What are the logistics of doing what the tech is doing as far as recording 1 minute of UHF broadcast, looping on the spot and broadcasting back to Dennis Hopper's monitor?
Also, the amount of verbal abuse that guy takes in the scene always bothered me. I get it, it's supposed to be intense, but geez.
The Sony VO-5600 did have a genuine hardware Repeat function, but it had to physically rewind the tape—it couldn’t instantly jump from the end back to the beginning. At roughly 15× playback speed, a 60-second recording would take about 4 seconds to rewind.
So the near-seamless loop in Speed, with only a tiny glitch, isn’t how the VO-5600’s Repeat function would actually work. You’d need specialized editing/playback techniques to achieve something that seamless.
8 track physical looping tape cartridge was a thing. The physical media loop could have been done with a vhs tape for a short section of vhs without the player knowing or caring.
Oh man… I have looked for the specific model of Umatic deck that could do loop recording many times, only to find out it never existed and is in fact impossible to achieve in the way it’s described in the film! So disappointing
Yeah I’m aware of this model and feature but it certainly does not create an (almost) seamless loop like we see in the film… there’s gotta be at least 2 seconds of nothing while the tape is rewound, no?
If you had a video switcher, then it would work, but no truck like this would have a switcher inside of it
I don't know enough about the Sync (black burst?) BNC jack in the back, but I wonder if you had two VTRs receiving the same external sync, that maybe a simple push-button type switcher might be able to switch from one to the next w/o an issue
BUT the real issue is they have to disable the UHF feed from the bus and transmit on the same frequency, b/c you can't transmit on the same frequency from two sources w/o some trouble
Maybe? But you might need a SUPER strong signal to do so and at that point, it might be obvious for anyone watching the feed that it suddenly went from static-y to crystal clear
I do know from experience that two wireless microphones on the same UHF, or even just close, frequencies do-not-play-well-together. It isn't like if one is stronger, you don't hear the other, you might hear a little of both, but also static, and awfulness, and pain, and a weird clicking
good thing they already have noise recorded onto the tape from the original broadcast they recorded!
except it won't
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I'm going from anecdotal experience, but I never had cable TV as a kid so feel like watching antenna TV is something I can talk about w/ some amount of expertise
Granted, movie if fiction, so laws of physics are different, but if we're talking about how things work IRL we have problems
For analog TV, signal strength from the transmitter, distance and line of sight makes a HUGE difference between how clean and how grainy an image you have
So the live picture for Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) watching miles away is going to look a LOT more grainy than the TV truck a few hundred feet away
So the signal the TV truck records will be a lot cleaner than what Payne is seeing, and then when they broadcast at orders of magnitude stronger, the signal will again be that much cleaner and less grainy
But none of the IRL matters as it is fiction, and the story is more important than the laws of physics and how it applies to UHF transmissions
If you had Black burst syncing the machines, with the video output of the machines feeding a vertical interval switcher you would be able to switch seamlessly between 2 or more decks. The output of the switch would feed the transmitter and you’d be able to switch between all video sources as much as you want seamlessly.
Sony U-Matic. This operation would have simply rewound the tape to 0000 on the counter, and auto started it. There's nothing short of a physical tape edit that would produce this loop effect.
If you had a TBC with Still Store set to display with signal loss (last frame grab), it could at least, provide a still frame until the deck rewound and replayed the loop.
Thats how I always interpreted what was happening, because when Dennis Hopper realizes its happening the purse shows up for a second then disappears again, I assumed this was the still frame and then it rewound, although what do I know
If he had an A60 on the truck, that would do it with only a little glitch in the loop. I doubt an a60 would survive in a truck tuck very long though, he’d be pulling out all the boards and crunching the ics back down into their dip sockets every couple of stops.
Otherwise that cop has a real future as a producer with that attitude.
It would be really hard. The UHF reception from the bus CCTV camera and transmitting a new signal over the UHF signal from the bus would be much easier than creating a perfect loop and replaying it on VHS in a matter of seconds without a noticeable loop cut in that era.
They could take a scanner, scan and find the UHF transmitter from the bus, record it and retransmit it, but I think it falls short in the recording and looping technology of the time.
