When I started to work in a TV station in Brazil back in 1976, we had 2 of these machines in operation that were working for 2 years already. Only 6 were operating in all the country, 2 in Sao Paulo state and 4 in Rio de Janeiro - all for the same company. They were NTSC converted to Pal M by AMPEX and we used them until 1990. Sixteen years in use 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I spent several nights fixing them - I miss that period of my life. They were replaced by Sony Betacart - more reliable but not so exiting…
Now that's a nightmare returning to me... All those years working those machines - writing load lists - working out replay cycles - cleaning heads - and the dreaded phrase "We're in test" (I was able to clear a test mode during a 30sec commercial and load the next one ready - semi-auto and continue). ah bugger, it's all coming back to me and I don't think I have said the phrase "drop out and reset please" in 10 years! Great vid!
We had It made when we got ours at WTVQ-TV in Lexington, KY. Before we had spots on six IVC 1 inch reel to reel recorders and prior to that made spot reels by dubbing and editing one after the other from one RCA TR-50 to a second TR-50. The ACR had its quirks and when a turntable o-ring came off, it was very exciting. Zip, kerthump, TEST MODE.
We had one of these at KRTV-3 in Great Falls, Montana (Montana Television Network) used it every day for news, production and spot playback. We called ours Charlie and it was the workhorse through the 80s. Those sounds bring back plenty of memories, mostly good, some not so much, but overall it was an amazing machine for the time. Thanks for sharing this video!
We had 2 ACR25 here in the NW UK ...they were very noisy and broke down in nearly every break till we cured the problems. I preferred working with the 2000B.
Good god what a blast from the past. That machine was a beast. From the compressor blowing fluid in the tape compartment to lovely carousel overload. Who could ever forget that sickning "THUMP" when it would go into test mode for no reason. Love it!!!!
HTV cardiff had two on the top floor and1on a lower floor when channel four started.the two were run live on air and I was responsible for removing the noisy blowers and compressors to another room .which made a big difference to the operator,
9 месяцев назад
I was one of those operators. Thanks Chris for all your hard work. That must have been around 81 or 82
we had two of these back in the day still in operation (1989) at CTV charles street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My current then we got the ACR225... much better... but still a dangerous dinosaur to have roaming freely in the CER!!
WOW, I haven't seen an ACR-25 since 1977 when I used to program them to play our news program stories and commercials. I have found memories of quad tape machines using 2" tape.
One on the luxury items on these acrs was the ident option. You could see what was qued up on the monitors. At this point in time, 1998, we had a vast amount of operational spare parts. Carriage, clamps, capstan sub bases, even spare blower units. Not to mention vast quantities of claws, pins, etc. all gone, no after market for these units.
At my first TV job we had two ACR-25s. Someone came up with the idea to use it to record segments for a Sunday religious show. It was like one choir song per tape. Then we would build a play list and play out all the segments and record that onto a master tape for the Sunday playback. However we found out that when the machine rewound a full 5 minutes of tape in 10 seconds it melted the hubs in the cassette. We got around that by shuttling the 5 minute tapes in reverse.
Management kept the acr so long that we skipped the robotic cassette loaders such as betacart and went directly to hard drive automation for commercial play out in 1998. In 2002, dvc tape was added and fully automated 2 stations. In 2010, a large 400 hour hard drive was installed and most play out was disk based. No more boxes of stacked dvc tapes to make up. And a much cleaner pull list. In 2012, a very small server with huge storage allowed complete high definition disk based play out.
I remember there were four of these in the commercials transmission unit at Central TV in Birmingham in the 1980s. Two for ITV and two for Channel 4. Central played out C4's commercials in those days. They were fascinating to watch. The last gasp of two inch tape!
Most of my 12 hour shift at WRET was feeding & tending the ACR-25, interspersed with transmitter monitoring and switching. Now it's all done by computer which doesn't make the mistakes I made. K4OF.
RCA first amazed the broadcast world with the TCR-100, and Ampex was caught flat footed. Ampex answered RCA with the ACR in only ONE YEAR, a heroically fast development. And the ACR was a mechanically much better design that handled tape with vacuum instead of mechanical fingers. The enabling innovation in the ACR was the retractable vacuum guide. It looks simple, but the requirement for repeatable mechanical accuracy made it very challenging to implement. They also used the design in the AVR-1, the pinnacle of quad tape machine technology (and price). Ampex had a brilliant mechanical engineer named Dale Dolby, who was the brother of Ray Dolby who founded the Dolby corporation.
