Thread by @gravislizard

hey look at this remote

folks, it's a remote for a video titler. do i need to explain what that is

okay
this is an 80s phenomenon. i was not there, so i can't tell you what the reality of it is. i can tell you what was intended and what i believe happened.

let's start with:
in 1985, owning a video camera was not unusual. being able to edit video was something almost no consumer could do however, and nonlinear editing like we have now did not exist outside of multi-billion-dollar corps

nothing was capable of 'spooling' video digitally, so you couldn't do things like carefully select punch-in points to cut between clips, any kind of editing required a minimum of two (expensive) VCRs, and it was impossible to sync them to get clean cuts.

what you COULD buy was realtime effects. typically those were (basically fraudulent) products like this, that "enhanced" your video by applying analog sharpening, or allowed you to adjust saturation or tint, things nobody wanted to do

you ran a composite video cable in from your camcorder, then another out to your VCR. hit play on the camcorder, record on the VCR, dick with the controls while it's rolling, and you have your crappy edit. it's ok, nobody wanted to watch your unedited soccer video

internally these consisted of little more than a handful of capacitors and resistors. seriously, analog video was some *raw shit*, and those knobs are mostly just potentiometers applying capacitance in the right places.

some boxes had two composite inputs, for the high roller with *three* VCRs. a knob would fade from one video to another, so now you can do transitions. yeah babey! we in hollywood now!!!

did i mention that there was no attempt in many of these to sync to the signal at all? so in a lot of cases at the midpoint of the fade it would lose sync and shred the image. but anyway

later (or maybe just if you paid enough) you could get more advanced versions that actually synced to the video signal, and that would let you do shit like star wipes. real cinema shit. at this point nobody wanted to watch your edited soccer video but progress had been made

with cheapening microprocessors, digital effects finally became possible. not "digital" as in "sucks your video into a frame buffer" but as in "a computer is involved in some way." this is how we got titlers. titlers were rippin instruments that let you put text on the video

here's a video titler. yeah it's a standalone device. yeah that's *all it does*. you run your video in and out to a VCR, and then this thing can just be programmed with strings of text that appear on the screen.

now here's where things break down: i have no idea how these worked. i owned one once when i was 18 and it's long gone. I can't find any videos of them in operation on You Tube. googling it's useless, you just get pictures of smarmy "retro look!!" modern software

What I know is that at the time these things were made,
a) applying overlays on analog video was pretty fuckin hard and iffy to begin with
b) the amount of memory needed to store a reasonable typeface or frame buffer was still quite expensive

I know that these devices allowed you to enter arbitrary text and position it on the screen. i can *guess* that they let you define a 'playlist' for when titles would appear so you could time your text to appear at appropriate times

I can guess that they (some, at least) let you choose colors and different typefaces. But since ROM was very expensive still, there only could have been a few, and not very high resolution.

I will also speculate that there was probably a wide variance in quality. The way this sort of thing works is essentially "racing the beam" - the device is superimposing video on an analog signal, so it has to watch for the beginning of the frame and then start counting lines

It has to dead-reckon where the beam is, and when it's at a spot where text is supposed to appear, it has to switch out the passed-through video signal with its own internally generated one. I have seen this done poorly, so I assume some titlers did a shit job.

The purpose of all this, presumably, is to create title cards - "Jon's Wedding 1999" or "Now We Head to The Beach" or "** Translators Note: this word means 'beautiful perfect insect' and has no English equivalent, so it has been left in the original Japanese **"

On its own this is kinda boring. There are two things that intrigue me:
1) why was this such a big deal? there were thousands of them. i've never seen what they did. could it possibly have looked good, and not cringeworthy?
2) they put them in odd places

i can't explain anything about the former but let's talk about the latter

first, the instrument I posted? it is not a remote control. i was wrong about that. it IS a titler. here's the video in and out jacks.

now, that's cute! it's so small! but why is it so small? and what are these jacks on the side?

well, i found this thing packaged with a JVC GZ-S5E, a very very small camera sold by JVC in the early-mid 80s. presumably it was sold as an accessory. small camera, makes sense it'd be a small titler.

