Okay, now, before we go any further, the first thing that I noticed when you kind of cracked this thing open and tilted it up like this
was this enormous cast aluminum base, and I wanted to ask, just because, you know, I have an expert handy,
is that so large and so heavy because of the stability that's required in operation?
Absolutely. All these pieces have been put together with an incredible deal of precision
if anything has moved out of place, even just a small amount, the tape won't feed correctly,
or there'll be some sort of gap opening up in a mechanism, or it won't load in and out.
Right, because the thing to appreciate about this, guys, is 1986. 1986, right? This was digital
in 1986 at these, I mean, what, 40 gigs of tape?
Absolutely, and that's for a half hour tape. That's unfathomable in 1986 terms.
Yeah, this was basically the moon landing in tape form. You know, somebody said,
what if we made a tape that stored all digital video when computers of the day couldn't store all digital video?
The biggest hard drive in the world in 1986 was what, maybe 150 megabytes?
In 1986, no, not even. 150 megabytes would have come later.
I'm talking like, if you let government bring, you know? Sure, yeah.
And so to them say, no, we want to store 40 or even 80 gigabytes on a tape. Everyone,
what's a Gigabyte? This was like Doc Brown 1.21 gigawatts, like no one had ever heard of a Gigabyte
of data, and they proposed to put 40 of them on a tape. Wow. Yeah, the head spins at 10,000 RPM.
There's over a kilometer of tape in an hour-long cartridge.
So dumb. I love it.
But that's what you had to do, and I have nothing but respect for the guys who figured out how to do it.
Okay, let's see if we can do a break job on their masterpiece.
Yeah, we're going to take the Mona Lisa and just touch up the eyebrows.
It's just, it seems so sketchy.
I get that feeling now, and I've been working with this for two years. To stretch it out like that, and go, and we'll just do, kind of like that, you know,
instead of a, you know, like flat seems safer.
It does, but they tried that in the early days, and the machines were the size of an industrial washing
and drying machine, and they ran for, you know, multiple days at a time before breaking down,
as opposed to multiple months and years at a time, so I can see why they changed.
My God, look at it. It's pixel perfect. This looks as good as it does in your memories.
You know how you go back to playing old game, and you think, wow, I don't remember having this many,
like pixels. This is as clean as my memories as a seven-year-old tell me reboot used to look.
That's incredible.
And yeah, let's do no more than like three minutes, because we just used up 0.01% of the life of that
head way to go. Yeah, that was like, that was like 50 cents of head time right there.
You got to get a shot though of the front panel when you're ejecting. So you want to see, you want to get it in B-roll, but you got to watch Linus on this.
Oh, okay. So you just tell me when.
Just as an example of how far the engineers of this machine went,
to make this the finest machine possible, watch what happens when I eject it.
Oh, the animation. That is so cool. It mirrors what it's doing.
Sure does.
That is so cool. It's heavy. I hadn't noticed before because I was busy making a video.
Like the tape is heavy and it gets warm when it's in there.
Like you pull it out and the tape is hot.
Okay, we've gone on a long side quest here.
Do we want to have a look at the break on that one? I'd like to look at the break on that one.
All right, let's have a look. Okay, so cool. It's a memory card that you put in the slot to back up the settings of the deck.
We found it in a box of cleaning supplies in mainframe's vault.
You know, next to the wind decks. Memo. Basic setups.
Before we do that, do you want to give us just a quick tour of some of the other
key components of these systems? Absolutely. There's so many to see.
First of all, we've got a power supply over here that puts out 5 volt at 50 amps.
And it's made by the Brits, the guys who are famous for the quality of their electrics.
So we have had to do a few repairs in there, including taking some silver polish to the connections and the relays
to stop the machine from catching fire. If that's not enough, there's a second one of those standing up in the back
and a third power distribution module over here. I don't even know how it works, but the fascinating one to me are the boards.
This is a time before you could just go and buy off-the-shelf video conversion function chips.
Everything in this machine had to really be designed from the ground up. And it shows when you start looking at the modules that are hiding in the bottom here.
Because every one of these cards has custom BTS part number chips made at companies like
Motorola just for this device. And then a sea of double ported SRAMs so that multiple components can talk to them simultaneously.
I count five FPGAs. You like FPGAs, do you?
I love FPGAs. Well, then this is your lucky day.
I hope you're hungry. If this will open, which sometimes it does.
