How to Make a YouTube Video in 1987
Everything you’re seeing and hearing was filmed and edited natively on equipment available in 1987. And it nearly killed me to make it work. It took me a total of 8 VCRs, 2 camcorders, and 3 of these: a gray, forgotten Pandora’s box that promised to make everyone a YouTuber while Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” was playing on the radio and Robocop was cleaning up a dystopian Detroit – and nearly two decades before YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded his 19-second video “Me at the zoo.” I’ve got a JVC VideoMovie camcorder – it records video and audio directly onto a VHS-C tape that goes into a cassette adapter for a VCR, which is then dubbed to a second VCR controlled by that box – the Videonics DirectED Plus.
I can add titles. I can add graphics. I can add special effects. I lied. The actual Videonics edit was so incomprehensible I had to fix it in Premiere just to get it to make any sense. I will show you the REAL Videonics disaster edit at the end of the video.
But you have NO idea what this is. This device was the breakthrough evolution that led to a $40 billion dollar industry of everyone from makeup artists to the CostCo guys making their own home videos – so out of the over 4 BILLION videos on YouTube, with around 3 million more being added every single day, WHY is there only ONE video made 5 years ago by a delightful man named GummyRoach that explains the majesty – and the frustration – of the DirectED Plus?! This nondescript magic brick was a foundational piece of technology that unlocked our ability to make and watch YouTube videos today – and absolutely no one knows about it. The May 1988 issue of Popular Science featured an article by William J. Hawkins that detailed Mark Hahn’s addiction to archiving music videos on VHS tapes. Four decades before MTV became a marathon of Ridiculousness and Catfish, it revolutionized audio-visual home entertainment by broadcasting a constant stream of music videos that created global icons like Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Guns N’ Roses – but the only way to watch Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” on demand was being quick enough to record it yourself with your VCR. Mark Hahn had HUNDREDS of music videos recorded on VHS tapes.
“Hahn’s library grew to be so extensive… he needed a computer to keep track of things… the computer taught Hahn how it could be used to control a VCR. The result, nearly two years later, is a video-editing system with smarts, called DirectED.” THIS thing.
It’s an unassuming 9 ½” by 8 ½” x 2 ½” box with 256KB RAM and an Intel 80166 CPU – and inside is where YouTube’s “Broadcast Yourself” ethos first slithered out of the primordial muck. Not only did it give normal people the ability to edit their own home videos – but the fact that it was inspired by a desire to collect and organize music videos foreshadowed what would be the dominant source of worldwide traffic on all of YouTube. This IS YouTube in 1987. And despite it being designed for consumer ease,
my odyssey to get the Videonics DirectED Plus to work made Odysseus’s circuitous post-Trojan War epic seem like a milk run to Walmart. So how is this SUPPOSED TO work? It’s all about controlling one of two VCRs. There are no buttons on the DirectED Video Control Unit box at all, and the back consists of 13 inputs. A dozen RCA jacks labeled Auxiliary In for your playback VCR, Monitor Out for your TV, Main VCR Out and In, which will do the editing, and Control. The front has three lights: Attention, VCR, and Power. And it comes with a special Videonics remote featuring the full alphabet, numbers 0 through 9, four arrow keys, and four command keys for Select, Change Display, Audio, and Cancel.
And… that’s it. That’s the unit. It’s pretty straightforward – how hard could it be to just plug all this stuff in and get started? Hard. Especially when you’re missing the “GETTING STARTED” VHS TAPE.
