[QuadList] Doug Hamer's Introduction Repost

[Douglas Hamer]

Well, I'm going to send my intro again. This is a different email client
than the one I was using in the hospital. (Kindles are amazing things.)
We'll see if it goes through.

Hello, I've been lurking on the list for a few months now and thought
I'd finally introduce myself. My name is Doug Hamer and I appear to be
alot younger than some of the people on this list. But in spite of that
I do actually have some quad experience, primarily as an operator
although occasionally some emergency repairs may have occurred when I
was nearby. (I can neither confirm nor deny them.)

I've always been interested in television and my first experience with
video tape recorders was in junior high where they had early 1/2" Sony
format recorders. The ones that only recorded every other field. I knew
there were better recorders around but I couldn't get my hands on any of
them. By high school the school system had acquired 1/2" EIAJ Sony
machines. We finally got to see both fields (yay!) but they still left a
lot to be desired. (Like color) The television production handbook the
school library had showed quad machines but warned that they were
already obsolete, soon to be replaced by better and better helical scan
machines. I was scared to death there wouldn't be any quad machines left
by the time I managed to get a job playing, er, working with them. This
was 1974.

My senior year I got a part time job recording network shows for the
local school systems to use in their curriculums. (Fair use,
dontchaknow.) There I met my first 3/4" machine. A rebranded Sony sold
as a Wollensak, I believe.) Yuck! But it was color. Also played with
some Ampex type A 1 inch machines, but they were already retired at that
point. Awesome pictures, though.

Off to college, I chose Iowa State University partially because at the
time they owned WOI-TV. One of only two educational institutions in the
country to own a commercial television station. I studied electrical
engineering and in my spare time tried to get hired there. Eventually I
succeeded in landing a part-time job. There I met my first quad
machines. Ooh! They had 3 VR-1200's. They could have been 1200b's, I'm
not sure. One of them was fitted with the Editec option. They also had
an ACR-25. Which I still think is the world's most awesome tape deck.
They even had a VR-1000 at the AM transmitter site, although it was
non-operational when I saw it. At last! Recordings that you could
actually pass off as live. Simply marvelous! I only worked there a short
time before leaving school and coming back home. By then they had added
3 VPR-2B's to the equipment room and I had to admit they looked pretty
darned good.

I got a full time job at KCRG-TV after leaving WOI. They were an RCA
house so I was presented with 2 TR-60's with the CAVEC option 1 with an
electronic RCA edit controller that I'm totally blanking on the name of.
It had lots of thumbwheels where you could dial in edit durations and do
previews and trims and such. Somebody had built a home-brew
intervalometer which operated that controller to make radar time-lapses.
That was the only time anybody ever used it while I was there. They also
had 2 TR-4's converted to high band color and a TCR-100. After working
with that beast I'm frankly lucky to still have all my fingers. There's
lots of fond memories working with the TR-60's, though. They made great
pictures.

One of the fun things I did on a nightly basis was to use 3 of the decks
to delay ABC late night programming by 30 minutes. It helped to develop
my OCD to a frightening degree. You couldn't take your eyes off them for
a second. I'm now mostly recovered, recovered, recovered.

I did that for many years, but slowly other formats crept in. They had 2
VPR-2B's when I started, eventually adding a pair of VPR-6's with
TBC-7's. One of those had a Lexicon box on it for "seamless" time
compression of playback. Probably one of the most evil things ever
invented.

Eventually 3/4" took over the tape room and drove out the quads. One day
I came to work and they were gone! I have no idea what happened to them,
although I believe the TCR-100 was sold to a religious broadcaster in
Virginia. We were left with an automation system that played 3/4" to air
for spot playback. A sorry state of affairs.

Later we got an Odetics system loaded with BetacamSP decks for spot and
some program playback. So that helped. Still not as fun as the quads,
though.

Now it's all servers and HD transport streams. No fun at all, except for
the occasional random freak out of the computer systems. "I don't want
to play TV today. So suck it."

There was a definite sense of pride knowing that not just anybody could
throw a tape on one of those quads and get a useable picture out of it.
Even fewer people could make a recording on one that would play back
properly. And to be able to get the playback aligned and cued for air in
under 15 seconds was just icing on the cake.

Sorry for being so long winded. I'm enjoying the conversations and hope
to be able to add stuff from time to time. 
-Doug Hamer