[QuadList] Introductions

[Joe Owens]

I feel like a total junior here... didn't spend much time with  
engineering Quads, but I do have a special fondness for them as an  
operator.

  My history with Quad tape spanned 1976-1985.  I worked in two  
facilities; an on-air station in Saskatoon, Sask (Canada), and a high- 
end post house  in Toronto.  The on-air station was an RCA house, but  
converted to AMPEX when Type-C took over with VPR-2s. Then they went  
SONY.  The Toronto house was AMPEX all the way.

I worked first as an engineer, then as an operator/editor at the TV  
station, which had five machines in its tape room and two in a truck  
for location taping.
      The machines (as I recall) consisted of: one TR-70C, used for  
mastering and editing "Hi-Band" commercial programming (no timecode)
                                                                         
       two TR-60s, used for on-air program and commercial playback  
('short' run) and donor source video for production
                                                                         
      one TR-4(5?) Lo-band recorder for programming tape delay, and
                                                                         
      one TR-3 (?) Lo-band recorder, also for tape delay.

The VTRs in the truck were also TR-3's if I've got that right -- they  
were the horizontal flat-bed type recorders.

We avoided Lo-band where we could, but because half the machines in  
the mix were Lo-band only, scheduling was critical.  Lots of midnight  
and very early AM shifts doing the commercial runs for the day --  
this was before the availability of a cart machine for this market.   
Eventually they installed a Betacart-- circa 1986.
It was during this time that VT playback traffic went from somewhere  
around 70-80 plays a day to north of 250, so the department was under  
enormous pressure, handling commercial on-air, program delay,  
production, news, etc., all with ONE operator and a supervisor -- who  
was mostly concerned with file management and traffic rather than  
actual operation.

I worked as an on-line editor / vision-mixer at the post facility in  
Toronto (VTR on Scollard) where five Super-HiBand AVR-3's were  in  
service; three directly controlled by an RA-(4000?) editor (with a  
Vital Squeezoom!) for A/B Roll editing, and two more for duplication,  
wild recordings, studio recording, etc.  Several 7.5 ips recording  
heads were acquired for feature-length capability when the facility  
became a film-transfer point for the new home-video market.  The  
important thing was to re-adjust the erase-delay before use!
      There was originally one VPR-2 (which got "Merlin'ed), and  
later 3 VPR-3's showed up (late 1984?) with an ACE and two ADO's.   
And I suspect those same three VPR-3's continued their careers in  
Edmonton when the Toronto company demised a couple of years later.

Its been 23 years, but if there's any little practical hands-on thing  
that might help....  We needed to do a lot of on-the-spot things, not  
many of them orthodox, to keep them "on-the-air"!  I believe they all  
had personalities, like dogs or Douglas Adams' "Marvin", in the  
Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.



Joe Owens
Presto!Digital Colourgrade
302-9664 106 Avenue
Edmonton, Alberta T5H0N4
+1 780 421-9980
jpo at prestodigital.ca



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