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Component Recording Video - The LVR-5000

NeXT

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 22, 2008
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8,095
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
It's a wet dream for anyone who loves laserdisc that you could record your own discs with whatever you want. The sad fact is that it currently is and always was impossible. While this does not mean that single-run discs could be recorded and in the 80's if you had the money you could have custom discs made for you but the equipment required to do so was so large, heavy and expensive that very few companies could actually do this and according to google, none of this equipment still exists. All that remains now are relics consisting of silver or ruby tinted discs made with a glass substrate.

This does not mean that the idea was dead. Later on in the life of the 12" medium the formats branched out and at the very high end companies like Sony and Pioneer were manufacturing their own disc based video recorders for use in archival environments. One such technology was Component Recording Video. It took the form factor of the 12" disc and put it in what you could compare to a very large Magneto Optical cartridge.

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Personally I do not know what enhancements took place in the encoding method however the major advantage it had over laserdisc was the ability to record and playback with RGB/component video which was a major improvement over composite and luma/chroma S-video.
Anyways as you can see above I came across one day two amazingly large cartridges. The DD logo meant that they were both actually not for CRV but for an amazingly large computer disc drive. Each cartridge stores around 6gb. To this day I've still yet to find one of these drives. There was two or three photos of an even bigger jukebox on google but running LTO3 myself there wasn't even anything novelty about using something like that and I wasn't really interested. Oddly aside from the branding the cartridges look identical to CLVdisc media and on ebay there's often a recorder or two up. Unfortunately they are the usual "AS-IS, but we still want a grand for it" junk. Then about a year ago I spot one in a rack not far from me. It wasn't too expensive but it was too far to consider for the then unemployed me. Fast forward a year and the ebay listing surfaces again. It's even cheaper now. Suddenly it clicks on me that I can get it! After some emails a deal was made and then yesterday the trip began at 4AM. Seven hours of that trip consisted of driving through a very flat hell but eventually I reached the seller, loaded it and the rack it came with into the car and drove back home. I still cannot understand how it took eight hours to travel one direction and 11 hours to travel back. It was suppost to be 14 hours tops. I was exhausted.

Anyways, the listing included some other fluff like a umatic deck, a power strip and said rack but this was the bulk of it before it was cleaned up.

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It's big. The entire recorder unit consists of the LVS-5000A, LVR-5000A and three interconnect cables.

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The LVR-5000A is the actual recording unit. It lacks a lot of logic and relies on the LVS processor to operate. The front has a few basic controls for manipulating the contents of a disc and starting/stopping recording. The rear has dub controls, a serial port and the interconnects for the processor. I'm assuming that you can daisy chain multiple drives to the one processor. The hours meter in the corner currently indicates that it has seen about 2500 hours of use. Oddly enough it came with an IR remote control when you bought it. I don't understand why you would need one on a device like this, at least in an editing environment. Unfortunately I did not receive one with my unit. Neither did I receive a manual.

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The LVS-5000A is the processor. It takes the video signal and conditions it for the LVR. Its front is even more basic looking with just a headphone jack, volume meters, and input control display but everything is on the back. There we can see the variety of inputs and outputs that it can use. It's interesting to note that it will work with both NTSC and PAL video signals.
On the inside there is a card cage which holds three boards (1, 2 and 3) and an extra slot for another option board.

Everything seemed fine so I put it all back together, plugged everything in and flipped the switches.
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The recorder promptly slammed its dust flap closed and then the processor went alive and indicated which modes it was set in on the display.
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Good. Well at least that works. Now I wonder about that cartridge.....
At this point I decided it would be best to make sure no attempt could be made to write to the disc so the write protect tab on the cartridge was flipped and the WRITE INHIBIT switch was toggled on the recorder, then the cartridge was fed into the unit.

So now we know that it doesn't immediately and outright refuse to work with it. Now comes the big question: Can I actually record to it? There are so many unanswered variables at this point. The cartridge might be hard sectored. The substrate might not be the same as that found on CRVdisc cartridges. The list goes on. There's also that thing about sourcing media. Every so often a cartridge or two of these WORM discs appear on ebay. At the time I wrote this there was one guy selling new ones for $10 each. They are surprisingly common and not all that expensive. I've never seen a CRVdisc on ebay. My two cartridges only cost me $25 each. I'm quite weary about attempting to record anything to them until I actually have something I really want to store on a disc. For now at least I can take pride in owning a nearly new recorder!
 
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