There’s been a few betacam tapes lying around here and we needed to get the footage off of them and into the computer. Luckily we have friends in the broadcast industry who had a Betacam deck we could borrow. The BVW-75P is an ancient piece of machinery but a real marvel of electrical and mechanical engineering. Back in 1989 it’s suggested retail price was around $53,000. Now units online are fetching around $7500, still a hefty sum.

We hooked the BVW-75P into our sony anycast through the composite out signal, and use the anycast to convert the signal to firewire which was fed into our computer. The footage turned out fairly nice considering one of the tapes was over ten years old.

The footage will be used for some promotional videos we’ll be making in the future for the upcoming ship ministry which we’ll be a part of.

See videos and photos below:

This is the Marine Reach promo video from 2003:

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