I used to operate these at Thames in the very early 90s before they were superseded by Panasonic’s MII MARC system. Terrifying at times, especially when they went into the dreaded ‘TEST’ mode just before TX - that little blue light still haunts my dreams 30 years on. Awesome pieces of machinery.
Another two were in Tucson, AZ. KOLD TV 13 had them starting in 1976. I used to do commercial production editing on them. Only slightly easier than on the TR-70.
The blowers and air compressers were in another room making the machines quiet. The white slips on the transport door were for reloads into the other on air machine, as I was making a break tape. I got lots of overtime being called in to fix these things. Claws, PS and MDA amp transisters were most common. The interconnect book was 'fun' to read!
This machine put me though college in 1978 through 1982 at WDBO in Orlando. His name was FRED (Fricking Ridiculous Electronic Device. He would always jam up at the worse time... then we would have to scramble between programming and take his little cassette holders apart the get the damn tape cassette out and get him back online for the next break. I had the weekend shifts at WDBO from 11-8 am on Fridays and Saturday nights. Great job for a college kid paying his own way through school. My amateur radio ticket led me into getting my First Phone license required at that time to work in a TV station... Good times.... getting paid to watch TV.
I heaard (perhaps incorrectly) that NASA - back in the moon shot days - actually met up with the ACR design team. and presented them with a small plaque commemorating 'Perhaps the most complex electro-mechanical device ever created by man' - or something to that effect! Easy to believe if you ever had to use / maintain one!
Channel 39 in Houston had this machine in the 1970's They were the only one in town. Channels two, eleven, thirteen and twenty-six all used the R C A TCR-100. It worked out well because we could trade spare parts in an emergency. I worked in Master Control at 26 when they were bought out in 1979 by Metromedia, which later was bought by Fox.
I was at intern at KSTU TV-20 now Fox13 in Salt Lake City in 1984-85 and we had the RCA TCR-100 that we called the Cartasourus. It was so unreliable we just used it to build dubb packages for all our commercial breaks as we didn’t dare use it directly on-air.
i operated the 3rd ACR-25 sold at the NAB in 1973-4 at WFTV-9 Orlando and then went on to WHAS-11 Louisville and showed them where to kick it hard when it screwed up - have had many nightmares since about forgetting to get it loaded & programmed before the next break.
MindenMoose Yeah- it really was loud and I was already deaf in one ear. It was such a relief to walk out of the room. But to be honest, We had three 2 inch and six 1 inch VTR’s and the ACR all in the same room. Oh, and don’t forget the dreaded tape whine when something went wrong and and the ACR would crash!
@@dalebachman2892 We had 6 AVRs in the same room, a bunch of 1" machines so many configurations I can't remember them all. I do know that when we gave up the AVRs we scavenged the motors from them and anything else we could use. We prepackaged everything for the network feeds so the disasters were while not rare, infrequent. I do recall that the ACR sounded like it had run into a truck at speed occasionally. I sit here at the keyboard with cicadas blasting in both ears.
We did have 2 ACRs for a while at the end. Technology was astounding. They were replaced by Panasonic MARC using D3 machines. Our animated logo was on one tape and used for every show we aired. I checked the counter on the tape occasionally and it had had more plays than the Machine could count. I kept waiting for the tape to fail but it never did. There's a whole bunch of things I had forgotten about. :)
Eventually, all spots were pre tagged and even film spots were dubbed to cart. An expensive tech came in at least once a year to tune up the tape room, and our spot playback looked excellent.
Not Quincy. This was state of the art in 1975, we had 3 ampex 2000bs before getting the acr 25. At that time, national commercials were moving from film to videotape, so this reduced the need to edit single spots to make a spot reel, a 4 video break was tough to load with 3 machines, and you didn’t perform a full setup of that 4th spot with only 3 machines to work with.
It's testing 1970s technology to the absolute limit (as did the AVR1). I'd have one tomorrow if I had the space for it. Meanwhile I'll make do with my VPR20! Thank you for sharing.
We would assemble break reels for the local/high commercial times of the day to use the acr for spot production. A 1 frame editor was much better than trying to hit a re-edit with a manual reel to reel. We set a que point for these sort of edits on the acr.
Why didn't people such as I keep working ACR 25...they needed massive TLC, were huge and consumed vast amount of power...and what they did...play back COMMERCIALS!!!
This wasn't in Quincy Illinois was it? I operated one in Quincy in 1998 when I worked at KHQA-TV. When we stopped using it they said it was the last operationg one and it got sent to a museum.
