[QuadList] Doug Hamer's Introduction Repost

[mike at bolandcom.com]

Wow, you nailed it Doug!
You touched on lots of memories for a lot of us!
Especially the wonderfully broad experience had
working in smaller towns!
Thanks!  mike

mike at bolandcom.com
___________________________________

On Thu, 19 Jun 2014 03:52:07 -0500, Douglas Hamer 
<hamer133 at infionline.net> wrote:

> 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
>
> ______________________________________________
> Please trim posts to relevant info when replying. 
>
> Change subject to reflect thread direction. Thanks. 
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