Shoot & Show!

It's a hot summer's day and you're poolside with friends. You've brought along your camera and sometime during the afternoon, you decide to film the outdoor fun. You suggest that, for a start, everybody take turns going off the high board.

You load the film, yell "Action!" and your girl, prodded by a flash image of herself as star of Wide World of Sports, steps to the end of the board and executes what she feels is a perfect swan. You stop the camera, rewind the film and watch it play back through the view finder. No, that didn't quite make it. She comes across as someone who's hastily abandoning ship. You decide to take the sequence over again, back up once more and reshoot, but you're not worried--you've got up to 30 minutes of shooting time without having to change a reel or a cartridge, and you go from the high-board bit to a no-holds-barred game of water polo. The action rolls on and you realize with satisfaction that the camera's built-in microphone is picking up the giggles and the shouts in perfect lip-sync sound.

When you get back to your pad, everybody gathers round while you set up for an immediate showing--by plugging your camera equipment into your home TV set--and watches the afternoon's festivities on the big 25-inch screen, complete with laughter and the sound of splashing water.

Fantastic? Yes. Science fiction? No. You can do it today and it's part of the most important revolution in communication since Gutenberg became a printer. The catch, of course, is that your camera was actually a miniature TV camera connected by a short cable to a portable video-tape recorder that uses magnetic tape very similar to the tape you use in your audio-tape recorder, and in much the same way.

Called Porta-Paks, the units record both sight and sound and are becoming available in increasing numbers and models from companies that have long specialized in audio-tape recorders--Sony, Akai, Panasonic, JVC, Ampex and a dozen others. The revolution received its final seal of approval earlier this year in Chicago when Sears, Roebuck ran a two-page newspaper ad for a console-model cartridge television set. The unit will play prerecorded cartridges, record off the air in black and white or color and comes with a small camera with which you can tape your own home "movies." Unlike the Porta-Paks, the camera is attached to the console by an umbilical cord. At the same time, Sony was introducing its "U-matic" video-cassette system, but its market thrust was aimed primarily at industrial users.

Where the revolution's really at, however, is with the proliferating Porta-Paks. With a portable video-tape recorder, you can go almost anyplace and record almost anything--which explains why such units are the favorites of underground videotape makers eager to present viewpoints seldom seen on commercial television, manufacturers who want to make on-the-spot training tapes, police departments needing a method to record evidence at the scene of a crime, schools anxious to free lecturers from endlessly repeating the same material and companies that figure it's cheaper to send out a dozen taped sales presentations than a dozen live salesmen.

For home users, the possibilities are overwhelming. Granted that the console cartridge--which will eventually open up a vast library of prerecorded material--will free the home viewer from the minimal selection of programs usually offered, the ability to record off the air for viewing later (an ability shared by many Porta-Paks) will also free him from the time tyranny of the local TV schedule. In short, he can become his own program director.

But most important, it means that for the first time, the vast TV audience has a chance to make and screen its own product, that now absolutely anybody can be a star. Or, as Chicago Daily News TV critic Norman Mark puts it, "A flick of the switch and there you are, in the same spot where Bob Hope or Johnny Carson was just a moment before." For the average TV addict, that possibility may be a heady one, indeed.

Why tape and not film? There are a multitude of reasons, and all of them imply, as one critic claims, that film is yesterday's technology and may well be superseded by tape, whose advantages are manifold:

• Ease of operation. No special knowledge of lenses or film speeds is required; the Porta-Paks are as easy to use as any audio-tape recorder (and easier than some).

• Instant replay--no processing. You can shoot tape and replay it instantly, either on the screen of a monitor TV or (with the aid of an inexpensive converter) on almost any home TV set. You don't have to take your tape to the local tape-recorder shop nor send it away for processing, with the inevitable time lag of at least several days between shooting and finished product.

• Synchronized sound. Conversation, music, etc., are recorded right on the tape, along with the picture. No separate sound-track preparation is required, as is usually the case with film.

• Inexpensive. A half hour of half-inch black-and-white tape will run between $12 and $15 (even less for quarter-inch). A half hour of Super-8 color (which you have to assemble from standard cartridges averaging a little less than three minutes each), developed and with sound, will run about $80--and that's a minimum figure, since most film buffs find they have to shoot three or four times as much actual footage to get exactly what they want.

