Analog Composite and Component video... any future?

[peteb2]

Technically most video (the signal) and video equipment has moved on into its various digital systems and standards but i have to wonder is there any kind of future use for olde analog video in either composite of component? By that i mean the signal itself and any of the equipment responsible.

As a background, i spent the best part of the 1980s to around 2005 in a TV station that was PAL 4:3... We eventually cut over to 16:9 Standard Def then and soon moved toward full HiDef. Some of the old composite coax could continue life passing SDI standard Def between edit suites, studios etc but most of it is being replaced now...

In the '80s and early 2000s the analog VTRs needed a constant amount of maintenance mechanically and of course there were plenty of a never ending line of dead 4:3 CRT monitors.

Bottom line there existed tons of seriously hi-spec equipments, just as infrastructure. Video DAs to Sync reference etc etc.

The Composite signal for those who aren't aware was a convoluted affair carrying the sync pulses to id the scan line for the position in the interlace process of making a frame of the view-able picture (the raster), the burst signal for the colour info, the 8 field sequence for VTR chroma-subcarrier relationship for the VTRs  and in the transmitted signal the video vertical interval was full of  all kinds of extra data carried from test signals, ghosting cancellation and the old Teletext.

Much of the equipment responsible for handling such a signal is now all dumped into landfill or scrapped and this must be the case the world over as we move on with much better systems. I guess in some places there continues an analog approach to the reticulation of TV but it must be very rare. My question is though, analog video (whether PAL, NTSC or SECAM) had extremely high standards and convoluted specifications and i wonder whether there's anything using it now, or if it's been re- purposed i.e. any reason for it to still exist. 

The only place i have seen any reference to it is on Siglent's 'Scope advertising brochure showing us some 75% chroma colour bars... (oh the nostalgia)!

[Brumby]

The only place i have seen any reference to it is on Siglent's 'Scope advertising brochure showing us some 75% chroma colour bars... (oh the nostalgia)!

I noticed that too.  Rather quaint .... and somewhat of an anachronism, I thought.

[NivagSwerdna]

I am currently interested in arcade games from the 1980s... RGB and SYNC all the way. 

[Richard Crowley]

...analog video (whether PAL, NTSC or SECAM) had extremely high standards and convoluted specifications and i wonder whether there's anything using it now, or if it's been re- purposed i.e. any reason for it to still exist. 

Yes broadcast-standard analog video had "extremely high standards" back in their day.  But this is the 21st century and the same (or more likely better) quality can be achieved for a tiny fraction of the cost with modern technology.

Agreed that it was a marvelously clever invention to encode the monochrome and then color video onto a "serial"  analog signal stream.  But here in the digital age it doesn't seem like very "convoluted specifications". Everything else is moving on to "better, faster, cheaper" why should video be any different?

I still have several pieces of analog video gear hanging around and it is rather painful to just dump it into the waste-stream, but dunno what benefit anyone would get from it here in 2018.

I curate an imaginary "museum" of some of my favorite communications gear. Two of the featured "exhibits", one from the late 1800s is the gas-fired Mergenthaler Linotype machine. A very impressive mechanical engineering masterpiece. But made completely obsolete by photo-typesetting in the late 1900s, and then by computer-based methods to this day. 

And the second item is the marvelous Ampex quadruplex video tape recorder.  The tape deck as big as a traditional side-by-side washer and dryer, and requiring three 6-foot racks bristling with hundreds of tubes. Quite amazing that the fiddly and complex thing worked so well for decades.

But that was then and this is now.  It is proper to be impressed by that old technology, but today we aren't limited by the technology of our parents and grandparents.

[aargee]

I don’t know about future, but C-Vid is still in wide use in the FPV area of RC flight. Due to it’s low bandwidth requirements, I assume.

[Edison]

How did SirAlucard ask me about the composite video drawer on my PWR panel on my desk -
a) I have a device possessing this output - Panasonic DVR, Panasonic minidv cam, Sharp 12head professional SVHS - in their cleaning and maintenance is excellent.
b) my color inspection camera (long eye) has its own monitor and composite video output.
The future of CVBS is a past

[dexters_lab]

does it have a future? probably not long term. though i suspect it will be around and easily accessible for quite some time yet because i would imagine it doesn't actually cost much to include analog video input in new equipment.

as for the vintage equipment there are a lot of ex engineers out there with hoards of broadcast stuff. Some of it is used for historical reasons. For example i was actually at a company today that supply vintage TV equipment both working and not. They have everything from studio cameras from the 60s to OB vans from the 2000s and domestic TVs. These get used for educational, historical reasons and also for film and TV programs set in the past that need period TVs or equipment.

there are also nutters like me who seem to like collecting Quantel products

[peteb2]

I recall we had a Tektronics VM700 that could dissect the composite signal completely to pieces to measure just about, if not all, measurable magnitude errors or to set timing alignments.

The thing must have cost a fortune and earned its keep many times. I think the day it failed to power up and the green CRT had become dim by then anyway, it headed off to landfill.

I recall in the 80s using it to verify what's called the Bruch Blanking for a PAL video composite signal coming out of a high-end Sat receiver. Everyday at our noon we recorded the USA ABC World News Tonight presented by the then anchor Peter Jennings. We'd transmit it at midnight our time later that day but we'd complaints from a bunch of viewers that it always went monochrome... I discovered they were recording it themselves on a toploader Beta machine which i found out really needed the correct sequence Bruch Blanking. I discovered all out Sat receivers had a huge bug at silicon level and simply did not make the correct Bruch Blanching sequence for PAL.... As a result there wasn't much that could be done because the makers of the sat receivers were not interested in a little station with a few viewers with a problem! It was easier if the viewers bought themselves a cheap VHS VCR that wasn't so critical at what signal it had....

In hindsight when i think back about all the math the VM700 could number crunch through and what it took to design it so it could to do plus the minds involved in it's creation at Tek for all that to just be gone now.... To me i see it as a real pity for all that incredible kind of technology to be basically trash now. Equally however I accept and enjoy the far better digital video systems the likes of 4k or 8K and even 1920x1080 HD we have now.

I was on the job and helped stack-load multiple max size dumpsters with 1" VTR machines, crates and crates of analog video distribution amps, crates of vision switchers and layers of vectorscopes and waveform monitors not to mention 1000s of CRT 4:3 colour monitors and masses of 'early digital VTRs like Sony D2 plus special Graphics workstations... Absolutely TONS of gear. (The security cameras actually caught one dumpster being totally unloaded through the night by i imagine metal recyclers into their truck)....but the rest would have ended up at landfill i assume...

The actual composite video signal from an historic sense is really interesting in how it came about and how colour was piggy backed onto it and then the vertical interval used for data etc. As Richard Crowley posted above, we have effectively moved on but i wonder is anyone anywhere is likely to ever going to be able to do something with it again? It seems such a waste and i know it won't be in RF transmitted form because that's just too bandwidth hungry...

Some of the test generators (SPGs ...sync pulse generators) were quite highly accurate with heated crystal references or the actual Timing Reference Standard a TV Station used (cesium beam or rubidium) the station once locked its entire video ref sync ('colour black') to could be 'handy' in home Lab **maybe** if you ever found one....

Apart from that for now i guess composite video is a real a dead duck... !

[james_s]

We had a couple VM700's around the last place I worked too. When new they cost about $40,000.