Im going to edit an AMV on VHS with a setup that cost over $25,000 in the 90's

[justin_]

Are you going to sit in front of this while you work or what

That's the idea. Im going to cut back the piece of plywood so there will be plenty of room for a chair. I setup the control deck to be at a good height with a chair, and I have a tube light that I might put in the back for light.

[CrackTheSky]

Keep posting photos and stuff, I'm loving this.

[justin_]

Keep posting photos and stuff, I'm loving this.

Will do! I'm currently waiting for some more tapes to come in off eBay and I have yet to decide on a song, but I will give updates. I'm kinda thinking Ready Aim Fire by Imagine Dragons could be neet, but I don't know. I kinda want to go with something 90's, but I don't know what song.

[CrackTheSky]

Will do! I'm currently waiting for some more tapes to come in off eBay and I have yet to decide on a song, but I will give updates. I'm kinda thinking Ready Aim Fire by Imagine Dragons could be neet, but I don't know. I kinda want to go with something 90's, but I don't know what song.

In my opinion and experience, older anime generally don't pair too well with newer songs...but that's just me.

[justin_]

Will do! I'm currently waiting for some more tapes to come in off eBay and I have yet to decide on a song, but I will give updates. I'm kinda thinking Ready Aim Fire by Imagine Dragons could be neet, but I don't know. I kinda want to go with something 90's, but I don't know what song.

In my opinion and experience, older anime generally don't pair too well with newer songs...but that's just me.

Yeah, I really didn't think it would work too well. Now I have pandora on 90s songs and I have a few ideas.

[DJ_Izumi]

How accurately can you edit with VHS which lacks the luxury of embedded time code? I only ever worked with digital tape VTR decks, mainly DVCAM, which have all kinds of nice things, including frame accurate inserts and such. (I mean, not that I'd ever want to go back to any kind of tape again in my life.)

[justin_]

Im still learning the gear, but it seems that I cannot just record the audio track to tape and then just throw clips on top of it. I can record the audio off a CD (or a tablet for that matter) to tape, and then put video clips without the audio track on top of it, but it seems like it is impossible to record just video, or just audio to VHS. If I want to record audio I need to supply some sort of video whether that be another tape, or just a single color generated by the edit controller, and if I record video with no audio (not just muted audio, no audio) it still records a blank audio track to the tape.

That said it is still better than just using 2 consumer VCRs audio wise as when I am done editing together the video I can take the recorded tape and put it into the playback deck, use the edit controller to take video from the playback deck and audio from 'AUX 2', and record it to a new tape without rewiring anything.

Im still waiting on some tapes before I start, but I am still learning the edit controller and trying to see if I can get my hands on a second playback deck so I can do A/B editing in one take. At this point I have the basics of editing down and I am learning the more intermediate to advanced parts. The manual shows you how to do the basics, but doesn't mention too much about anything beyond that so at this point it is just trial and error on practice tape. It's nice how you can record onto VHS a theoretically infinite amount of times.

[justin_]

How accurately can you edit with VHS which lacks the luxury of embedded time code? I only ever worked with digital tape VTR decks, mainly DVCAM, which have all kinds of nice things, including frame accurate inserts and such. (I mean, not that I'd ever want to go back to any kind of tape again in my life.)

Woops didnt see I was upto 2 pages!

The edit deck itself keeps time. When you turn it on it sets the timecode clocks to 00:00:00:00 (hours:minutes:seconds:frames) and you can rewind the tapes to the beginning and reset the clock so that you can always have the timecodes align. It is quite good and with everything synchronized together (the edit deck creates a sync pulse that goes thru an amplifier and out to the VTRs, PVMs, and the character generator) it is very accurate. I haven't tested it, but it seems that if you rewind the tapes and reset the clocks when you start any frame will always be at the same timecode time.

As far as the actual editing gose, you set the Mark In and Mark Out points on the playback VTR, and the Mark In point on the record VTR, then you have the deck make the edit and the Mark In point seems to be frame perfect, but (and I haven't done too much testing with this) the actual end of the clip seems to be just a bit after the mark out point. When the deck makes the actual edit it gets both tapes to the right point and then rewinds them about 10 seconds, starts playback, and then when it reaches the mark in point it starts the recording.

[justin_]

So bit of an update. It's currently about 4: 30 a.m. And I've spent the last 4 plus hours trying to learn the edit deck as the manual is near useless for anything but the most basic features and the internet doesn't seem to know anything about it. I have figured out that it is possible to lay down only audio or only video tracks so theoretically I can lay down the audio track and then stack videos on top of it like you would do with modern-day digital editing and that should help me out quite a bit as you can Time the video perfectly but there's no way for the edit deck to trigger the CD player so you have to start that manually and you can never start at the same time twice. All of this is in the, this deck seems to have some features that I can't seem to find anywhere in the manual or online and they are confusing me and turning the deck off and back on again doesn't actually reset it it will keep settings and I'm confused on what I've set and just need to call it a night and try again later. So I haven't made any progress on the actual AMV but I've made a bit of progress on learning the deck. Hopefully next time I sit down and try this out I can at least get an audio track laid down. Part of the issues I'm having is that the VHS decks weren't actually physically configured properly, the playback deck was playing back HiFi and the recording that was playing back Hi-Fi but it wasn't recording in Hi-Fi and that seem to be causing some issues. If that was set correctly at the beginning of the night I think I would have the audio done by now in a bit of video but this whole setup is confusing.

Anyway I'm sure that's not the update anyone wants to hear but hey at least I can put out a 'I'm still working on it this isn't dead' update. Like I said this isn't going to be overnight, and the learning curve on this edit deck is a bit more than I thought it would be so I'm glad I didn't say would be fast.

[CrackTheSky]

Props to you, I would have given up after that