• Reusable. The $12-to-$15 figure may be misleading. Unlike film, tape can be erased and reused; experts estimate that a reel of tape can be reused perhaps 100 times before the tape shows signs of wear. If, in practice, it turns out to be only a quarter of that, each half-hour shot (assuming you don't want to save the tape for posterity) will still cost less than a dollar. This also means that if you make a mistake, you can rewind the tape (after first verifying the error through instant replay via the electronic view finder or a monitor scope) and reshoot immediately (reshooting automatically erases what you shot before). With film, days may go by before you even discover that you made a mistake--and then you're stuck with it.

• Cheap and immediate copies. It's just as easy to make dupes with video tape as with audio tape.

Put all these assets together and you've got an argument for video tape that more than justifies the initial cost of the equipment ($1600 is the approximate price of the average Porta-Pak, as well as the Sears console). Summarized by Norman Mark, "With film, every time you push the button, you're pushing a lot of money through that camera, plus you have to deal with the fact that Super-8 cartridges are only good for a few minutes. That means you have to plan ahead for all your shots, that you lose spontaneity. With video tape, because it's so cheap and a reel is good for half an hour, you've got freedom of time. You can shoot hours and hours of video tape, erasing and reshooting until you get exactly what you want. And when you show it at home, you don't have to have a special projector or set up a screen or turn off the lights--just plug it into your TV set."

Drawbacks? Compared with some film equipment, a Porta-Pak is expensive, equivalent in price to that of a very good stereo set. The image produced isn't as good as that obtainable with film (though it compares favorably with what you ordinarily get on your home TV set), and small, inexpensive color-TV cameras aren't yet available (though it probably won't be long before they are). Portable video-tape units weigh about 20 pounds, counting the camera and the record/playback deck, as opposed to, say, seven pounds for a Super-8 camera and an accessory audio-tape recorder. Editing isn't as easy as with film (film can be snipped and cemented together again; with tape, you have to rerecord on an editing deck those portions of the original tape or tapes that you wish to retain--though this has the advantage of leaving your original tape intact). Really professional editing in either medium is apt to be tedious and expensive.

There is also a lack of standardization among the various manufacturers. Tape sizes vary, as do recording speeds and systems. The equipment itself is becoming as varied as stereo components, which in the long run will probably be a good thing but initially may pose a problem for the would-be purchaser. As it stands, some decks are complete record/playback units while others only record and the reel of tape has to be shifted to a playback machine for viewing. As far as the half-inch tape units go, more and more companies are shifting to new industry standards (Type I for black and white), so tapes are now interchangeable among most Porta-Paks; that is, a tape made on one machine can usually be played back on another (Sony, Panasonic, Shibaden, Ampex, et al., make half-inch units that subscribe to the Type I standard--though the Ampex tape comes in cartridge form and cannot be used directly on other machines).

Instant-replay facilities also vary from unit to unit, though most decks can be plugged into a monitor screen or, via a converter, into your home TV set. Some units use the camera view finder--which may actually be a miniature TV screen--as a monitor for instant replay while out in the field, which limits viewing to the camera operator. The Akai camera, however, uses an optical-reflex system for view finding, while the instant replay can be seen on a three-inch monitor scope attached to the recording deck, (continued on page 189) Shoot & Show! (continued from page 118) allowing several people to watch. Finally, many Porta-Paks can record programs off the air when plugged into special monitor sets (in the future, almost every TV set will have jacks and built-in circuitry, much as stereo receivers do today, so video-tape decks can be plugged in for record and playback).

As with photography and stereo, the sky's the limit for hobbyists with ample funds. Accessories such as special lenses, long-life battery packs and carrying cases abound--and there are editing decks, special-effects generators, converters, extension cables, ad infinitum. In addition to the Porta-Paks, other half-inch but less-portable equipment is available: playback and record decks that can record off the air and play back either black and white or color via special monitors, color cameras (very expensive) and the like. There is also one-inch tape equipment (used primarily for closed-circuit TV in schools) and, of course, professional two-inch equipment--but by then, you've left the hobby class far behind.

In short, the video-tape Porta-Pak has much the same relationship to more elaborate video-tape equipment as portable audio cassette recorders have to expensive reel-to-reel units. The latter will give you greater flexibility and fidelity, but the former are frequently more fun.

The fun aspects, however, were not what first occurred to manufacturers (chiefly Sony) who originally started turning out portable half-inch videotape units back in 1968. One-inch equipment was expensive, stationary and usually required hours of training for the operator. The result was a demand on the part of industry for simple, portable equipment that could be taken out into the plant for the making of a training tape--one that required the expertise not of a cameraman but of a foreman who was familiar with the process being taped. The military was quick to pick up on equipment that could be used in the field, and police departments weren't far behind. The Chicago Police Department uses portable systems to record the scene of homicides, while in Costa Mesa, California, the department tapes suspected drunks for later viewing when they're sober; after watching them, subjects usually cop a guilty plea and pay their fines quietly. (And who hasn't noticed the video-tape cameras focused on the tellers' cages at the local bank?) Porta-Paks were also used to record the damage caused by Hurricane Camille in 1969; claims adjusters viewed the tapes a day later in the front office, so that claims could be settled quickly and easily. Portable units also have been used to tape would-be teachers in training courses as an aid in correcting their delivery.

