Thread by @gravislizard

anyway so my sony betacam
god. god damn. this thing is like a fucking cybernetics experiment it has so many goddamn interchangeable parts. this is my jam. this is what i'm here for.

okay okay it's like this. when a company like this releases a product like this, it isn't exactly like apple releasing a macbook. it's not like "the Consumers will worship at our alter". people have jobs to do

so sony creates this new camera system. says, ok, it records on betacam SP, takes the NB-1P battery for 8 hours of record time, has a monochrome viewfinder, and you'll play back video with an external deck except for review

somewhere between then and now, the camera ends up with 4 different battery standards accomplished by installing different rear-end plates. mine actually has an aftermarket IXP V-mount and, okay, so

sorry, IDX. it's called V-mount 'cause of the, you know, the V there. that's how the battery attaches

ok so look here's what sony released the machine with, apparently. the manual for my VTR says it can take all of these batteries. so four, stock.

the way this worked is that you'd simply unscrew the entire rear end of the VTR, removing the battery mount plate, and install a different one. which is some barbarian shit

then, this IXP thing takes it a step further by adding aftermarket capabilities, so it has a fuse, a SPARE fuse holder, and a fucking power take off?? see those two holes near the top of the side in the second pic? that's a DC tap!

that is to say we are talking about a device that allows for four STOCK options and an unpredictable number of aftermarket options in literally THE PIECE OF PLASTIC THE BATTERY CLIPS TO

one of the available systems is just the ability to take two of the first systems batteries and I THINK the way that works is by simply screwing a second battery case to the back of the first one. It's hard to say because there's NO proof it exists

that is the only picture I can find except a blurry catalog shot. None on ebay. this device has fallen off the earth.

here's the DC-500, which apparently is a case that just takes a fatter stock battery. these are relatively available for about $30.

I do like that the DC-500 looks like an ammo case

god what a fucking lump. By the way, the battery that goes in there looks like the first pic on the back, while the V-mount I spoke of looks like this

In other words they're damn close to identical except for the physical connector layout, circle pins instead of tab pins.

Now it would be silly of me to imply that Sony invented three or four battery standards just for this camera. The truth is probably that these are legacy formats, which IMO is even weirder.

Maybe one was created for this series but the others are from past series. maybe there's some complicated economics going on wrt production quantities that make it hard to only make one or the other so sony makes both

maybe they maintain battery and equipment lineups completely separately and just develop new battery designs in the middle of a product run and go "ok you can start installing these new plates if you want the new packs"

Seriously anything could be the explanation, professional gear is on some other shit. I don't even know what their designers think like.

An interesting quality about this stuff staying relevant for so long is that there are, curiously, very competitively-designed replacement packs. Like, you know how if you get a replacement for your shitty JVC camcorder it's just a black cube?

look at the SHIT that is going DOWN in the v-mount battery market. this puppy costs $149, it's li-ion (orig was ni-mh or ni-cad) and sports a more ergonomic grip and both D-tap and USB ports

Turns out this is because this battery system has LEGS. It's in the manual of a 1996 camcorder, is STILL in the manual for Arri and Red, absolute state of the art 2018.

so i can snap a battery off an 8k imaging cube used for shooting the latest blockbuster movies and put it on my 22 year old SD camcorder with a rock in its shoe

IDK MAN DOESN'T THAT JUST MAKE YOUR SPINE TINGLE TO THINK ABOUT

Addition Alley: look at this fucking claymore mine of a battery charger. if you kicked this thing walking across the studio floor you'd be in traction for a month

here's more shit you can change. this is just a small section of the manual. so, god, there's so many options here

basically this means you have the option to dock beta or hi8 (hahahahahhaaha) recorders, or you can have it spit out a VTR remote cable, OR you can get raw RGB and just run cables. why? i'm really not sure!

i like how this happens to spit out composite video in the upper left, because the camera head itself outputs composite right out the side. this makes me wonder what happens if you hook up both. does it affect the signal? distortion meters are needed

presumably this is compatible with other models that /don't/ output composite from the head itself. there's just so many permutations of this shit

holy shit i think i've just Cracked a fucking Code with this thing

so, i've been wrestling over trying to figure out one big question: what lenses DOES my camera take? and so far i've had a really hard time answering that.

like... it's REALLY hard to just google this. and what's peculiar is that the manuals for the camera heads don't address it. i've looked at the manuals for multiple heads from multiple manufacturers and they just shrug and say "attach your lens here"

This is one of those things you can't google because not enough people who have less than an IPO in the bank care enough about it, and people who have that much money just call a dealer and say "make this work"

the information just isn't in some easily locatable place online. wikipedia could help but, again, it doesn't because of its common and extremely well known problems e.g. nobody would fucking bother to put this on there

i mean - how could you win an edit war over data that's NOT AVAILABLE? what could a wiki editor link to? what news article? what magazine article? this is apparently entirely industry word of mouth info

so here's what i've GLEANED

through consumption of VAST amount of Web Pages
and i need to be clear
this, times two, spanning my entire screen width, for a solid week
i have been able to suss out what i THINK is going on

First: There is something called B3 Mount. it looks like this. the lens has a rotating ring on it and the camera has a bayonet that it locks onto.

Second: There is something called B4 Mount. It looks like this. The lens has the bayonet, the camera has the rotating ring. same thing but inverted.

Third: COMPLETELY SEPARATE FROM MOUNT, lenses are either 1/2" or 2/3". presumably this literally means they cast an image circle that covers either a 1/2" or 2/3" sensor area.

With consumer equipment, this is information that would be plastered across all surfaces. Pro gear assumes you ordered it from a dealer, brand new, and the dealer had a paper cross ref from some old hulk of a company that says what body takes what lens.

And that's how I spent a week trying to figure out what lens my camera takes, and I'm still not sure. So then I get hit with this gut-punch:

setting aside the fact they used " in one place and -inch in another, motherfucker IT TAKES BOTH

So converting this over to still terms, 2/3" is full-frame and 1/2" is APS-C, and probably the whole industry treats this just like the DSLR companies: You can mount a full-frame lens on APS-C, it's just gonna be a lot shorter.

This simplifies things because my camera uses the smaller size so: i can just get any lens i like, so the $35 one with free shipping i found is now on its way to my house.

Now here's an interesting new wrinkle in the process of me getting this camera ready to use: I've solved the lens, I can probably get tapes at Goodwill (they have a huge stack of ones I think will work) but what about the battery?

Obviously V-mount is ideal but I don't have $150 to drop on it or $250 with a charger so what should I do for the moment?

Getting DC power into this thing isn't the easiest, it takes a 4-pin XLR and the power bricks are still expensive, natch. I could hack one up of course.

but what I could also do is just put two spade lugs on a 12V supply and stick them right here, because those two screws are the battery connection. since you can replace the battery mount plate.

OH, and here's another weird aspect of this: getting actual video out of it might be hard, because the Video Out port on the side, which I ASSUMED was, you know, for the VTR output, miiiiight not be.

It... might be the viewfinder output. in glorious monochrome, complete with framing lines and OSD. The manual is not super clear on this!!!

like - it says this. ok??? it says mono playback is available through the viewfinder, then says color playback is available with this adapter, but ok what does the video out hole do when you're playing back then????

theory: dead nothing. it's a passthrough from the camera, and outputs squat when the tape is just rolling. i have no idea what else to think.

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