Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M
I know I've gone as far as three maybe four generations of copying in the VHS format, and despite tons of garbage getting in each time they were still rather watchable (though using a video stabilizer during dubbing would have helped greatly).
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I remember seeing a show called
The Secret Life of Machines, a British series that examined the history of everyday pieces of technology: washing machines, sewing machines, refrigerators, etc. I remember there was one episode magnetic recording, where they showed how audio tape may be made with Scotch tape and rust: take a piece of Scotch tape, rub it in a pile of rust powder, shake off the excess, then run it through a reel-to-reel tape recorder. The message they recorded was "this recording was made with Scotch tape and rust," which didn't sound bad at all when they played it back.
They also talked about video tape, and how the image quality of a video cassette--I don't recall if it was VHS or Beta--degraded very quickly as one tape was copied to another, which was then copied to a third. By that point it was just possible to see the image--a BBC 4 ident--but a fourth copy yielded no recognizable image at all. They explained why this was, but it will come as no surprise to anyone here that I didn't understand it...