It's this latter, self-instructive use of instant replay that set tape apart from film and persuaded film makers--both the underground and home hobbyists--to take a closer look at portable, do-it-yourself video-tape recorders. Louis Jaffe writes in Radical Software (a combination Whole Earth Catalog and Rolling Stone magazine for video-tape enthusiasts): "Video tape can be played back as soon as it is recorded and seen as part of the situation that produced it. It is this capability that gives tape a clear advantage over film for use in all forms of educational experience, from encounter groups to industrial training, where it is valuable for people to see themselves in action as others see them, while they still remember freshly how they felt as they were being recorded."

It's one thing to sit home and see Arthur Ashe deliver the perfect overhead smash (in a prerecorded cartridge you can rent for viewing on the Sears console) and quite another to be on the courts and watch yourself blow one just 30 seconds after you did so. It's not only instant replay, it's instant education. Paul Willey, boss of the Phoenix Tennis Center, uses video tape in precisely this way, to record his students and play back the tapes so they can spot their own errors.

To improve your tennis smash or golf swing through instant feedback is an obvious use of video tape. So is recording birthdays, outings and parties, where your video-tape recorder will have an advantage over many cameras because the only sound it makes is a slight hum, which means it's relatively unobtrusive and you can catch people unaware (not that they'll always love you for it).

There's also this to consider: A free-wheeling cameraman no longer need worry whether or not Kodak will decide he's gone too far in filming his girlfriend and refuse to return his shots. And sooner or later, of course, video-tape equipment will end up in the bedroom. After all, there's no reason the instructional uses of video tape should stop at the tennis court or golf course. Which makes one ponder what the future of pornographic films will be, now that everybody can make his own.

This brings us to the question of censorship. Unlike magazines from Denmark, there's absolutely no visual evidence as to the true nature of a reel of video tape--it is, after all, nothing but a configuration of iron filings on a plastic backing. Michael Shamberg, coeditor of Radical Software and author of Guerrilla Television, is convinced it means the end of Governmental censorship. "You can't see the image on video tape. You can't hold it up to the light and say, hey, that's pornography. There's no chance of a child accidentally stumbling onto it--you have to actively put it on a machine. I think in the case of tape or video cassettes that censorship will be unconstitutional--you can't have the Government pulling tapes out of the mail and playing them to see whether or not they're pornographic."

Whenever Shamberg or even the establishment TV critics consider the potential of video tape and the Porta-Paks (classed as "easy access" equipment because they're portable and almost anybody can operate one), the subject of commercial television is introduced. Described years ago as a "vast wasteland" by then FCC chairman Newton Minow, it has been getting vaster and more wasted ever since, according to some critics. Whether this is true or not, the fact remains that by the time he leaves school, the average American has spent 15,000 hours watching TV and only 12,000 in the hallowed halls of ivy. Those hours of staring at the tube also include some 350,000 commercials; as Peter Drucker, quoted in Expanded Cinema, comments wryly, "Few teachers spend in their entire careers as much time or thought in preparing their classes as is invested in the many months of writing, drawing, acting, filming and editing of one 30-second television commercial." The result has been that the influence and mystique of television have become so ingrained over the years that, as Alan Watts puts it, "In our society you don't really exist until your existence has been confirmed by seeing yourself on television."

Until the advent of half-inch video tape, and particularly the Porta-Paks, there wasn't much anybody could do about this. But the situation has now radically changed, and from the ground up. John LeBaron of the Media Center at the University of Massachusetts comments in Educational Television, "A kid can have a tremendous familiarity with prepackaged [television] programing, but not know how to make his own. This is like knowing how to read and listen, but not how to write or speak." The Media Center took pains to correct this by turning elementary school kids loose with Porta-Paks to tape their own shows, with adult supervision kept to a minimum. The kids wrote their own scripts, made their own tapes, operated the equipment, and the finished shows (a simulated astronaut's voyage to the moon, making maple sugar, etc.) were telecast over WHYN-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts. Another example: Students at the State University of New York in Binghamton were given Porta-Paks to document their own environments. One of the results: a tape of two teenaged junkies shooting up while pleading with the cameraman not to follow their example. Mod Squad would be hard pressed to duplicate either the shock or the reality.

