[QuadList] Introductions

[Pat Shevlin]

Hi Steve,

Good to hear that there are still some of us RCA guys alive out here.

I was one of the RCA design Engineers out of Camden New Jersey that worked
on the modulator and demodulator of the RCA TR70B.  My career started in the
early to mid 60's.  I also work for Ray Dolby as an intern Engineer at Ampex
when I was attending MIT.  I had a lot of good mentors in this business the
last 40+ years

I currently have (2) TR-600s, (2) AVR-2, (2) VR2000 machine.

All the best,

Pat Shevlin

Director of Technology

 The Media Preserve

"An Audio Visual Laboratory"

A Division of:

Preservation Technologies, L.P.

800-416-2665

724-779-2111

 <mailto:pshevlin at themediapreserve.com> pshevlin at themediapreserve.com

www.themediapreserve.com

 

 

 

  _____  

From: quadlist-bounces at quadvideotapegroup.com
[mailto:quadlist-bounces at quadvideotapegroup.com] On Behalf Of Steve Greene
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 3:38 PM
To: quadlist at quadvideotapegroup.com
Subject: Re: [QuadList] Introductions

 

Wow, another RCA guy!  My quad career ran from 1985-1998, with TR-600's.
Our office now contracts the duplication out, but I still have eight
TR-600's in varying states of repair, numerous headwheel panels and
reasonably complete documentation.  I loved the ability to go from high to
low-band playback by flipping two switches.

 

Anyone still using TR-600's?

 

 

 

Steve Greene
Archivist
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
(301) 837-1772

>>> jpo at prestodigital.ca 8/6/2008 12:22:30 PM >>>

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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