Oh, baby. Look at those FPGAs.
And this is 1993, this particular deck was built.
FPGA was still like a new technology. This must have been like an entire week's output at the Xilinx factory back then.
Then you add all the pals and gals had to be individually programmed, all the eProms, more of those crazy dual ported Rams.
It's no wonder this thing cost the equivalent of a third of a million dollars.
This machine was 10 times the price of a brand new cutting edge Digi Beta deck.
And it shows. So what are we looking at here?
Board one is processing control. Board two video record.
The one you just had was video play. Then we've got digital audio and analog audio.
Five boards each dedicated to just one function.
And each two feet long and a foot wide, and covered in the most expensive ICs available at the time.
So I haven't even shown you the cards in the back. Each one of these has its own special function on the tags.
We've got, I guess, a servo pulse shaper. You need one of those. I'm an enthusiast for those.
Absolutely. And this is the board in fact that I thought was giving us all those problems in those early days.
Right. I spent hours going chip by chip on this, looking for a problem that didn't exist.
Wow, what else we got in here? This is the motor control board
that turned out to actually be responsible for our problems.
Wasn't actually on the board either, but this is the thing that manages the clocks
and also every single thing that turns or moves or spins or stops and starts.
Wow. You'll notice, by the way, there's an entire Intel 8186 CPU on here.
A lot of cards in here have these little board computers. And they're all running their own x86 operating system,
independent and all coordinating with them over a separate Ethernet bus.
Wow. Now, we don't need all this I.O., do we?
Thankfully not. But these things were meant to go into a studio that probably already had a half a dozen existing formats.
So these machines were really intended to just slot right in and connect into the existing workflow as much as possible.
If you're wondering what the difference between a DCR 500 and a 300 is, it's just that the 300 has fewer of these inputs and outputs.
Otherwise, all the mechanics are exactly the same. Okay, I think that transitions us perfectly
to talking a little bit about the mechanical side. Excellent. There's a lot to talk about.
As a not-VCR technician, walk me through it.
Well, tape goes in the top here. Thank you. The slot is built for three different sizes of tapes.
And so there's actually a motor that moves the hubs in and out depending on the size tape.
Yep, you actually see a little diagram on the screen as it figures out which tape you've put in and adjusts itself to fit.
And then down it goes. And roughly 10 million components start moving in here all in unison.
There's belts and gears and flex shafts and all kinds of things
that put the tape exactly where it needs to be. So it wraps around this big head in the center.
Wraps around it. Yep, it goes from one corner all the way around to the other
so that it has as much room to go over that tape as it can get.
This over here is the motor that actually pulls the tape through the machine.
It's called the cap stand roller. Yeah. And then all of the little guides and things in here,
they're designed to make sure that the tape is angled at just the right points.
These ones are spring-loaded. They're the ones that tell how tight the tape is as it goes through.
It's making constant little adjustments to make sure it's pulling it just right.
And all the way through there are sensors, little lights here, like the kind of thing that makes the ding-dong when you go through a store
that just tells it that the tape is in the right position. Okay, and then, I mean, forgive my ignorance,
where is the part on the head that actually does the zeros and ones?
I saw the spinny part earlier. And the spinny part is it. It's hiding in this little slot down here.
There's little teeny tiny bits, basically one half of a transformer,
if you think about it, that when it goes whipping past the tape,
it's inducing current in there that it can pick up and turn back into a signal.
And it has to spin at 10,000 RPM. So this thing sounds like a dentist's drill whenever it's running.
Right, and then this is all going out into these boards.
Absolutely. These are shielded RF cables. They're carrying very faint signals to these boards that amplify them
and basically square the signal back up into nice ones and zeros so it can be decoded.
That's insane. Absolutely. Okay, you got your money's worth. I do want to see it in action then.
Do you have like a sacrificial tape we can throw in to just see it ripping around in there?
Oh, I can show you a tape. We got a tape or two around here. Let's have a look at a tape.
You guys ready? I'm ready. Everyone crowds around. This is the best part.
Holy crap. And if any one of those belts breaks,
I have no idea how I'd ever put it back together.
Is it just me or is the tape wrapped around it at an angle right now?
It is. So pretty much all video units use something called helical scanning
so that the frame is basically drawn diagonally across the tape.
And that lets you pack more information into a tape that moves slower through the machine.
As fast as this is going, this is still so much better than it would have been
if they just laid the bits out sequentially like on an audio tape.