For the video-tape underground--whose slogan might be "Porta-Paks to the people"--half-inch tape has much the same appeal as offset printing. The great white light for the first underground-newspaper publisher must have been when he suddenly realized that for approximately $200 he could turn out 10,000 copies of his very own newspaper, complete with photographs. Regarding half-inch video-tape equipment, Shamberg adds appropriately: "Don't forget there's more than just the underground press--there's the neighborhood press and the ethnic press, too. When it comes to video tape, what we want to avoid is just one culture getting its hands on it."

Through Radical Software, Shamberg is attempting to do just that. A clearing house for information about dozens of underground video groups (Global Village, People's Video Theater, Raindance, the Videofreex, Ant Farm Video and dozens of others), the publication also lists hundreds of tapes available for exchange among groups. As far as Shamberg is concerned, the more people documenting their environment the better. Some of the tapes are crude and others self-indulgent, but they're television of, for and, most importantly, by the people, and they have distinct advantages when stacked up against what is ordinarily seen on commercial TV.

Video tapes are meant to be viewed, of course, and the underground people, as well as some critics, see cable television as the natural showcase for them. A home hooked up to CATV will have access to a vastly multiplied number of channels--instead of five or six, the viewer may be able to get as many as 40 or more. The problem has been what to fill them with. The answer may be to reserve a certain percentage of the channels for open access on a first-come, first-served basis, for those who wish to show their tapes. Through this type of programing, the community may have the chance to become acquainted with itself, with the life styles and problems of the different groups that live in it.

Will it work? In New York, a version of it already has. In Manhattan, Open Channel facilitates public-service programing to 90,000 cable-TV subscribers and has helped arrange free airtime for groups ranging from the Boy Scouts to black radicals. Raindance has broadcast some of its tapes over CATV as well. (There are technical problems in broadcasting half-inch video tape, but they're not insurmountable.) And CATV is spreading; there are currently 2750 CATV stations around the country and (at this writing) 2779 applications for franchises are pending.

On a smaller scale, there are those buildings completely wired for television in which an enterprising video-tape maker need only plug into the master antenna. New York's Westbeth apartment complex, a former telephone-company laboratory building converted into apartments for artists and completely wired for TV, is one example. And film maker Shirley Clarke would like to do the same with New York's Chelsea Hotel, whose residents are also primarily in the arts.

As for the future of the underground, which is fast becoming an overground, Shamberg thinks, perhaps wistfully, of real guerrilla television. "Some of my friends are building short-range transmitters. One group that lives in a valley is already transmitting to the other residents. It's against the law, but after all, they're transmitting on a pretty small scale. And I have another friend who wants to build a very powerful transmitter the size of a Porta-Pak so he can travel around and broadcast." Television's Johnny Appleseed.

In considering how half-inch video tape and do-it-yourself portable units may remake society, some of video tape's more far-out theoreticians have rather interesting ideas. Philip Morton, a young assistant professor in experimental video at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, insists that video tape is not product but process (when not recording, the video camera shows your image on the monitor scope simultaneously--in what Morton calls "no-time"--but from a completely different angle, which is oddly upsetting; what's happening is not two different actions but a single one, in which the image feeds back to the performer and vice versa), and that instant feedback will subtly but inevitably alter the behavior, and perhaps even the nature, of whoever is watching. Morton believes that the identity crises so familiar to today's generation may never occur at all to a generation that's used to having itself fed back as information at a very early age. Print, he claims, conditions us so that the process of thinking is the same for all of us, though what we think about obviously differs. "I don't know what will happen 25 years from now," he says, "when a four- or a five-year-old, instead of learning how to print in kindergarten, will be dealing with a no-time image of himself. For the first time, there'll be some bastards coming up who don't think like we do--and that's beautifully frightening."

But 25 years is a long time away and meanwhile, there's this marvelous machine with which you can correct your net game, watch yourself and your friends make love, tape your own cinéma vérité opus and record New Year's festivities so you'll know better next time. You can exchange tapes with your friend down the street or mail them to correspondents around the world. Or, if you want to show your creations to a larger audience, there's the possibility of CATV or maybe a store-front theater. New York's Channel One Theater has attracted sold-out audiences to a hilarious, if shocking, video-taped show called Groove Tube (and its sequel, Groove Tube II), featuring most of those things you always wanted to see and hear on the tube but thought you never would.

In any event, one thing is certain: Porta-Paks bridge the gap between the film buff and the audio freak, which means that video-tape recording may well become the most popular hobby of them all.