The Time-Lapse VCR

It is surprisingly hard to keep a T-shirt from bunching up under a tweed jacket. Speaking of T-shirts, I got the one I'm wearing in the video here: www.redbubble.com/people/flemishdog/works/10491601… This isn't my design and I'm not making any money here; someone I follow on Twitter ( @FlemishDog ) made this design and frankly I could not resist the urge to buy it immediately because it's flippin' great. Check it out along with some of their other designs!

your VCR recording is better than 99% of digital gasstation security cameras

"Violently Smooth Jazz" 10/10 Closed Captions

"Are we... bitter... about something, Sony?" Literally LOLed

Can't believe that with so much quality content, this channel is still relatively obscure. This guy deserves millions of subs.

The fact that there is someone out there that loves VCRs and old tech as much as you do makes me happy.

That switcher simulation was awesome. You taking the time to simulate the CRT resync, it's a level of detail that makes my inner nerd feel so good.

There was also another application for VCRs that could "write" one frame at a time outside of surveillance. Back in the early days of CGI, people using Lightwave 3D and other 3D graphics packages needed them to copy their completed animations to tape! Why? Because the computers at the time were too slow to playback the rendered animations at a smooth 30fps (at least until the Amiga 4000 came out in 1992 in the case of Lightwave users). So a common setup was to use a single frame step VCR and a GPIO output on the computer to trigger the VCR to record the output...one......frame....at.....a.....time.

As interesting as all these videos are now, it shouldn’t be underestimated how important this type of video will increasingly become in future decades. Important historical work, thank you!

Nice T-shirt, very appropriate to the subject matter. I kind of want one now

I spent a long time working in retail years ago and we had similar equipment. I think our's were set to run for 24 hours on one tape because changing the tape was on the opening list. We had one for each day of the week with and A and B set, so 2 weeks of video. Our stores usually had 16 cameras running through a multiplexer into the time lapse VCR. I always wondered how they worked, but lacked the motivation to find out at the time. I hated having to review footage, there was no motion detection so you just had to fast forward until you saw something. I was so happy when our stores started converting to digital recorders. Those things were beasts back in the early 2000s, we still used analog cameras so these things had massive capture cards in them with a coax wire for each camera plugged into the back. We had a rack of equipment for like 20 cameras. I remember the software being a bit slow and it was a bit difficult for some of the less tech-abled managers, but was so much better than tape. Great video. I'm glad you reminded me that I wanted to know how these worked!

The level of professionalism that these videos exude and the planning that shows through is mind boggling. It's almost like a fully funded TV segment.

This was pretty interesting. It never occurred to me that time-lapse security videos required a special VCR to record.

Man you're genuinely and intellectually entertaining.

I remember when I amazed my husband by dropping open the little door on the front of the VCR and revealing loads of buttons. Why is this remarkable? He was an electronic engineer.

2:30 same reasons PCs were beige. In some countries in Europe, office equipment had to be a neutral color like that, and big companies made one case to use in all markets. Even in other places, it became a signifier that it was "professional" or business equipment, as opposed to toys.

I still have a time-lapse VCR (maybe a couple) in storage at work. Before we switched to digital we used it with a quad with multiple image options and up until the mid 90's we had another box in addition to the quad that interfaced with our cash registers. It would produce a text overlay of the transaction data in real time over the quad output. When we upgraded the cash registers, we lost this functionality and haven't had it since. This video brought back a lot of memories, in fact I still have multiple security tapes from the late 90's. I'm just a nostalgic pack rat I guess.

Here's a topic idea: There were VCRs that could write data to a special label that went on the end of the cassette. The VCR would write the current tape position every time a recording started, so you didn't have to search for recordings; the VCR could wind the tape to the right position itself. It would be neat to see how that worked.

I remember back in the 90s an uncle had a dozen cameras with just a couple tapes and always wondered what kind of sorcery it was used. This one hit me right in the nostalgia.

10:41 "you cant get more detail out of an image than was already there" You mean "ZOOM, ENHANCE, ZOOM ENHANCE" is not real?