I happen to own a GZ-S5E, so I know that the weird mini-DIN-looking plug on the side of the titler is the viewfinder socket. That provides 12V, composite video, and a couple other things to operate the viewfinder. it would have made sense to tap off that to run the titler.

so: the little cable is a patch cord that goes from the viewfinder socket to the input of this device, then the viewfinder plugs into the output. what's peculiar about this to me is I'm not sure how this makes any sense.

the GZ-S5E is not a camcorder, it is a *camera*. it has no inherent ability to record. there's a socket on the handgrip that connects to a 10ft cable that plugs into a VCR. There are no RCA jacks on the device to get video from.

the video path coming out of the viewfinder jack is one-way, so the titler couldn't be interposing itself that way. so... you have to have the titler attached to the camera via 3" cords *just* to get power, but then two 10' RCA cords sending video to/from the VCR?

but that ALSO doesn't make sense. The same cable that attaches the camera to the VCR also carries video to the VCR. I DO NOT understand how this device ever served a purpose.

let's confuse things even further

here's a JVC product with the same model number that this mini titler supposedly has, except it's a fully integrated device with a nearly identical version of this 'remote' on the side. what is this? what is going on?

oh sorry sorry, i take it back, I misread. This is a CG-V60U, the 'remote' is a CG-P50U. I just got myself confused there.

theory: the little box is the entire titler. there is a jack on the side that the keyboard plugs into that just allows it to do direct character entry, and for convenience it also passes through the two RCA jacks (on the bottom) through jacks on its own rear side

So, I know what this thing is, but I can't fathom how you were intended to use it. But that's part of the larger mystery that I have no idea how *any* of these were intended to be used. I don't know what they were for, what their fantasy use case was.

Now, the other thing: They put them in weird places. I will provide an example. Here is the Panasonic PK-958

Bam!

It just... has a title generator in it. I'm not sure why. i'm not sure how you would use this. The quality looks like shit - here's an iffy demo video. You can tell the generated characters look *awful*

A number of 8-bit home computers had titler modules or there were titlers based on them. This thing for instance is either a complete self contained unit based on MSX2 hardware, or a module for an MSX - not totally sure.

This of course makes a lot of sense. These platforms were already self contained systems with "lots" of RAM and keyboard interfaces; all they needed was a genlock for syncing to external video and you were a lot closer to a finished product than starting from scratch.

And it does very much mean that yes there was a Famicom Titler, which was both a video titler based on the Famicom, and a complete Famicom, and the only Famicom ever sold with clean RGB output. These go for $2k on ebay, obviously.

Daria knew a person who bought one of these right before NES RGB mods became available. Devastating. Tragic. The heart weeps.

https://twitter.com/Random832/status/1070031933000826880

Returning to the original device, I believe this does demonstrate that there must be a video return path through the viewfinder socket, which could ONLY be for this specific application. They must have planned for it.

I think this explains everything. This device was a highly portable titler that you were meant to use *in realtime.* Because nobody owned two VCRs in the early 80s, the most reasonable way to do this was to actually bake in the titles, live, while shooting.

That's why (if you look close at the image, and at ebay pics I forgot to share) there is a mount plate on the bottom of the titler that clips in where the viewfinder normally goes. Where does the viewfinder then go? I don't know. This thing is a continuous mystery.

Maybe it was meant to be clipped to the camera and the camera used as a monitor while titling already-recorded video, and the composited image would exit out of the VCRs composite jack to be plugged into another VCR? Maybe? I don't know! I have no idea!

so that... kinda... brings things... to a close? With few questions answered? I know what these were, I don't know much about how they worked or why, and the one I posted initially is exactly as bizarre as it looks, and each thing we learn about it raises new questions. thanks

*** BONUS ROUND ***


please enjoy some Titled footage from @narunetto, created with the videonics tm-3000. i doubt this is representative of typical consumer titlers, but it is funny