Tripped over this video on YouTube.

Why yes, it was up hill both ways!

ABC TV Videotape room tour and edit demo [720p60] - YouTube

Andrew

That's where I started with editing. 2" Ampex Quad.

If you didn't have the vacuum set correctly to suck your tape into the correct curve in the boat, you were in big trouble. With head adjustment, if your heads protruded too far from the drum, it could slice the tape like a razor. We had to use a solution with microscopic iron fillings in it to paint the tape to find the cut points. The iron filings would be attracted to the highest density ares of the magnetic tracks on the tape. This would reveal the scanned magnetic tacks visible along with their sync pulses. Adjacent to the sync pulse is where you had to cut the tape. Because Quad wasn't a helical scan system, you could physically cut between each head scan. This enabled a splicing method not dissimilar to film.

A slow and laborious process. Only Assemble editing. No Insert editing, basically. Noisy, hot, monstrous bits of kit they were. In today's money. Worth about US$400,000 each. And in constant need of maintenance nearly every day.

Andrew, You brought back some memories. Pretty mixed ones at that! 😃👍

Chris Young

..... and the fact that the audio was recorded in a different location, so your edits contained a bit of before/after!