The Trickle-down Theory: Pro Technology in Consumer Gear

Nowadays, we take for granted much of the technology we find in our camcorders. CCD chips, edit-control protocols and flying erase heads have greatly expanded our capabilities as consumer videographers and video editors. These features once were available only on very expensive camcorders. Where did all of these advances in video technology come from? Did the consumer electronics wizards just dream them up out of nowhere to sell more camcorders?

Not exactly. In most cases, these advances already existed in the world of professional videography. As consumer videographers became more savvy, they began to demand more control over their videomaking. In response, manufacturers simply borrowed the technology from their professional-level equipment, and gave it to consumers--but only in small doses over several years.

What follows is a historical survey of the various video technologies that have trickled down to us from the professional realm, beginning with the camcorder itself and ending with a look at DV and the future of video. Along the way, we'll try to examine why it sometimes takes so long for manufacturers to provide key technologies, and why some will probably never make it into the consumer market.

1982: The First Camcorders
Before camcorders, videographers (professional and consumer) had to record with an expensive two-piece setup--a camera and a (somewhat) portable VCR. This limited mobility and convenience, factors which impeded the growth of the consumer videomaking industry. The trend, at first, was toward greater portability in the VCR portion of the system. This led to a preference for the smaller tape formats like Beta and Matsushita's 1/2-inch M format, both of which were available to consumers in what we'd now consider to be expensive and unwieldy systems.

Then, at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in the spring of 1982, Matsushita (parent company of Panasonic) showed a small M-format VCR attached to an RCA camera--the first professional camcorder. The unit was small enough to rest on your shoulder, and included a "dockable" (removable) VCR unit that you could replace when it wore out or became obsolete. The optical pickup mechanism was a single Saticon tube, a device which cameras had used for years.

In the fall of the same year, Sony countered with their first Betacam, the BVW-1. The Betacam used a dockable recording mechanism and a tube-type image pickup. The following year, Sony's BVW-3 Betacam offered a three-tube configuration for better color reproduction.

Manufacturers made these three early models for professionals. They had a startling impact on the electronic news-gathering (ENG) field, reducing the number of personnel necessary for a remote video shoot from four or five to just two: cameraman and reporter. There were, however, no consumer camcorders available for the first year or so of the device's existence.

Then, two consumer camcorder formats battled for the public's attention: Sony's BetaMovie and JVC's VideoMovie. Both used half-inch videotape, and both represented the first big shift of technology from the professional video industry to the budding consumer-videography market. By 1983, total camcorders sold topped 400,000 units. And in 1984, Kodak released the first 8mm camcorder, which Matsushita manufactured. Soon thereafter in 1985, Sony made a big splash in the 8mm camcorder market, embracing the format as the best alternative to JVC's compact VHS-C camcorders. Only three years into the industry, the battle lines were clearly drawn.

A Chip Off the Old Block
Also in 1985, a new way of capturing light and converting it into electrical energy, the CCD (charge coupled device) chip, made its debut. Initially conceived as a way to make the camcorder smaller, the CCD had the added benefits of greater stability, durability and resolution than its predecessors. (See "The CCD: A Tiny Miracle" in the January issue.)

In the professional realm, CCD-based camcorders caught on quite rapidly, due in large part to the decrease in size and weight and the increase in picture quality. But in consumer camcorders, tube-based video pickup systems were still quite common for a number of years, even as late as 1990. Why did it take so long for the consumer manufacturers to catch up with the technology?

Big Numbers and Dirty Tricks
In part, this slow trickle-down of technology is due to economies of scale. In other words, the number of professional camcorders sold in a year is only a small fraction of the total sold to consumers. To gear up factory production for 5,000 professional units is one thing; gearing up for millions of consumers is something else altogether.

This is, however, only half of the story. In the international game of consumer-electronics marketing, there are a few common tactics employed by all manufacturers. The goal of these tactics is to glean every possible penny from consumers when a new technology is introduced. Consider: if the latest thing in video technology is the CCD pickup, and the manufacturers immediately put a CCD in every camcorder they produce, what have they gained, in terms of market share? Sure, they might gain converts away from those manufacturers who don't have CCDs in their camcorders yet, but they could accomplish the same thing by incorporating the new technology in only one or two higher-priced units. This has become a recurring theme in every aspect of the consumer electronics market, from televisions and radios to home-theater systems and cellular phones.