The first kit I ordered off eBay looked complete. The unit itself was still in its original plastic, but after plugging everything in I got to the “insert Getting Started Tape” step of the setup process and had… no tape. Okay. I couldn’t get the tape on its own, so I had to order a second Videonics unit that included the required tapes and proved it by picturing them in the listing. While I waited for that to arrive, I needed to understand the state of home video editing in the late 1980s. Now, everyone with a smartphone can record, trim,
and crop their videos instantly. They can add text, background music, emojis, and face filters to become a cartoon dog – all by pushing a few buttons. In 1987, your options for recording video were gigantic camcorders like this JVC VideoMovie GR-C7U – which used a bright yellow sticker to brag that it only weighed 2.9 pounds. I had to
buy this unit because my JVC VideoMovie I grew up with is completely dead – and most of the VideoMovies you find on eBay are sold as untested, which means these devices are generally in home tech junkyards in need of serious rehabilitation. And I thought THIS one was dead too but it turned out that the batteries were shot and I had no cable to directly plug it into the power supply so I paid my electronics guru Neal, who fixed the Butler In A Box, to make this working cord. But when these camcorders came out, they felt like you were holding Hollywood in your hands. Richard Layne described the 3.3 pound GR-C7 in the June 1986 issue of Popular Science as
the “lightest yet” and “packed with plenty of the sophisticated features found in other camcorders.” Both were considerably more compact than the over 4 pound JVC GR-C1 made famous by Marty McFly as he documented Doc Brown’s time-traveling Delorean in Back to the Future. This compact, mobile, all-in-one camcorder revolution was made possible thanks to its recording format: VHS-C. The “C” stood for “compact” because they were about ⅓ the size of a standard VHS tape. The downside to this was that the smaller tape meant a shorter runtime of about 30 minutes. And since you can’t stick a tiny VHS tape into your VCR for playback, you had to either hook the camcorder up directly or pop the VHS-C tape into a battery-powered motorized cassette adapter like I have here.
These early camcorders were an incredible leap forward beyond the Super8 home film cameras of decades past – and they were not cheap. The GR-C7 retailed for $1,485 in 1986 – which is the equivalent of $4,300 today. And your only option for editing what you shot was… setting up two VCRs and manually hitting play, stop, and record to crudely cut together your kid’s first communion. Oh, and a JVC VCR in 1987 ran you $600, which is about $1,700 today, and of course you needed TWO of them, so that’s $3,400… plus the $4,300 for an inflation-adjusted modern total approaching $8,000. Throw on the Videonics DirectED Plus at $499 retail, and before you’ve even purchased a single blank VHS tape or a TV to play it on, you’ve plunked down over $9,000 inflation-adjusted dollars to conduct the most basic manipulation of any video you shot or recorded.
And… that was actually shockingly cheap compared to the alternatives. In the years just after the Videonics debuted, editing software reminiscent of what we have now became available. Avid Media Composer came out in ‘89, Video Toaster in ‘90, and Adobe Premiere in 1991 – with the Video Toaster costing around $5,000 and Avid going all the way up to $80,000, for a range of $12,000 to $200,000 in today’s dollars. All of a sudden the $499 DirectED Plus is lookin’ PRETTY AMAZING. Imagine spending $200,000 to edit your kid’s 8th grade jazz band concert.
Anyway, the way the Videonics works is shockingly weird and surprisingly cool. And it completely destroyed my life for an entire month. When you fire up the Videonics, it gets stuck on the START screen until you insert the GETTING STARTED tape into the Main VCR. Once you do, you can see dashes appearing on screen. That’s because the Getting Started tape contains the data necessary for the Videonics to learn how to control your VCR – and this was my first major, major problem. That ¼” control jack on the back of the unit is for the Control Wand – a flat stick with an infrared diode on the end that you position directly in front of the remote control sensor of your VCR. The control wand basically hacks your VCR by recognizing the remote control
codes and allowing the DirectED to Play, Stop, Rewind, Pause, and Fast Forward your Main VCR. The Getting Started tape sends VCR manufacturer STOP commands to the control wand, and when the VCR STOPS it knows it found the proper remote control code for your specific model of VCR. It was designed to work with the roughly 500 different VCR models available in the late 1980s. I’ve got 3 different VCRs – but they’re all modern as far as VCRs go. They’re DVD/VCR combos manufactured around 20 years ago. There’s no way Videonics could’ve future-proofed the DirectED Plus, so I can’t get any of them to work. But there is only one man on the entire internet who knows enough about the Videonics to help me figure it out.
I need to find GummyRoach. I went to his YouTube channel and found no contact information. I searched X… found nothing. Facebook? Nothing. GummyRoach was a GUMMYGHOST.
I panic-Googled the name “GummyRoach” and found a Reddit thread with an active contributor named “GummyRoach” – I mean, there could not possibly be two GummyRoaches, so I shot him a DM about my Videonics woes and I waited. He replied 27 minutes later and APOLOGIZED for making me wait so long. I’ve mentioned in past videos that retro tech hobbyists are the nicest people on planet Earth and every single video I make reinforces that belief. In fact, HE was so inspired by our Videonics conversation that he went back and made a multiple part series on the DirectED Plus for his YouTube channel. So subscribe to GummyRoach and tell him that Kevin sent you.
