How were VHS tapes made?

The title pretty much sums it up, back when films came on VHS and music came on tapes or LPs, how were they made in large quantities?

I'm guessing they were recorded on massive rolls of tape then split into VHS size strips, rather than thousands of video recorders. But it's something i've often wondered, the same with audio cassette tapes presumably.

Llamarama said:

The title pretty much sums it up, back when films came on VHS and music came on tapes or LPs, how were they made in large quantities?

I'm guessing they were recorded on massive rolls of tape then split into VHS size strips, rather than thousands of video recorders. But it's something i've often wondered, the same with audio cassette tapes presumably.

Click to expand...

No, recorded on ready made tapes in large banks of recording machines - as crude as that.

Audio cassettes though are done the same way, BUT are done at high speed - can't do that with video.

I would never have guessed that... Makes sense though. That's probably how they make floppy disks en-masse too.

I guess it's a combination of "If it works, it works" and "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

Llamarama said:

I would never have guessed that... Makes sense though. That's probably how they make floppy disks en-masse too.

I guess it's a combination of "If it works, it works" and "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

Click to expand...

Any other way would be completely unworkable, give it a little thought and you'll soon understand why.

Ahh... Tapes have more than 1 track, I only found that out a few days ago. For years I thought when you turned a tape over, the tape would twist to expose the other side, rather than just switching from 1 edge to the other.

Thanks for clearing things up

Llamarama said:

Ahh... Tapes have more than 1 track, I only found that out a few days ago. For years I thought when you turned a tape over, the tape would twist to expose the other side, rather than just switching from 1 edge to the other.

Thanks for clearing things up

Click to expand...

Audio tapes do, VHS doesn't.

When recording pre-recorded audio cassettes both sides are recorded at once, with the 'opposite' obviously being recorded backwards, as well as doing it at high speed.

Take a look here at the various recoding techniqes for Video. https://www.danalee.ca/ttt/video_recording.htm VHS does have multiple tracks. The audio and video are separate, but the video is not a "track" in the conventional sense. It's a line of video recorded diagonally across the tape.

I have a Super VHS VCR which was also optimized to record audio only. These machines may have encoded the Chroma, luminance and left and right audio separately.

Cassettes had effectively 4 tracks, L & R side 1 or side 2 but as you found out the side is not the back and front. The players came in a auto-reversing variety. One deck, I think it was the Nakamichi Dragon, actually spit the tape out and turned it around. Audio mastering definitely had more than just Left and right.

Now we had 8 track continuous loop tapes too. Never bothered to figure that out.

KeepItSimpleStupid said:

Take a look here at the various recoding techniqes for Video. https://www.danalee.ca/ttt/video_recording.htm VHS does have multiple tracks. The audio and video are separate, but the video is not a "track" in the conventional sense. It's a line of video recorded diagonally across the tape.

Click to expand...

Not multiple tracks in the way we were talking - there's a control track (one edge of the tape), linear audio track (other edge of the tape - can be two tracks for LowFi stereo), a helically scanned video track (consisting of entirely separate luma and chroma, recorded in totally different ways), plus for HiFi stereo another helically scanned track underneath the video track, recorded on two FM carriers.

This is all why you have to record it in real time.