Don't know, there's a few mods that would need to be done to get the FM subcarrier from the head amplifier but it's a standard PCM digital format.

ARC Tech-109:

I have a Sony VO 2600 and a VO 2850 that I occasionally use for transfers. I actually just repaired the 2850; a real chore wrestling 83 pounds of U-matic on my counter. The 2600 is tucked neatly in the bottom of a wooden TV stand in my living room; it also serves as a stabilizing weight as I have 30” Toshiba wide screen CRT TV on top.
I used to have a VO 3800 portable, but still have a VO 4800 and a JVC CR 4400 portable.
I really do appreciate the performance of this format

There was a time before climate change when I had one of those VO-3800's strapped to my side and a TK-76 on my shoulder... all powered with a motorcycle battery that lasted maybe half hour. I was an A/V nerd in school and made the mistake of volunteering for camera duty during a school event at 12 years old, I was no match for this but I managed to keep it steady. We also had those Sony open-reel porta-pack's with the big camera and this long lens but being B&W wasn't good enough for me... lesson learned. Back then everything was clunky and heavy, we had a number of those Setchell Carlson "Educator" TV/monitors on tall carts with either a VP-2000 U-Matic or Sony 8600s feeding them. Problem here was the school floors were that terrazzo from the 1930's and the big carts had 4-wheel swivel steering meaning they would go in any direction and being top heavy would crush an A/V nerd flat. We didn't get VHS until the mid-80's and those were top load hand-me-down's from a larger school district that went front load and the big Setchell Carlson's survived into the early 90's.
There were a number of Panasonic NV-3160's in the A/V lab along with two of the "new" VO-5858's and Panasonic SEG which I always hated because everyone wanted to get EFX happy and make everyone sick. I ended up with the 3160's and a number of other decks when the district auctioned them off paying $20/lot but passed on the big sets. The 3160's died years later from the head chips coming off the little mounts. Just the centrifugal force of running at 1800 is enough to pull them loose so do be mindful of yours as both Sony and Panasonic used that urethane glue of the day and it gives out over time.

Okay so an update on my 3/4 U-Matic caps project.
Been spending some time recently on putting together this little clips project and I'm at the point of uploading to YouTube however each time I do the end result looks like... don't step in it. My capture chain starts with a Sony VO-2860A U-Matic feeding a NOVA 800 TBC and that feeds the composite input of my DVW-A500 DigiBeta which then does the conversion to SDI which I capture as an .avi using a Blackmagic Decklink SDI card in my Tricaster TC550. From there I do the cuts using kdenlive under Fedora then export the entire project as a high rate mp4 and upload to YouTube which waters things down to basically garbage. What I'm fighting is the interlacing which is really making things look rough and coarse so my question is does anyone have suggestions on how to either interpolate the scan lines to a progressive format or somehow smooth things down? I've tried capturing direct from the composite using the Tricaster's own capture but this makes no improvement and uses a hardware mjpeg-2 compression which is great but the bit rate suffers as it's designed for web streaming.

The purpose of this is to demonstrate the ancient capabilities of the format itself and the camera I used to capture with which was a Sony DXC-M3a, these were recorded during the early 90's when the best we had was color-under for the home. Right now the modern tech is making things look far worse than what we had and with over 30 years of my own experience I'm at my wits end.

This is the results I'm getting right now, this was shot last weekend using a Sony DVW-790 DigiBeta camera, edited using kdenlive in Linux then exported as mp4 and uploaded to YouTube... https://youtu.be/4aiuFKTzbTA and it looks worse than VHS.

Now just for the sake of comparison these videos were also shot using Digital Betacam https://youtu.be/YDu7YpkkfJE and https://youtu.be/AUWMDCUofUg but with no editing, just captured using the SDI input of the camera bus of the Tricaster and watered down to mpeg-2.

The video frequency response (horizontal resolution) doesn't look bad.

The following may be repeating what you already know, but let me know if that's right:

The vertical has something wrong, either the interlaced fields are in the wrong order, or (I think more likely) you are only getting one field in the output, causing stairstepping on diagonal edges and gaps on diagonal lines.
When you run just the vintage gear into an analog monitor, are both fields present?

Can you tell if the final result posted to YouTube has only half NTSC vertical resolution? When I look at settings, it says 480P, so I think somewhere in your processing chain it is dropping one field (leaving 240 lines) and somewhere it is interpolating each retained field to 480P.

I will look deeper into this. On my end I'm using all CRT's on the analog side and Dell S-2409 LCD @ 1920x1080-75Hz refresh. Now that you mention it the vertical detail does look like its missing one field on the final.

Going to basically start over from scratch with default settings and see how that works out.

Thanks for the insight.

brett

Okay so the moment everyone (almost no one) has been waiting for; Old-school U-Matic video captures from the early 1990's. Yes I have finally got everything captured and uploaded to YouTube in its native low-def 4:3 glory. Everything is direct from my old U-Matic tapes that were recorded using a JVC CR-4900U portable and captured on the Sony DXC-M3A when it had good tubes, only the night scenes were shot using a DXC-3000 and they look ghastly.

The signal chain starts with my VO-2860A feeding a NOVA 800 full frame TBC and this was run into my Sony DVW-A500 DigiBeta and chop & paste edited running the decks as a master & slave pair with all the signalling SDI then captured using a NewTek Tricaster Broadcast TC-550 which uses a mild hardware mpeg-2 then uploaded to YouTube and watered down even more. No the end video is not 4K or even 1080P but rather a testament to the resiliency of the U-Matic format. This was state-of-the-art before DVD's and I'm sure the critics will have plenty to say, don't expect an apology from me.

The issues I was having earlier were the result of multiple codecs and a timing issue with my one TBC that wasn't apparent as I use all CRT's. A complete recapture and direct upload in the mpeg-2 format eliminated all of this and for a 30-something year old video it doesn't look terrible.

Anyway check it out tell me what you think, flames will be ignored... or laughed at.

https://youtu.be/2HlJLsBXHxQ

Looks good to me.

So how this all came about is I got a set of new satacon tubes for the M3A thanks to a friend at a local station and spent an evening setting everything up as best I could with the what I had, Hitachi V-089 vectorscope, V-099 waveform monitor and Sony multi standard monitor with the intent of getting some really good video to put on the Mpls cable access channel-35... that was the intent anyway. I ended up setting the green ped at 0 ire with the red & blue at 7.5 and didn't do a diff check or go over my work, all looked good on the scopes and I went with that. Next day in the car I do a quick auto black balance and everything does what it should and balanced against the green that it assumed was at 7.5 and set the levels accordingly, I didn't know this at the moment and assumed all was well until I did the playback that evening and saw my error and ended up chucking all 6 tapes into a drawer hoping they'd disappear forever... I was pi-- well you get the picture of why everything has a slight green cast.

The night shots were sometime later when I tried out a DXC-3000. I wanted to see what the night sensitivity was like, it was alright but the camera was too sparkly in normal light and edgy with proper lighting so I went back over the M3A and got it right but it ended up on the back burner in favor of a DXC-325/CA-325 package with a deep educational discount of $3500.

I was originally going for an urban documentary using the angles for a more in the moment feel, actually it worked well with the fast clips and motion thirty-some years later.

:thmbsp:

I might have a few more tapes shot on the M3A using the CR-4900U but the pennies were put away for a betacam and that ended up being an AMPEX branded BVW-35, if I can find them I will put something together.