GummyRoach told me that he had also had problems with pairing a VCR to his Videonics unit, so my path forward was to go on a VCR hunt to somehow find one that works with 1987 tech. Everyone had a VCR by the end of the 80s, so there have to be tens of millions of them out there all in working order that no one but vintage tech enthusiasts want, right? WRONG. I went to a thrift store and I bought 2 more VCRs that were NOT DVD combos – an RCA and an Emerson. The Emerson had no remote, but I did find this random RCA remote in a literal pile of dirty old remotes, but it did not work with my VCR. Awesome. I used a VCR head cleaner tape to clean the heads, which were so nasty that they prevented playback – and I did successfully get them up and running. The Emerson didn’t work with the Videonics Remote Wand, so I tossed that onto my growing stack of VCRs, but the RCA ACTUALLY WORKED. I was able to get through the next two stages of setup,
which were “Learning the VCR’s Remote Control” and “Checking the VCR Control.” You can see the Videonics is successfully controlling every playback feature of the VCR on its own. The end was in sight – I only had two final setup steps left to go: “Learning the VCR Play Characteristics” and “Learning the VCR’s Record Characteristics.” But because the RCA remote wasn’t an exact match for the VCR, those last two steps would not and COULD not work – I needed to be able to adjust one very precise VCR setting that the non-functioning remote didn’t let me change.
SPEED. Blank VHS tapes offered three record speeds that allowed different lengths of material to be recorded: SP, LP, and EP. Standard Play recorded for 2 hours, Long Play for 4, and Extended Play for 6. This worked by changing the speed of the tape as it relates to the rotating drum
in the VCR, so SP moved the tape past the head at 1.31 linear inches per second,, LP at 0.66 IPS, and EP at 0.44 IPS. The slower-moving tape meant more hours of video – but it also meant quality loss, blurring and tracking issues, and general degradation over time. SP is called Standard for a reason. This is the speed the VHS tape is intended to
record at and the speed the DirectED Plus REQUIRES. And… my RCA is set to LP. That’s really not a big problem – I can adjust that with the settings button on the VCR. Okay, there IS NO settings button on the VCR. I do need a remote.
I went to my local hardware store and grabbed a GE Universal Remote that has codes for VCRs including RCA. Which is great! I programmed the remote using the first code for an RCA VCR – 0062. That got me into the VCR settings, and… there is no record speed setting IN THE SETTINGS. A frantic Google search revealed that the Speed setting on the VCR could only be changed by pressing the Speed Button on the remote. I DON’T HAVE A SPEED BUTTON ON MY REMOTE. Modern Universal Remotes HAVE NO SPEED BUTTON. And why would they? Who is trying to change the record speed on their VCR? Me. I am trying to change the record speed on my entire graveyard of VCRs. So I got a much older RCA Universal Remote with a SPEED button off eBay – but that was going to take a week to show up. And even when it did would it work? Magic 8 Ball
says “WHO KNOWS?” So in the meantime I ordered a third Videonics unit just in case the first two weren’t working. And then I called everyone I knew to ask for more VCRs in the hopes that one of them would work with the DirectED Plus. My friend Orion stopped by with a nice Panasonic and another Emerson DVD combo. The Panasonic
synched with the Control Wand, but it was set to SLP or Super Long Play which is an another term for EP, and it had no remote and no way to change the record speed. No one has VCR remotes anymore. Check out this listing I found on Facebook Marketplace for ELEVEN VCRs with NO REMOTES. Apparently everyone threw away their VCR remotes. And then the next day something miraculous ocurred. My friend Mike showed up with this Zenith and… THE MATCHING ZENITH REMOTE. I nearly kissed this vintage tech angel right there in my
garage. Mike and his ancient VCR were a deus ex machina – or, a deus ex MIKE-ina. That’s terrible. But of course, the record speed on Mike’s Zenith was also set to EP – but with a simple press of the blessed SP/EP button I was able to change it. And… It worked. It actually worked. I got
through the rest of the setup and was ready to edit my first Videonics video. NO, ACTUALLY. NO, I WASN’T. We need to talk about this bizarre “Learning the VCR’s Record Characteristics” process. If you watched my video on the TRS-80 Pocket Computer, you’ll remember my failed attempts at getting programs to load off the cassette player – and that horrendous noise that it made. Well,
