In fact, Sony has stopped making HDCAM-SR tape decks. The tipping point was the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan and damaged the factory that made the high-end videotapes that we all used, the Sony SR tapes. It even adds fancy effects, like page turns and heart wipes! Maybe that was the Abekas that did that, or the Axial? In any case, professional videotape is all but extinct in modern post production. At its most complex, the edit controller orchestrates multiple tape decks and does dissolves between tape sources.

At its simplest, an edit controller remotely controls professional tape decks. For example, every episode of Friends was assembled and titled in a linear online bay.Ī key component, among the hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment-including Chyron character generators, tape decks and highly-trained staff-is the edit controller.

This is how TV shows in the '90s were created. It was like conducting a symphony-orchestrating the buzzing and whirring of all the equipment to create a final master tape that was then dubbed thousands of times in huge banks of tape decks and shared with the world. I remember the million-dollar rooms with star editors masterfully controlling a starship's worth of panels with controls with flashing lights and the whir of tape decks shuttling.

My background in post production goes back to the transition from videotape-based linear online rooms and the dawn of file-based workflows. It looks like an old fashioned edit controller!'

WEBSITE: When I got my hands on the HM Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Speed Editor, I thought to myself, 'My, that looks familiar.

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