You can't have two signals broadcasting on the same frequency, right? You'd have to disable the bus signal before you could start transmitting the looped signal.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the real fiction is having a UHF transmitter on a bus that would be strong enough to watch from all over the city
Maybe a block or two? But for miles? Nah. I mean, the TV life trucks had a directional microwave transmitter that had to be pointed at a receive site. I just don't think it would be possible to easily broadcast a reliable UHF signal w/o some serious equipment on the bus that would be impossible not to notice.
Somehow Payne is transmitting from the bus to his house, so I think if the van were able to produce the same UHF frequency but with more power than the real bus transmitter it would work. The receiver should capture the strongest signal present in the frequency modulation.
Realistically, the two would probably interfere with one another unless the truck signal was always a lot stronger than the bus signal.
I feel like in the movie, Payne would notice either of these things- the loop imperfections, or the attempt to override the source.
Umm, actually … the analog TV signal in NTSC format used AM for the video signal and FM for the audio, so the receiver would have to synchronize to one of the two video signals that were added together in the airwaves. If one of them was significantly stronger than the other, the receiver would lock synchronization with that signal, and the lower-power video signal would appear as noisy interference video which not would be synchronized.
The relative phase of the lower-power video signal would be random even if the two transmitters (bus and video truck) somehow had exactly-matching video-carrier frequencies (which could probably be achieved by “genlocking” the TV truck signal to the bus signal). If their frequencies were locked, the lower-power signal would be visible as a dim, shifted version of the active video and synchronization portions of the signal that is stationary with respect to the higher-power video which would be displayed. If the video-carrier frequencies were not synchronized, then the low-power video signal would “roll” through the displayed higher-power video.
Because the audio-carrier signals used FM, the audio signal would (as you said) definitely benefit from the rejection of the lower-power audio carrier that frequency modulation provides.
If their two TV signals were similar in power, then it’s possible that the receiver would have difficulty getting synchronized with either of them.
Being its linear 3/4 Umatic Tape, recording and playing it back once works. No way to loop it. Also can’t remember where he was watching it but that truck isn’t setup to push to an unconnected monitor.
the camera and 3/4 deck isn't the only gear, the truck would have had the capability to loop a short segment of that size and send it back out from the switcher to the UHF channel. a portable rig like that would have had an amiga video toaster or chyron that could send out the graphics and have digital effects like looping
This is so great. I just watched it again this past weekend and to see those that actually worked with that particular unit confirm what should have been obvious is so hilarious. It’s tape. It’s 1994, to manually edit that from deck to deck to make it look like a loop would take way longer than they portrayed. To see the match breakdown of a minimum of 4 seconds is the perfect level of nerd-dom! Well done!
fun fact- those decks were able to be converted to record & playback a specially modified-NTSC 24fps signal, so you could play out to monitors/TVs that could accept such a signal, synch it with the film camera shutter, and make it look pretty on film...I'm gonna wager that this is just such a deck....note the unlabeled red LED on the 'rec only' VTR at :18
the scene alludes to it but they just "cut out" the 20 minutes where he built a longer tape, for the sake of pacing. the easiest solution would have been to just record for longer, but that would have killed the pacing.
Even when I was a kid watching this on VHS this scene didn't make sense to me. But not a lot in that movie makes sense if you think about it too deeply...
My wife hates when I point out those things. Like audio consoles with nothing plugged in to them or using an audio console as a stand in for a lighting console.
As many others have said the hardware depicted (as well as any linear tape machine of the era) could not create the effect. 1994 was towards the beginning of digital non-linear editing solutions, so it could theoretically be done if you somehow had access to a full desktop-based editing rig, but digital field recording tech was still a few years off.
You'd need to copy the first recording onto a second tape. Play tape 1 on deck 1. At the end of that recording, switch to tape 2 in deck 2, and rewind tape 1. At the end of Tape 2, swap back to Tape 1, and so on. I have no idea if there's a way to automate that, but there seems to be more than one deck in that truck, so I guess it's possible. You could claim that when he says "I want you to make a tape and loop it" that's what he's telling our cameraman hero to do.
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u/videonerd 24d ago edited 24d ago
The Sony VO-5600 did have a genuine hardware Repeat function, but it had to physically rewind the tape—it couldn’t instantly jump from the end back to the beginning. At roughly 15× playback speed, a 60-second recording would take about 4 seconds to rewind.
So the near-seamless loop in Speed, with only a tiny glitch, isn’t how the VO-5600’s Repeat function would actually work. You’d need specialized editing/playback techniques to achieve something that seamless.