Storage: From film to optical
Jun 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Collin Lajoie
Here’s a look back at the evolution from analog tape to modern digital servers, optical and flash storage products.
Throughout the 1940s, television really began to come to the forefront. Producers were looking at the recently developed tape technology in an effort to apply it to television, for the same reasons Bing Crosby had applied it to radio — rebroadcast and editing capabilities, according to Paul Cameron in his article “VTR Technology” in the Broadcast Engineer's Reference Book.
Crosby had invested $50,000 in a small startup called Ampex after seeing the technology AEG Magnetophon Signal Corps engineer John Mullin had brought back from Germany following World War II, according to Cameron.
In the late '40s, Mullin approached Crosby about applying this tape technology to video, and, with Ampex, he developed a prototype in the early '50s that led to the introduction of what is widely recognized as the first video recorder, Ampex's VR-1000, in 1956, Cameron says.
“The breakthrough that Ampex had was a two-fold breakthrough. One was that they came up with the concept of using spinning heads,” says Mark Schubin, technical editor for Videography magazine. “But [unlike what the Germans were doing with spinning heads during World War II] what Ampex did was have the heads spin transversely across the tape, and there were four heads, which is why the machines got known as quadruplex machines.” With the advent of this quadruplex machine came the 2in quadruplex videotape and ability to edit TV content.
“The early form of videotape editing was with a razor blade — splicing, the same as with film editing,” says Anthony Gargano, industry consultant. “It was the actual cutting and splicing of the videotape.”
Videotapes, and their corresponding machines, continued to develop through the '60s, with slight technological differences, until about 1970 when Sony introduced U-matic.
“U-matic was really the all-time champ because Sony itself sold, over the life of the U-matic tape … well over 1.5 million U-matic machines,” Gargano says.
Originally designed to be a consumer product, but failing to excel in that area because of its size and cost, the 3/4in tape held one hour of content, according to Schubin. From there, various analog videotape formats were introduced, including Sony's 1/2in Betamax in 1975; Bosch's 1in Type B in '76 (which, according to Gargano, became the standard in Europe); Sony and Ampex's 1in Type C in '76; JVC's 1/2in VHS in '76; and Sony's 1/2in Betacam in '82.
Digital videotape
Digital videotapes came into play in the late '80s with the introduction of Sony's D1 and the first digital videotape recorder, followed closely by D2, which recorded a PAL or NTSC signal with no compression and used 19mm tape. Both formats were relegated mainly to post-production applications.
“[D1] used 3/4in tape, just like the U-matic — large reels, but [it was] amazing that you could have a cassette that recorded what we refer to today as 4:2:2 video,” Schubin says.
Cameron says digital videotape continued to develop to include Sony's 1/2in Digital Betacam in 1993; 1/4in DV and MiniDV in '95; Panasonic's 1/4in DVCPRO in '95; Sony's 1/4in DVCAM in '96; Sony's 1/2in Betacam SX in '96; JVC's 1/2in Digital S in '96; Sony's 1/2in HDCAM in '97 (adding to the burgeoning interest in HD video); Panasonic's DVCPRO 50 in '98; Sony's 1/2in IMX in 2000; and Sony's MicroMV in 2001.
IT and storage
IT and broadcasting technologies have converged many times throughout the years, yet the IT industry has never specifically tailored products to target the broadcast market. But there may be a reason for this. According to market research firm IBISWorld, in 2008, the approximate industry revenue of the computer and peripheral manufacturing industry was about $62 billion, whereas the TV broadcasting industry came in at about $37 billion. Years ago, the disparity was even greater.
“No storage technology has been invented, other than the videotape … for television purposes. All of the storage technologies that we talk about, linear data tapes and so forth, hard disc, were not invented because of video; they were invented for something else, and television co-opted their use,” says John Luff, broadcast technology consultant.
In September 1956 (the year of the introduction of the first videotape recorder), the first model of the IBM 350 disc storage unit was released — a large cabinet that was part of the even larger IBM 305 Random Access Memory Accounting system. Jumping ahead to 1973, IBM released the 3340 direct access storage facility, code-named “Winchester,” which featured a smaller, lighter read/write head that could ride closer to the disc surface.
“It was IBM that developed the Winchester drive, and that was the underlying technology for all the hard drive-based products,” Gargano says. “RCA developed CED; that was capacitive head pickup technology, which actually required contact with the disk surface.”
Then beginning in the early '90s, innovations in storage systems in the IT world also revolutionized those in the broadcasting space with the introduction of redundant array of independent disc (RAID) systems. These allowed the coordination of multiple hard disc drive devices to provide higher levels of redundancy and performance than could be achieved with a single drive. The emergence of smaller, more powerful drives also helped the proliferation of RAID storage arrays, which became fairly standard in the mid-1990s, according to a 2003 article in IBM Systems Journal by R.J.T. Morris and B.J. Truskowski. And with the improvements in computer technology in the '80s and '90s, storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) enabled IT technologists, as well as broadcasters, to work with shared storage over a computer network, according to the article.
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