The tape would have to move at like 12 miles an hour to get through the thing otherwise.
1986. I know. 40 gigabytes. Yeah.
I had no idea this existed. The Walkman was the hot new technology.
Yeah. And then they're like, bam, all digital tape.
Damn, Sony. Sony wasn't content with being one of the best.
They wanted to show they were the best. And I think they nailed it with this format.
Should we talk at all about where BTS comes from? Sure.
BTS was a partnership between Bosch and Philips. So speaking of, Bosch is better known for making a lot of automotive gear,
including the engine computers in anything German you've ever seen.
The MW Porsche companies like that all use Bosch electronics.
Right. Philips had a background NVIDIA gear.
Bosch, I'm not quite sure if they did previous to this project or not. But either way, they came together to form BTS.
And they made some really, really high end. Really good songs. Oh, absolutely.
So they made some brilliant video equipment that no one in the consumer world would ever have seen.
It was always stuff for studios. They made audio gear. They made video gear.
They made cameras. They made editing decks. And they made some Digi Beta and things like that.
But D1 was really them going out and saying, no, no, no. We want to be part of the top end.
Unfortunately, not long after these machines were built,
Philips bought Bosch's half. That turned into Philips Thompson,
which then turned into Thompson Grass Valley. I think from that point on,
this division got spun off as digital film technology who's been recently bought by the Prasad Group.
And that's a long way of saying nobody in any of those companies has any clue that they ever built such a machine,
let alone where to find any spare parts or manuals.
So that's why I'm here.
It sounds a lot like the airplane industry, actually.
The difference is the airplane industry has a lot of regulation and documentation.
And if BTS had been forced to conform to some of that, my job would have been a lot easier.
Well, I mean, on the spare parts side. So acquisitions get made.
And then you end up with these kind of orphan aircraft that nobody really owns the responsibility.
For producing any parts for them. Yes, that definitely sounds familiar.
These machines, as far as I can tell, back in the day, there would have been guys
practically in lab coats coming out to service them. The parts were not something that you sort of ordered and kept on sight.
Radio shack, probably. No, not so much, no.
So this is the kind of thing where they brought the part that you needed and they put it in for you and then they left and took their tools.
Yep, and the manuals. And so there wasn't just a lot of surplus parts alongside the machines.
And now if memory serves, I think I only need to remove a couple of these
and the whole mechanism lifts out. Fortunately, there's a tool for that.
Of course there is. Pardon me, gotta find it.
That was the other tool I was supposed to have pulled out when I said I was going to make this look professional and coordinated.
I feel like I'm helping dad to stay out of my life.
There you go. Okay, so we use a pair of these fancy pliers.
And we can take this little ring here and convince it to come off.
If we're lucky, it doesn't go winging through the entire machine.
Don't use that take. Oh, this is the floating one.
I don't need to remove it. This is the one that needs to come off.
That's right. That's how I did last time. Sorry, it's been a year since I did this.
Okay, ignore that part where I dinged the machine.
It's fine, it's not expensive. No, no, it wasn't my money, remember?
Thanks, Kyokes, yeah.
Okay, so there's a little ring down here and all you have to do is convince it to come off.
And then someone has to catch it before it pings off throughout the store
because we'll never find it again. Brilliant. So you're the catcher today.
I'll put that there. That's my porn roll too.
Oh no.
I've seen the people who comment on your videos. Let's not encourage them.
That's my job to encourage them.
All right, so the problem with this mechanism is actually three-fold.
There's three different things that go on with them. This is the break in the on position right now.
The position it goes into when it loses power. And it should stop this from turning very easily.
And it's still kind of... Yeah, there's a little bit of pressure on it.
Yeah, but not as much as there should be. And part of the problem is just that the spring itself is worn out.
It's gotten old. It's been wrapped around there so long it's lost some of its springiness.
Well, how do you fix that? You take the spring off and tighten it.
Right, right, right. But another problem is you see how these two bits are kind of rubbing against each other.
There's this piece here and then there's this spring underneath. Sometimes they rub and get caught and it doesn't go all the way back.
So we're going to bend this piece up so there's no way for it to touch it.
And then lastly, we also want to make sure that the brakes turn off when they're not needed.
This little rod is what's supposed to release the brakes. And you see how it only really touches it at the very end of its travel?
