Is this Umatic tape?
 

I bought this tape off ebay. It simply said Marketing VHS Tape. I thought it would fit in my standard VHS Player but nope.

Is this a UMatic Tape?

It says 3M on it

AI seems to be suggesting this is not a type of VHS, would you guys agree? I may try to dispute with Ebay and now I have to look at paying someone to convert

Yes, that is a U-matic tape. I can transfer it for you to digital for a small fee if you like. PM me if interested. Good news for you is that Umatic tape will reproduce video better than VHS with the right player/TBC combo and assuming the tape is in good condition. I do bake all tapes I transfer to drive out any moisture that they may have absorbed over the years that can often lead to playback issues.

I suspect you could tell the ebay seller that it wasn't VHS, so you can't actually play it and see if they'll give you a 50% refund for the hassle.

I'm getting "Ricki Lake" vibes from the photo even though the title is covered haha.

Is that some sort of preview/screener from the mid/late 80s? :hmm:

Yep, it's not as described, and will cost you quite a bit more to even view.

Nah, that's not necessarily true at all. Not better, just different.

Loool thats funny. Can you send a pm message on here? Ya youre right...howd you figure that out!

In a prior life, I was a reviewer. Last century, everything was tapes. In '00/10s, it was all discs. I still have some that I cared about, but most tapes were trashed years/decades ago.

Here's a fun fact for you: Buena Vista (Disney), for example, used to tell us that we were not allowed to keep the tapes, nor trash the tapes. We could send them back on our own dime (HA!), or .... something? I still have a letter somewhere.

Back then, tapes came in a print packet. Press releases, instruction letters, photos, etc. I still have many packets. But I sold some, and gave some away.

In the DVD age, the packets mostly disappeared, you were emailed, with attachments (and that in itself caused lots of issues, with huge photos and slow internet). Networks still send goodies, however, for quite a while after the studios stopped.

Between those gigs, I worked at studios. So I worked both sides. The person getting, and the person making/sending.

Many of these tapes had a look to them, and by year/era. That's because most were prepped by the same post houses.

Wow thats crazy that you remember this from 30 years ago....wow. How long do you think the tape is? It says its a Promax Presentation.

I believe the effective "TV lines" of standard (non-SP) Umatic was between 250 to 280 for luma (I've seen different numbers quoted) vs VHS 240. Not a huge difference, but not inferior. Chroma was also a little better as they used a higher frequency subcarrier (688KHz vs 629KHz for VHS). There was also only one tape speed with Umatic, so you don't have to cross your fingers and hope that the recording isn't in an inferior SLP/EP like it could be with VHS.

Eventually, I do plan to actually record different patterns to each tape type I've got machines for (U-Matic, U-Matic SP, VHS, SVHS, Video8, Hi8, Digital8/DV, Betamax (Is, II, and III), Betacam, Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, DVD recorder at 1 hour speed/MPEG2) using the same analog pattern generator producing the Snell and Wilcox SW2 pattern and then re-capture (or directly import digital formats) with the same machines that recorded them to compare the quality.

This was a regular U-Matic (non-SP) transfer I did and the tape itself was recorded in 1981 (a broadcast master of the show meant for airing). There was no post-processing, color correction, or noise reduction performed. Simply a crop (to remove head switching noise and side black bars) and deinterlace/upscale with hybrid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51F4jNfKeNY The actual captured file looks even better as YouTube compression does add some slight blockiness to it. To me, the lack of general chroma noise/stability in particular is impressive for a tape that is almost 44 years old.

That said, condition of the tape, original recording equipment, and how many generation dub it is all will affect the final result.

In probably 99% of cases, it'll only barely be longer than the content. In the VHS world, you probably know that T120 is 2 hours. But there were T60, T30, T15, even T5. But some companies were cheap to the penny, so they'd have something custom like a T22 made, for a 21-minute recording. To this day, I don't know how a few less inches, custom spooled, would save money.

A lot of promo tape releasers specifically did not want to have their tapes reused, or content added to. I've transferred many tapes, where somebody got a promo tape, then decide to fill it with homemade footage. Tapes were under $5, often under $1 in the 90s. How cheap were these people?

OH, HEY, WARNING! You need to open the tape gate, look for magnets/erasers. You're not sure if this was ever viewed, or if erase components are inside. Sometime you need to dismantle the tape. Those things can be tricky to find, too, like modern credit card skimmers. I forgot to do it once, and we lost the recording. That was actually one I would have kept, but oops.

The tape grade on most promo tapes was crap. VHS was often Fuji Pro, and there was nothing pro about it. U-matic probably wasn't much different.

I also had D-1 tapes from the local TV station, mostly ads and promo material. Those tapes weren't mine, and the org trashed them in the 00s. Wouldn't let me keep the tapes, had to be trashed. That's how a lot of media companies are/were. Lost forever is/was preferable to fans bootlegging it, even though it has no real value, and was expired for the intended use.

It's really not much different than VHS. It could be gorgeous, or crap. Lots of factors determine quality, but those factors aren't heavily different between the formats.

uMatic contents are slightly better than VHS due to better bulky and stable cameras (especially studio contents), better lighting techniques, qualified technicians. As far as pre-recorded types, it all depends on the quality of the master. It's hard to do a direct comparison due to lack of tapes with same contents, the only way to do it is to record both formats on tapes from the same source and capture them.

I doubt anyone tried to make a self-erasing U-Matic tape. VHS tapes that erased themselves after two plays were briefly marketed in the Netherlands in 2001, but the idea was abandoned after people quickly discovered that simply sticking a paper clip in the mechanism would disable the self-erasing:

2View: The Self-Erasing VHS Tape With Paperclip Hack

That's not at all the same. What I refer to are review/promo/screener tapes, which often had magnets along the tape path. Either just inside or outside the entrance or exit from the clamshell.

It was very common, especially from Warner Brothers.