Quote:
Originally Posted by Kurtis Bahr 
There were two type of recorders made. The one with the caddy so you could only play them in units made for them and another that did not have a caddy but the player had to be designed to play the disc. The LD-V4400 industrial was made to read those. I do not know of any LD recorder that used a disc you could put into any LD player.
There were two type of recorders made. The one with the caddy so you could only play them in units made for them and another that did not have a caddy but the player had to be designed to play the disc. The LD-V4400 industrial was made to read those. I do not know of any LD recorder that used a disc you could put into any LD player.
Well there was one. The ODC 6010 (or some number like that). They cost $250K and were the size of a washer and dryer set. They had both plastic disc blanks as well as glass masters for high quality work - like museum kiosks. The used a high power Argon laser to burn the pits into the aluminum (or whatever it was) layer inside the blank. This technology is in fact very similar to today's CD-R recorders. The first disks in the early 1980s were about VHS quality. The later disks in the late 80s were as good as an average commercial pressed disk.
These systems were used in the 1980s for offline electronic film editing. This was before video compression and cheap hard disks so the edit systems had four modified consumer LD players all with copies of the same disk. When you spread the playout across all four disks, there is always one within the seek area to allow a frame to frame cut. The edit system output was to VHS or 3/4in tape and most importantly a computer file on a 3.5in floppy that contained all the edit points for later negative cutting or even broadcast linear tape editing.
Of course due to the cost of the daily disk recording X4 per half hour of camera footage (all CAV btw) these system quickly died in the early 1990s when hard disk and video compression became viable.
The well known Avid was the first hard disk based edit system in 1990 running on a MAC that signaled the end of this labor intensive and expensive daily laser disk mastering.
I've never actually seen a CDV that wasn't porn!