Yeah. They put some adjustment screws here so you could move the whole thing back,
but it's already about as far as it can go. So instead, once again, we're going to bend this very slightly inward
so that it grabs it a little sooner and pulls it off a little farther.
And that little bit of an adjustment is just what it needs to go both on all the way and off all the way.
We hope. It's worked so far. I think we can do it again.
Okay.
This is hilarious. If you've been wondering why the project has taken so long.
I haven't really. I just assumed that it was difficult.
You were right. Your assumptions were correct.
Yeah. I don't know what that was. My hunch says it was grease.
Must have been. I mean, could it even be just like remnants of dust crap kicking around in here?
Like it could almost be just about anything. It has a very greasy look though.
I'm guessing probably grease given that it had something covering it a whole life.
But was it lubricating grease or was it just don't rust grease?
Well, the good news is neither of these parts would rust. So. Oh, what is this?
Actually, you know what? Now that you mentioned it, that might be spring steel given that it's a spring.
So the man has a point.
Multiple. So good news is I have a friend in the aircraft industry
and I asked him what the best greases they had were and he gave me a little squirt of something that he's used before.
I have no idea what this magic substance is. But I'm told that it's a really, really good grease.
Monoject 412. Yeah, but is that the grease or is that the tube?
Who knows? I'm certainly not one to ask questions.
That is one of the thinnest washers I think I've ever seen in my life.
It looks like a picture of a washer. Right, doesn't it? Like it was simply drawn on.
Yeah, you can tell you're not meant to use a lot of this stuff by how it barely...
Yeah. Comes out. So you'll see here that the two pieces pull it farther apart.
They don't cross over. They sit like that. But now the mechanism wants to sit almost overlapping
where before it had a gap between it. That's good. That means we've bent it the right way.
But we also need to bend this ARM up and out so that it doesn't have...
Or sorry, I guess that'd be in. So the angle of it a little bit. Just a little so that it doesn't rub against the mechanism.
And so when this rod moves back, it pulls it just a little bit farther.
So all we have to do is give this beautiful precision German-made spring
a very ugly bodge with a pair of pliers. I love the generous use of the word we.
Yeah, you are an integral part of this operation.
You are there, so if I screw this up, I can say... But Linus told me to.
So we just go like that. Man, this thing, it almost like looks Rube Goldberg-like.
Oh, absolutely. And it's just dependencies, you know?
Well, just as a brief example, this is a weight that stops one of the rollers here
from vibrating around, and it locks in place.
It gets screwed in by a flexible metal shaft, which is driven by a belt,
like a timing belt out of a car. Now it's connected to this rod at an angle, so that belt is twisted.
You don't want to run a belt when it's twisted, but it doesn't matter, because before that starts turning, this piece lifts up.
And that's all triggered by a marble rolling down a chute onto a mouse trap,
which launches the fireworks, which makes the monkey run to the cheese.
Which wakes up your sister. Exactly. And then, you know, don't wake daddy.
That's a 90s kid reference, if I've ever heard one. I'm a 90s kid.
What do you expect? It'd be weird if I was making 70s references.
Where's the beef? And the cool thing is, we can actually run the machine in this position,
so we can watch these and see exactly what they're doing, and what kind of adjustments are needed.
I think it's time to give this a go.
Once it fires up, don't put your hands in it. You bet. That would be a very bad idea.
And so I want you to go ahead and flip on the power supply at the very back.
It's on the bottom there, the one that we plugged into.
Oh yeah, you bet. Yeah. Okay, you're sure? Uh-huh.
Okay, it's on.
Okay. And you can see we're already getting diagnostic information coming up. Oh yeah, look at that.
Yep. Let me get the everything set up here.
We've got a little work to do before we can capture.
We've got our video capture tool, and we have our very custom made
error logging tool that Brian here developed. So these machines have like a hash function inside.
They can tell when a bit has been read correctly or not,
and it's got some rudimentary error correction to try and patch those bad bits.
Got it. Basically, it like grabs from the previous frame and fills in the gaps,
and hopes that things kind of haven't moved too much. We could smart. Yeah, but we found a diagnostic interface inside the machine
that lets us tap into that information in real time. So we can get a log of when uncorrectable errors occurred,
time coded to match the video. So we can see, oh, there was a big spike right here.
Let's go to that section of video and really scrutinize it, and see if we can see something that's wrong,
that maybe we need to take that same piece of footage and replace it with one from an alternate copy.