instead of ear-piercing audio tones the DirectED uses video patterns. A series of flashing black and white blocks is recorded onto a blank VHS tape that you label Library Tape 1 as the final step in the setup process. So now that the Main VCR is finally fully set up and I have the required data recorded onto Library Tape 1, I should be able to make a dub. The DirectED forces you to make a dub or copy of the tape you want to edit so that you’re not using the original – which is smart. Here’s a question. What would you do if all of a sudden you had the power
to make or remake something you loved? What would you have done with the Videonics DirectED in the late 1980s? What was your passion in 1987? My passion was FIRST BLOOD. Rambo was a big deal to me in the 80s. I was even Rambo for Halloween. This was the greatest costume ever. I showed this picture of my Dad’s old video rental store in my Selectavision video, and what do you notice to the left? A giant Rambo cardboard standee. If I’d had my current creative skills back in 1987 and I was lucky enough to have a DirectED Plus, I’d have created a remix of the film I’ve watched more times than I can count – so that’s exactly what I’m going to do with it right now.
But just like John Rambo refused to cooperate with the bumbling, authoritarian local police of Hope, Washington – John Rambo also refused to be dubbed. GummyRoach explained why – he said, “Most commercially-produced tapes have Macrovision anti-copying encoded onto them and there are gadgets to combat that, but the DirectEd Plus by itself wouldn’t.” And… that makes total sense. TechnologyConnections has a great video about Macrovision Copy Protection in which he explains that it messes up the vertical blanking interval of a video signal, causing the recording VCR to interpret it as a change in signal strength.
So, Rambo defeated Brian Denehy, the Vietnamese, Soviet, and Burmese militaries, and a Mexican cartel – and now he’s defeated me. The DirectED Plus really was aimed at the consumer enthusiast, so I popped in a home movie of MY first communion and the Videonics is happy. I can FINALLY start using it to edit. But what happened to Videonics? This is a pretty amazing device for its time – did anyone actually buy it? And why has the proto-YouTube machine been completely forgotten? Because it was for yuppies. In a March 31st, 1990 article in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News, Scott Eyman declared that “Camcorders Boost Yuppies’ Chances of Becoming Stars.” Which may be the first example of legacy media was dumping on YouTubers because it was 16 years before the very first upload.
Okay Eyman thought it was for yuppies but what did everyone else think? They thought that it was cool but too complicated. Andy Wickstrom’s 1989 review for Knight-Ridder Newspapers said, “New Gadget Makes Video Editing Almost Fun.” He acknowledges that brute force video editing, “can be a tedious and time-consuming chore” but that setting up the DirectEd Plus “takes some time and determination to learn how to run it.” And laments its “124 page instruction book”. Stephen Advokat’s Fast Forward column in 1988 takes this a step further by mentioning Videonics’ marketing manager Moe Rubenzahl admitting “DirectED’s complex instructions are the biggest hurdle in convincing videophiles of its advantages.” And finishes his article by providing a toll-free Videonics hotline to call for troubleshooting. It is not a great sign when you need a hotline to help customers who can’t translate your 124 page instruction guide.
In that “Yuppies” article, Videonics co-founder Michale D’Addio “... estimates that no more than 20 percent of camcorder owners want to bother with editing.” But an estimated 10 percent of the US owned a camcorder – so with 20% of THEM wanting to bother with editing, you were still looking at 5 million potential customers for the DirectED Plus. They saw some early success – within 2 years
they’d “shipped more than 35,000 machines around the world,” and they earned “$5.3 million in sales” in 1988 alone – which is over $14 million in revenue today. And they were about to put a DirectED in almost every home. In 1991, Videonics struck a deal with Matsushita Electric Industrial Corp.,
the Japanese tech company behind massive brands like Panasonic, Quasar, and Technics. The deal would see Matsushita selling Videonics equipment – namely DirectED – under the Panasonic brand name. Up until that point, “The US consumer electronics business” was “accustomed to looking to Japan for the most interesting, innovative products.” Japan was dominant in the 1980s electronics market, but Videonics proved that “American companies with the right technology and creativity [were] able to compete successfully in the world market.” And then it was just… gone. Nothing seemed to have happened. Whether Matsushita got cold feet or the numbers didn’t work, I can’t find any evidence of a Panasonic DirectED Plus.