@Philm35 You must have worked at KTVY ha ha! The other one VR-5 was called A.L.F.R.E.D = Another F*CKING RIDICULOUS ELECTRONIC DEVICE. I loved my years working at KTVY and those ACR-25's were awesome with instant roll!
@JULIAN8845 The 400 was indeed pretty bad. The 400A was a lot better. But ... Remember that the 400/400A was the inspiration for the 350. The 350 utilized the electronics of the 400A, its capstan motor and its relay box. The 350 utilized the reel motors, the left hand idler and the tape break switch of the 300. In a very real sense, the 350 was the arithmetic average of the 300 and the 400. (300 + 400) = 350. Ginsburg designed the 350 in a single luncheon sitting.
too bad you don't show the back of the machine. the wire wrap circuits, the miles of pneumatic tubing. amazing machine! I hated ours with a passion. I used it to assemble the days' commercials onto compilation reels. have you ever watch 8 solid hours of commercials?
Some stations engineering crews were not good enough to keep them running well enough such that they could be used; "Direct to Air" like they were intended to be used...so instead you had to do that terrible job of making a 1inch "commercial reel" UGH!!!
Not Quincy. This was state of the art in 1975, we had 3 ampex 2000bs before getting the acr 25. At that time, national commercials were moving from film to videotape, so this reduced the need to edit single spots to make a spot reel, a 4 video break was tough to load with 3 machines, and you didn’t perform a full setup of that 3rd spot with only 3 machines to work with.
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When I started to work in a TV station in Brazil back in 1976, we had 2 of these machines in operation that were working for 2 years already. Only 6 were operating in all the country, 2 in Sao Paulo state and 4 in Rio de Janeiro - all for the same company. They were NTSC converted to Pal M by AMPEX and we used them until 1990. Sixteen years in use 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I spent several nights fixing them - I miss that period of my life. They were replaced by Sony Betacart - more reliable but not so exiting…
I kept an ACR 25 Kart as a souvenir when Scottish TV got rid of theirs in 1990. They were an amazing piece of technology!
Now that's a nightmare returning to me... All those years working those machines - writing load lists - working out replay cycles - cleaning heads - and the dreaded phrase "We're in test" (I was able to clear a test mode during a 30sec commercial and load the next one ready - semi-auto and continue). ah bugger, it's all coming back to me and I don't think I have said the phrase "drop out and reset please" in 10 years! Great vid!
We had It made when we got ours at WTVQ-TV in Lexington, KY. Before we had spots on six IVC 1 inch reel to reel recorders and prior to that made spot reels by dubbing and editing one after the other from one RCA TR-50 to a second TR-50. The ACR had its quirks and when a turntable o-ring came off, it was very exciting. Zip, kerthump, TEST MODE.
Impressive maschine!
Its a pleasure to watch it.
Cant imagine how expensive it was.
I looked it up, and it was 160,000 in 1970.
We had one of these at KRTV-3 in Great Falls, Montana (Montana Television Network) used it every day for news, production and spot playback. We called ours Charlie and it was the workhorse through the 80s. Those sounds bring back plenty of memories, mostly good, some not so much, but overall it was an amazing machine for the time. Thanks for sharing this video!
I worked next door at KFBB in the mid-80s. We had the RCA TCR-100, a temperamental beast.
We had 2 ACR25 here in the NW UK ...they were very noisy and broke down in nearly every break till we cured the problems. I preferred working with the 2000B.
Good god what a blast from the past. That machine was a beast. From the compressor blowing fluid in the tape compartment to lovely carousel overload. Who could ever forget that sickning "THUMP" when it would go into test mode for no reason. Love it!!!!
HTV cardiff had two on the top floor and1on a lower floor when channel four started.the two were run live on air and I was responsible for removing the noisy blowers and compressors to another room .which made a big difference to the operator,
I was one of those operators. Thanks Chris for all your hard work. That must have been around 81 or 82
we had two of these back in the day still in operation (1989) at CTV charles street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My current then we got the ACR225... much better... but still a dangerous dinosaur to have roaming freely in the CER!!
WOW, I haven't seen an ACR-25 since 1977 when I used to program them to play our news program stories and commercials. I have found memories of quad tape machines using 2" tape.
One on the luxury items on these acrs was the ident option. You could see what was qued up on the monitors. At this point in time, 1998, we had a vast amount of operational spare parts. Carriage, clamps, capstan sub bases, even spare blower units. Not to mention vast quantities of claws, pins, etc. all gone, no after market for these units.