Edit Control
For the consumer camcorder industry's first five years, editing was an afterthought. It was, at best, the process of copying selected footage from a source VCR or camcorder to a record VCR, and perhaps adding titles or an extra audio track along the way. The most common type of edit control? Two index fingers, practiced in the art of hitting the play, record and pause buttons at precisely the right moments.

Professional video editors had the luxury of sophisticated systems that could perform a series of pre-programmed edits. Through large panels of buttons and switches, you could program these systems and tell them what to do. "Okay, player deck: rewind to the beginning of the tape; then play the scene that starts exactly at one minute, three seconds and five frames. Record deck: start recording at precisely that point, and stop when the player deck gets to one minute, twenty seconds and twelve frames," and so on.

These edit-control systems seemed intimidating at first, but they could make the job easier once you learned how they worked. In order for them to operate, you had to use expensive VCRs that had the ability to accept commands from a special kind of wired remote--the edit controller. For the first five years of the consumer camcorder industry, the only way you could get a professional edit of your consumer tapes was to take them to an edit bureau, where they would copy the material to a professional format for editing on their expensive systems.

In 1987, the consumer camcorder industry was toying with inexpensive ways to make the two-button technique of consumer video editing easier. It wasn't as though the technical problem was a difficult one. Why not simply attach a wire between the camcorder and the VCR that makes both pause buttons release at the same time, when you only press one of them? In this way, one of the first consumer editing protocols, Sony's Control-S, was born. (A protocol is a standardized method used by machines to transfer information from one device to another.) Not long thereafter, camcorders and VCRs began appearing with Control-L and Panasonic 5-pin connectors, and it became possible to transmit fast forward, rewind, frame advance, record, play and other commands from a wired remote. No sooner had these standard interfaces become available than a number of small companies--Videonics and FutureVideo among them--began making edit controllers that would take command of these new consumer devices.

At the same time, the big manufacturers were looking for ways to expand the camcorder market. The industry as a whole was booming, but it was also fiercely competitive. What direction would the market take when most of the potential weekend video hobbyists already owned a camcorder? The answer: to a wedding--or a bar mitzvah, or perhaps even a high-school soccer game. In a word, the industry went "prosumer."

The Quest for Accuracy
From the very beginning of the consumer video market, there have been people who made use of their consumer video gear to make an extra buck. Problem was, the early consumer gear wasn't up to the challenge at first, and the video quality--as well as the bottom line of these early businesses--suffered.

As more and more consumers began to use their equipment professionally, the manufacturers' consumer divisions met some of their prosumer concerns. We've already seen the development of the consumer edit-control protocols (Control-S, Control-L and Panasonic 5-pin); however, a few more steps were needed before the prosumer videographer could truly lay claim to the more advanced systems that professionals took for granted.

For one thing, the new consumer editing devices were only as accurate as the decks they controlled. Most VCRs and camcorders of the mid-1980s used very crude systems to keep count of a tape's elapsed time, usually in hours, minutes and seconds. This system was very inaccurate, offering edits that were difficult to keep within a second or two of the planned in or out point. Then, the real-time counter offered a slight advance, but consumer gear still couldn't achieve the zero-frame accuracy that the pros made regular use of.

Of Time Code and Lenses
How did the pros do it? With a little bit of technology called time code. Time code is a system of writing a specific address for each frame of video directly on the tape itself. A time-code counter number is easy to recognize; if it includes hours, minutes, seconds and frames, it's probably time code (see figure 1).

With time code, you can do many things that you can't do otherwise: you can make a quick series of choppy, five-frame edits in a video program; you can start or stop recording your video exactly where you want; and you can eliminate the tedious process of re-recording an edit each time the VCR starts recording a little bit early or late. This is why the prosumers wanted time code so badly; if they could purchase an inexpensive VCR and/or camcorder that used time code, they would be able to perform accurate edits without shelling out big cash for the stuff the pros used.