Videonics did continue to chug along and release new products, but by 1998 the iconic iMac G3 dropped alongside Adobe Premiere 5.0 – and video editing truly entered the home market. Ironically, D’Addio and Hahn got their start by founding a company called Corvus Systems in 1979 that eventually developed hard disk memory units for the Apple II computer. But by the year 2000, the Apple they’d played a tiny role in growing had become so dominant in video editing that they sold Videonics to Focus Enhancements Inc., which pivoted to specializing in video mixers and switchers. And a year 2000 classified ad right below 100 Atari Games for $1 each shows that the firesale was on – DirectEd Plus units were offloaded at $75 a pop. The DirectED dream was officially dead.
But my DirectED reality is very much alive – and after weeks of failed attempts and frustration, I’m going to be one of the first people to ever show you how video was edited in the stone age of YouTube. By clicking “Mark scenes on dub, place in movie” and choosing the dub, you enter a screen that allows you to set in and out points using the arrow keys on your Videonics remote. This screen plays back your dub with the editing controls overlaid, and in real time you choose the Start and End of each scene with its corresponding timecode – and then you hit Select to save it. “Search” lets you fast forward or rewind, and “V” will show you the scenes you’ve marked.
There’s actually a blue bar progress timeline on the right that visually shows you where you’ve marked the dub in relation to its total runtime. Getting super tightly-cut scenes is pretty much impossible since you’re relying on hitting the Start and End at the exact moment the VCR is playing the dub. When you’re done, you press Cancel – and now you can go into a menu that displays the time codes of the scenes you’ve marked. You can also rearrange the scenes you’ve marked for the final movie, or add scenes from another movie to combine footage from different tapes.
One of the craziest things about this is if the scenes you’ve marked are out of order, you have to physically rewind the original tape all the way to the beginning and let it play FROM THE BEGINNING so that it can find the scene. It doesn’t know how else to find the specific scene unless you start the tape from the very beginning – so all of this just takes absolutely FOREVER to do. If you want to add graphics and titles, you go into that menu and select the scene you’d like to use. Then you choose from a list of graphics like Television Set, Canadian Flag, or Space and then type in the text. Then you can preview what that scene looks like with the graphic and text you’ve chosen.
When you’ve done all of that, you can make the final production from the movie, which begins the actual recording process of creating your analog YouTube masterpiece. There might not be a better example of old technology that was very cool, clever, and advanced for its time that is an absolute abomination compared to what we have today – but it’s really only possible to appreciate progress when you have an understanding of what came first. And it’s not just the technology that came before – it’s the people. Because there were actual YouTubers decades before streaming online video was available to anyone. Weird Paul Petroskey is called the “Original Vlogger” for good reason. The Pennsylvania musician has been documenting the details of his life ever since his family got an RCA Color Video Camera on September 7th, 1984. He took mirror selfies,
made unboxing videos, room tours, food reviews, music reviews, travel vlogs, and music videos – two decades before these possibly popular content styles even existed. In 2017, a documentary called “Will Work for Views: The Lo-Fi Life of Weird Paul” followed his journey making over 2,000 videos and 160 songs – and he’s still uploading today. Because YouTube didn’t make Weird Paul into a YouTuber. It simply gave everyone else access to the YouTube videos that he was already making. It’s proof that advances in technology don’t just help us create – sometimes they help us discover the basement dreamers and garage tinkerers that were already doing it. See you in the future. …edited natively on equipment available in 1987. And it nearly killed me to make it work.
Rs. Two. Three of these. -gotten Pandoras box that promised to make everyone a YouTuber. -ing on the radio. And Robocop- And nearly two - and nearly two decades before YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded his 19-second video “Me at the zoo.” -JVC VideoMovie camcorder – it records video and audio directly onto a VHS-C tape. that goes
-ssette adapter for a VCR …controlled by that box – the Videonics DirectED Plus. -les. Okay. Graphics! I can add special effects.
2024-11-12 08:53
