Miniature formats: Size is important
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Recognising that full-size domestic tape formats were never going to be genuinely practical for portable use, it was natural for manufacturers to consider entirely new formats designed specifically for this purpose.

Although there were already too many different systems in the market, the reduction in size and weight such a design could provide would give any new system an important edge. And for portable use the actual format was less important, since the recordings made in the field were likely to be "rushes" - raw shots to be edited together later - and the final edited tape could be in a different, full-size format.

The first such miniature system to reach the market was a semi-professional portable system from Akai, called VK, in 1977. This used 1/4 inch tape, but in a full-sized cassette for longer running time. Although popular for a while, the fact that VK was monochrome swiftly relegated it to oblivion. Very few references to this system have been found, and in 1983 it was described as "long obsolete"

A more successful 1/4 inch format was CVC (Compact Video Cassette), from Funai in Japan and Technicolor in the US, launched in 1980. CVC cassettes were only slightly larger than an audio cassette, and provided up to 60 minutes of colour recording.

Meanwhile, JVC had developed a different solution to the problem - Compact VHS, which they introduced in 1982. This used the same tape as standard VHS, and the same recording format, but in a cassette which was only 1/3 the size. This compact cassette could be inserted into in a full-sized VHS adaptor shell, so that it could be played back in any VHS machine. In this way they achieved the required miniaturisation without compromising compatibility with older equipment.

Interestingly, both Sony and Philips had experimented with this compact-cassette-plus-adaptor approach, for Betamax and V2000 respectively, but neither had followed it through to an actual product.


A prototype miniature VCC cassette,
shown next to a full-sized tape.

 

CVC



VHS-C



Video8

A selection of miniature video cassettes, alongside a normal (full-sized) VHS tape.

Other manufacturers were also attempting to crack the miniature video nut. The "Holy Grail" was a single unit combining a camera and a recorder - the video equivalent of the cine camera. Several prototype formats were demonstrated in the early eighties, including MagCamera from Hitachi, MicroVideo from Panasonic and Handy Camera from Sanyo, plus VideoMovie from Sony. The situation was looking all too familiar, and in 1982 JVC, Matsushita, Sony and Philips got together to try to agree a common standard, based on the best features of the existing prototypes. This was to be based on 8mm tape (like Sony's VideoMovie), and would be called Video8. It was scheduled to be released "after 1985".

In all, 122 companies joined up to the Video8 project. But in an eerie repeat of the Beta/VHS story, JVC then started to back off - despite being one of the key players in the project's inception. They had brought out a shoulder frame for their VHS-C equipment, which allowed a portable recorder and camera to be bolted together, putting them just one step away from a single integrated camera/recorder. Then in 1983 they demonstrated a prototype of just such a unit, and in late 1984 launched the worlds first true Camcorder, the GR-C1.
In fact there had been one previous combined camera/recorder, Sony's BetaMovie system from 1983. This was a bizarre machine, which used a standard Betamax cassette and hence was large and heavy, and its non-standard single-head recording system meant that in-camera playback - one of the key benifits of a camcorder - was not possible. For both these reasons, the BetaMovie format made almost no impact.

The BMC-100 camcorder.

The specifications for Video8 were finalised in 1983, and 8mm machines started to appear in 1985. The small size of the cassettes, plus 90 minute recording time and high-quality FM sound ensured that this format was a success.

The first Video8 equipment was Kodak's KodaVision system, actually manufactured by Matsushita (Panasonic) and sold in the US in 1985. The chunky design of this novel system was not representative of the 8mm equipment which came after it!

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