Got it. Right, and because you guys have in many cases multiple edits,
like one that had less censoring for YTV, one that had more censoring for the American network,
you can kind of... Absolutely, absolutely. I'm still in the gap.
So, so cool. Yeah, so Jacob here has been scrutinizing every episode,
just absolutely obsessively looking for those, and keeps finding...
I've spent the last month watching basically every episode in real time looking for pixels that are off.
Does it take any of the magic out of it, or does it put more magic into it?
I don't know, maybe I'm crazy, but it's... He's 1200 kilometers away from me,
so I can't strangle him. So instead, I just curse away and do it again.
But we've got tons of basically Excel spreadsheets.
Every tape has a custom fix list. And so every time we render it, if there's an issue,
we're going to go back and readjust that command. And I think this has to be put out there.
There is no AI involved, no LLMs involved.
This is old school, if we want to talk about AVI, Synth,
and all the different plugins out there. This is truly algorithmic, and nothing for interpretive logic.
Because everyone says you can AI upscale this show, and we will eventually show you why you cannot.
Well, that's the other scary thing, is that when this thing was young and full of life,
by default, it would move the tape through the machine at a 40 times fast forward and rewind.
40? Yeah, and you can hear and see that this thing ain't no slouch on a normal day,
but 40 was what it would do by default. So I have to just manually do it.
I only go to six. Any more than that, and I feel like
we're just asking for the tape to explode. Yeah, this was undocumented,
but there is an RS422 control port that somehow these guys were so bleeding edge,
they're using the same control protocols as what's being used in digital capture today.
So we, just out of luck, our Blackmagic software,
we were able to connect right into that, and it's auto-capture everything from the auto rewind
to the play, even the time codes. We're actually getting the time codes synced up
so that every time we receive an episode on my side, we're at 59 minutes on the mark.
The episode starts at the one hour mark,
one minute or so for the intro, and so we have consistency tape over tape.
Previously, we'd have to figure out the offset of every single recording and figure out
if we're grabbing A from B, we have to figure out what that offset was.
So this has been tons of development. So this time code's actually embedded in that.
That's the raw serial data, and then just convert to hex. And even that's not the end-all, be-all.
We had one tape where it fixes itself,
but not at regular playback rate. So poor Mark here.
I had him here one night playing back at 0.2 times,
and then I have a capture file that's two hours long and manually cut basically every fifth frame
until we had good clean frames for it. Because some of these are just one tape.
That's all you got.
Hey, that's you.
This is all digital, right? If you're familiar with the broadcast technologies,
this has the earliest version of SDI that we are aware of.
So the SDI digital video goes digitally to our capture card one-to-one.
The audio also is digital audio in the same format one-to-one on our system.
That's basically CD audio. And because it's the exact same bit rate,
no noise, same levels, we can use it to cancel out and hear theoretical,
basically studio recordings of certain areas. It's just a matter of slightly adjusting the time
throughout the tape, but we have done some tests that are quite eerie. It sounds like you're sitting in a studio recording.
Oh, that's cool. So yeah, at the end here, we're seeing this titleist credits where it is the intro.
Sometimes it does have music, but most of the time it's silent, but there's none of the produced by, written by here.
And so when it would be shipped safe Quebec for the French dub,
they would put their own overlay in there, so it would be localized. Some of these tapes actually cut off slightly early,
like there's just no anything on them. So I've had to truncate this one by about a minute.
Hopefully I won't cut anything off. So if we just let it run for another four minutes,
it will, we might get a version of the intro with no audio and no text on it for, again, for localization,
and then it'll stop itself. Oh, interesting. Okay. Oh yeah, there was some Doctor Who episodes
that were lost or something, wasn't there? Yeah. There's just several.
But what they're finding is, there's these BBC retransmitters in, you know,
Africa that someone's about to sell the land, they go inside and they're finding tapes
that are in far worse shape than this and have a lot more money to spend to try and recover them
because they are considered lost media. And that's, Reboot's just one example of lost media right now
that we are trying to help, especially on the Canadian front, to restore.
And there's several other mainframe shows that have been discussed,
and frankly, licensing is beyond a nightmare.
So mainframe owns the Reboot property.
We have a direct contact there. So that's relatively simple.
But let's say, for example, a toy company were to own the intellectual property.
Yeah. Then it gets more complicated. We're hoping, you know, for...
Unless the aforementioned toy company was going through some bad PR right now
and they were looking for a win. Can I Hasbro?