The first consumer camcorders that employed time code were European VHS units. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, video enthusiasts enjoyed the use of vertical interval time code (VITC) as early as the late 1980s--even on inexpensive VHS-C units. Over here, prosumers were doing all they could to tweak their existing gear for time-code use. Small electronics companies began offering time-code generators that would record time code onto the linear audio track of your VCR. Still, time code was clearly something that the manufacturers had decided to offer other consumers in the world, but hold back from the U.S. market. (To this day, no manufacturer's consumer division offers a VHS camcorder with time code in the U.S.)

Then, in the early '90s, Sony introduced its first U.S. camcorder with Rewritable Consumer Time Code (RCTC), the Hi8 CCD-V801. Immediately afterward, it did a strange thing: it withdrew the camcorder from the market. The company released a similar breakthrough product in 1993, the CCD-VX3. Along with RCTC, it had another crucial feature that the pros take for granted: three CCD chips, instead of one, to improve the color reproduction of the images it recorded. To this day, Sony's consumer division hasn't released any other three-chip 8mm-family models, and only a handful of camcorders have incorporated RC time code since its introduction.

A similar development occurred in 1991, when Matsushita, Canon, Sony and Hitachi agreed to develop a standard for removable lenses on consumer camcorders (the VL-mount system). Here was a way for home videographers to enjoy the same flexibility that home photographers had in their 35mm film cameras. Unfortunately, only two companies--Sony and Canon--have ever released a model that used the VL-Mount system, and the one VL-mount camcorder that was still available in early 1997 is no longer being manufactured (the Canon L2).

What gives? There's clearly a benefit to having these systems available to consumers. What sort of games are the consumer-electronics giants playing with us?

The answer lies in the word prosumer itself: an unwelcome blending of the worlds of the consumer and the professional.

The Perfect Camcorder You Can't Have
For almost a decade, the technology has been in place to produce a low-cost, consumer three-chip camcorder with removable lenses and time code. Yet no such beast has ever seen the light of day, nor is likely to anytime soon.

The reasons for these developments in the industry are complicated, and not easily explained. There are, however, a few basic truths we can attest to; truths which shed light on the situation:

1. Professional gear is expensive, largely because those who purchase it have deep pockets.

2. Consumer gear is inexpensive, because consumers don't have deep pockets.

3. If inexpensive consumer gear can perform the same functions as the professional gear, what's to stop the pros from buying the inexpensive stuff?

Also at work are those same economies of scale we discussed at the beginning of the article. In short: if a company has a choice between selling one million $400 camcorders or ten thousand $2500 models, which course do you think it is more likely to pursue?

This, in a large part, explains why the trickle-down of professional technology to the consumer realm is just a trickle, and not a torrent. There are other factors, to be sure--factors like consumer apathy, the corporate structure of America's electronics-distribution system, and others.

Our purpose here isn't necessarily to bash the manufacturers for not doing what we want them to do; in the long run, they'll always try to do what's in their best interest. They should, in fact, be commended for bringing a number of important developments to market--the most recent of which is DV, the exciting new digital format that's making waves among prosumer videographers.

DV certainly offers much of what professionals want in a camcorder format: great resolution, little generation loss, easy interface with nonlinear systems, etc. But if you're in the market for a low-cost, three-chip, zero-frame-accurate DV camcorder with removable lenses, chances are you'll be in for a long wait.

Joe McCleskey is Videomaker's technical editor.

SIDEBAR

Timeline of Important Camcorder Developments

1982

First camcorder shown at NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) convention

1983

400,000 camcorders sold worldwide

8mm format first developed by consortium of manufacturers

1985

Kodak releases first 8mm camcorder

Invention of the CCD image sensor

1987

Control-S, Control-L and Panasonic 5-pin edit protocols developed

Videonics and FutureVideo offer consumer-priced edit controllers

1989

First Hi8 camcorder (Sony CCD-V99)

1989

Debut of America's Funniest Home Videos

1990

10 million camcorders sold worldwide

First RCTC camcorder (Sony CCD-V801)

1991

First camcorder with V-Mount lens (Canon's L1)

Panasonic's WJ-AVE5, the first consumer-level switcher

1993

Sony and Panasonic offer 3-chip consumer camcorders

1995

Sony and Panasonic race to release the first DV camcorders

1996

Pocket-sized DV camcorders introduced (JVC and Sony)

1997

Release of Sony's DHR-1000 DV editing deck

--JM