech telling me that the 2" ran on steam. For many
> years I thought he was joking until somebody confirmed that the ball
> bearing were steam injected to be frictionless. Still not sure if
> this is true, but I love the idea.
>
>

---
Kevin Perry
Post-Production Systems Engineer, Creative Services
Dolby Laboratories, Inc.
100 Potrero Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94103, USA
T 415-558-0250 F 415-863-1373
www.dolby.com | kevin.perry@dolby.com

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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