At my first TV job we had two ACR-25s. Someone came up with the idea to use it to record segments for a Sunday religious show. It was like one choir song per tape. Then we would build a play list and play out all the segments and record that onto a master tape for the Sunday playback. However we found out that when the machine rewound a full 5 minutes of tape in 10 seconds it melted the hubs in the cassette. We got around that by shuttling the 5 minute tapes in reverse.
Management kept the acr so long that we skipped the robotic cassette loaders such as betacart and went directly to hard drive automation for commercial play out in 1998. In 2002, dvc tape was added and fully automated 2 stations. In 2010, a large 400 hour hard drive was installed and most play out was disk based. No more boxes of stacked dvc tapes to make up. And a much cleaner pull list. In 2012, a very small server with huge storage allowed complete high definition disk based play out.
I remember there were four of these in the commercials transmission unit at Central TV in Birmingham in the 1980s. Two for ITV and two for Channel 4. Central played out C4's commercials in those days. They were fascinating to watch. The last gasp of two inch tape!
Most of my 12 hour shift at WRET was feeding & tending the ACR-25, interspersed with transmitter monitoring and switching. Now it's all done by computer which doesn't make the mistakes I made.
K4OF.
RCA first amazed the broadcast world with the TCR-100, and Ampex was caught flat footed. Ampex answered RCA with the ACR in only ONE YEAR, a heroically fast development. And the ACR was a mechanically much better design that handled tape with vacuum instead of mechanical fingers. The enabling innovation in the ACR was the retractable vacuum guide. It looks simple, but the requirement for repeatable mechanical accuracy made it very challenging to implement. They also used the design in the AVR-1, the pinnacle of quad tape machine technology (and price). Ampex had a brilliant mechanical engineer named Dale Dolby, who was the brother of Ray Dolby who founded the Dolby corporation.
naturally RCA said ACR is RCA spelled Backwards
I used to operate these at Thames in the very early 90s before they were superseded by Panasonic’s MII MARC system. Terrifying at times, especially when they went into the dreaded ‘TEST’ mode just before TX - that little blue light still haunts my dreams 30 years on. Awesome pieces of machinery.
Another two were in Tucson, AZ. KOLD TV 13 had them starting in 1976. I used to do commercial production editing on them. Only slightly easier than on the TR-70.
The blowers and air compressers were in another room making the machines quiet. The white slips on the transport door were for reloads into the other on air machine, as I was making a break tape. I got lots of overtime being called in to fix these things. Claws, PS and MDA amp transisters were most common. The interconnect book was 'fun' to read!
This machine put me though college in 1978 through 1982 at WDBO in Orlando. His name was FRED (Fricking Ridiculous Electronic Device. He would always jam up at the worse time... then we would have to scramble between programming and take his little cassette holders apart the get the damn tape cassette out and get him back online for the next break. I had the weekend shifts at WDBO from 11-8 am on Fridays and Saturday nights. Great job for a college kid paying his own way through school. My amateur radio ticket led me into getting my First Phone license required at that time to work in a TV station... Good times.... getting paid to watch TV.
I heaard (perhaps incorrectly) that NASA - back in the moon shot days - actually met up with the ACR design team. and presented them with a small plaque commemorating 'Perhaps the most complex electro-mechanical device ever created by man' - or something to that effect!
Easy to believe if you ever had to use / maintain one!
I'm in Australia and had heard that story about NASA too. I think it was an amazing machine and in my whole career I only had 2 test modes.
Indeed--just from watching this video, the RCA TCR-100 in comparison to the ACR-25 looks a lot simpler in it's electro-mechanical design!
Channel 39 in Houston had this machine in the 1970's They were the only one in town. Channels two, eleven, thirteen and twenty-six all used the R C A TCR-100. It worked out well because we could trade spare parts in an emergency. I worked in Master Control at 26 when they were bought out in 1979 by Metromedia, which later was bought by Fox.
I was at intern at KSTU TV-20 now Fox13 in Salt Lake City in 1984-85 and we had the RCA TCR-100 that we called the Cartasourus. It was so unreliable we just used it to build dubb packages for all our commercial breaks as we didn’t dare use it directly on-air.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... shlluupp.... ploppp!! Then you knew it had threaded succussfully.
"Standing by". Scarey time.
i operated the 3rd ACR-25 sold at the NAB in 1973-4 at WFTV-9 Orlando and then went on to WHAS-11 Louisville and showed them where to kick it hard when it screwed up - have had many nightmares since about forgetting to get it loaded & programmed before the next break.
does it surprise any of you that having worked with these amazing machines for years, I have tinnitus almost as loud as the ACR itself
MindenMoose Yeah- it really was loud and I was already deaf in one ear. It was such a relief to walk out of the room. But to be honest, We had three 2 inch and six 1 inch VTR’s and the ACR all in the same room. Oh, and don’t forget the dreaded tape whine when something went wrong and and the ACR would crash!
