The Video Tape Room
This was the infamous tape room located at the
old studios on the corner of Converse St. and Main St. in
Spartanburg. Many long shifts and hundreds and hundreds of miles
of 2" video tape passed through here. The three machines in
the foreground are Ampex model VR1200's...notorious for drifting
oscillators and tape cutting heads. I remember the day when I
though we were really high-tech when our chief engineer, Chuck
Binns installed the digital tape counters. It still didn't solve
the 10 second pre-roll that was needed to to get a stable picture
on them. But with a trusty pocket screwdriver close at hand, WSPA
had probably the best video quality in the region.
On the back wall you can see a rack full of current commercials and PSA's ready for air on the new RCA TCR1 (see further down the page).
Suspended from the ceiling was a Conrac 19" monitor that we had to keep the covers removed to keep it working. A slight heat problem...even in a 65 degree air-conditioned tape room.
Here's a view in the opposite direction. Not much interesting there....just tape storage. The first rack after the last VTR housed the first digital frame store...it would store a single frame of video in case of a sync loss!
Here's a closer shot of "VTR #4". We used this machine mostly for news footage as we could get it to do a 2 second pre-roll (well most of the time). See the intercom hanging out of the front? We used to yell at Jimmy Sanders (news technical director) to tell him that the tape was cued and ready to roll. This was communications technology at it's greatest!
Here's the RCA TCR-1...a 2" automated quad tape system (better picture of that further down the page). It featured a carosel that would hold several breaks worth of commercials, two transports, a 2 second preroll (lightning fast in it's day) and a ton of pneumatics. To watch it load a cart and thread was a wonder (and sometimes dangerous if you got too close). This was Chuck Binn's nemesis...he added a whole new vocabulary when he worked on that beast.
Finally...this was a poster tha hung on the tape room door for quite some time...it never did much good.