Half-Inch Videotape and Random – Access Editing
By 1984, broadcast-quality half-inch videotape had been accepted by the broadcasting industry. The picture quality of the half-inch tape was far superior to that of three-quarter-inch and incredibly close to that of one-inch, thanks to the technique of composite recording. An added advantage was that the recorder could be built into the camera, eliminating a crew member as well as the cumbersome wires that ran from the camera to the record deck.
Newer editing systems, including those from CMX, began mixing two-inch quad with one-inch videotape, three-quarter-inch cassettes, and half-inch tape. Video, which had once been a very expensive, quad-only process used almost exclusively by the networks, was becoming a flexible, fast, and relatively inexpensive production medium.
In the mid-1980s, several companies began to take