@@dalebachman2892 We had 6 AVRs in the same room, a bunch of 1" machines so many configurations I can't remember them all. I do know that when we gave up the AVRs we scavenged the motors from them and anything else we could use. We prepackaged everything for the network feeds so the disasters were while not rare, infrequent. I do recall that the ACR sounded like it had run into a truck at speed occasionally. I sit here at the keyboard with cicadas blasting in both ears.
We did have 2 ACRs for a while at the end. Technology was astounding. They were replaced by Panasonic MARC using D3 machines. Our animated logo was on one tape and used for every show we aired. I checked the counter on the tape occasionally and it had had more plays than the Machine could count. I kept waiting for the tape to fail but it never did. There's a whole bunch of things I had forgotten about. :)
Eventually, all spots were pre tagged and even film spots were dubbed to cart. An expensive tech came in at least once a year to tune up the tape room, and our spot playback looked excellent.
last time that i restored a ACR-25 was in 1995 in the RTVE, its a amazing machine...
Not Quincy. This was state of the art in 1975, we had 3 ampex 2000bs before getting the acr 25. At that time, national commercials were moving from film to videotape, so this reduced the need to edit single spots to make a spot reel, a 4 video break was tough to load with 3 machines, and you didn’t perform a full setup of that 4th spot with only 3 machines to work with.
One of the few Ampex quad VTRs I never got any experience on.
Test Mode alarm still gives me nightmares...
It's testing 1970s technology to the absolute limit (as did the AVR1).
I'd have one tomorrow if I had the space for it. Meanwhile I'll make do with my VPR20!
Thank you for sharing.
I am so happy that there was enough usable video with out me blabbing and droning on.
We would assemble break reels for the local/high commercial times of the day to use the acr for spot production. A 1 frame editor was much better than trying to hit a re-edit with a manual reel to reel. We set a que point for these sort of edits on the acr.
A term that comes to mind is "mechanically dramatic."
#halsghostwashere
Why didn't people such as I keep working ACR 25...they needed massive TLC, were huge and consumed vast amount of power...and what they did...play back COMMERCIALS!!!
This wasn't in Quincy Illinois was it? I operated one in Quincy in 1998 when I worked at KHQA-TV. When we stopped using it they said it was the last operationg one and it got sent to a museum.
Operating that beast without the covers on is just asking for fingers to be lopped off, LOL
@Philm35 You must have worked at KTVY ha ha! The other one VR-5 was called A.L.F.R.E.D = Another F*CKING RIDICULOUS ELECTRONIC DEVICE. I loved my years working at KTVY and those ACR-25's were awesome with instant roll!
ON NO! TEST MODE!!
The ACR-25 at our station was called "FRED". Stood for F*CKING RIDICULOUS ELECTRONIC DEVICE".
I ran this machine at KUTV in 1984-85!
@JULIAN8845
The 400 was indeed pretty bad. The 400A was a lot better.
But ...
Remember that the 400/400A was the inspiration for the 350.
The 350 utilized the electronics of the 400A, its capstan motor and its relay box.
The 350 utilized the reel motors, the left hand idler and the tape break switch of the 300.
In a very real sense, the 350 was the arithmetic average of the 300 and the 400.
(300 + 400) = 350.
Ginsburg designed the 350 in a single luncheon sitting.
too bad you don't show the back of the machine. the wire wrap circuits, the miles of pneumatic tubing. amazing machine! I hated ours with a passion. I used it to assemble the days' commercials onto compilation reels. have you ever watch 8 solid hours of commercials?
Some stations engineering crews were not good enough to keep them running well enough such that they could be used; "Direct to Air" like they were intended to be used...so instead you had to do that terrible job of making a 1inch "commercial reel" UGH!!!
The ACR-25 at our station was named FRED. As in F**king Ridiculous Electronic Device.
Great
These used to scare the shit out of me.............
way way way before the betacart.
Not Quincy. This was state of the art in 1975, we had 3 ampex 2000bs before getting the acr 25. At that time, national commercials were moving from film to videotape, so this reduced the need to edit single spots to make a spot reel, a 4 video break was tough to load with 3 machines, and you didn’t perform a full setup of that 3rd spot with only 3 machines to work with.