Decades before software like Premiere and iMovie made video editing cheap, easy, and accessible for everyone, the only option was chaining a conglomerate of vintage 80s technology – multiple camcorders or VCRs and a TV – to craft custom analog video. Then the Videonics system changed tech history forever.

With professional-grade setups costing up to six figures at the time, the Videonics brought simple editing to the masses at a tiny fraction of the price… in theory. The reality of the Videonics video editing system was a jumbled mess of retro tech that took a near-miracle to make your kid’s 8th grade jazz band concert video look a little more polished.

And getting it all to work over 35 years later? It took 8 VCRs, 2 camcorders, 3 Videonics units and 4 remotes to create a 1987-era YouTube masterpiece. But in the end, it revealed the beauty and drive of the first-generation analog filmmakers and videographers who made YouTube possible for all of us.

GummyRoach:
Weird Paul:
TechnologyConnections:

#retrotech #analog #vhs #filmmaking

Nearly 50 years ago, the Polavision camera blended Polaroid’s revolutionary instant film with on-demand home video – and the result was a landmark advance in analog technology that would become a mystery of science and a winding international journey into vintage tech.

Because now, generations after Edwin Land bet his half-century legacy of innovation and the company he founded on the success of the Polavision, I need to figure out how to get the thing to work… and only one man in the world could help me.

I traveled to Vienna, Austria to meet Florian “Doc” Kaps – the man behind ‘The Impossible Project’ that saved Polaroid from the dustbin of history. With his guidance and his private store of old Polaroid video tapes, perhaps I would be able to record a modern YouTube video with my vintage Polavision camera.

Through it all, Doc immersed me into his world of analog technology and the philosophy behind his mission to re-integrate analog into our daily lives. We cut lacquer records, we felt the fires of an analog restaurant, and we spent too much time trying to resurrect a relic of the past – because technology, vintage and modern, is all about people.

#polaroid #analog #vintagetech #history #cameras #documentary

A global team of 287 researchers have combined over 100 terabytes of data to create a full map of a fruit fly’s brain, which includes 139,255 individual neurons and 50 million connections.

Popular Science, “Scientists mapped every neuron of an adult animal’s brain for the first time”:

#science #sciencefacts #weirdscience #biology #research