How to Make a YouTube Video in 1987

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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

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