The potential for making videotapes cheaper by using extended-play duplication has always tantalized the video companies. The EP mode is a VHS machine's slowest speed, two-thirds slower than standard play and requiring two-thirds less tape for the same program. In other words, a 90-minute movie can fit on what is normally 30 minutes of tape.
In home recording, the EP mode is convenient for long tapings but the quality is nothing to brag about. The picture is notably coarser than in SP, and the audio tends to waver and wobble. Still, as a way to catch the occasional long TV show or movie for one-time viewing later on, EP has its place.It's quite a different story for commercially prepared videocassettes. When video consumers buy a movie or other program, presumably to watch many times, quality becomes more important and they look to SP for dependable performance.
But what if EP could be improved? What if a movie could be packaged using a third of the tape length required for SP? What if that movie could be priced below $10, and short subjects below $5? Would home video sales expand even further?
We may soon find out. Rank Video Services America, one of the largest duplicators in the business, is asking the major studios and its smaller clients to consider the advantages of an enhanced EP process it calls Master Sharp.
As Rank executive vice president David Cuyler sees it, Master Sharp is good enough to pave the way for "a paperback format for video" - offering quality at a budget price, just as paperback books present an alternative to costlier hardbacks.
In addition to its main business of SP tapes, Rank has been producing EP tapes for years, made to much higher standards than a home VCR can produce. Rank uses a contact-printing method known as thermal magnetic duplication, or TMD. It's a complex process but essentially it involves two tapes, a master and a blank. On a TMD machine, the master and blank are drawn simultaneously and at high speed through a contact point, where electromagnetism transfers the images onto the blank. The transfer is quick: in "real time" duplication, a 90-minute program takes 90 minutes to copy, but in
contact printing it's more like 90 seconds.
Since first using TMD in 1988, says Cuyler, Rank has developed more than 50 improvements to the TMD process, some mechanical and some procedural. The sum of these improvements is represented by the Master Sharp trademark, which Rank hopes will be seen as a quality imprint for EP video.
To help overcome the negative associations of EP, the company has designed a "promise" of quality to appear on cassettes using Master Sharp, reading: "This movie was manufactured to exacting standards using a unique high-speed process that delivers outstanding sound and picture quality."
Cuyler says Master Sharp EP is not intended to replace SP, which is still superior. Rather, he predicts consumers will see it applied to limited-use corporate tapes and sponsored giveaways, such as video "brochures" showcasing new automobile models, annual reports to shareholders or video pharmaceutical catalogs.
Clearly, though, the market for budget movie cassettes is just as ripe. The consumer's readiness to buy millions of copies of popular titles has brought us hits like "Hook" (due July 24) at $24.95 and "The Silence of the Lambs" (already in stores) at $19.98, to cite two recent examples.
Now that hundreds of older titles have been priced at $14.95, many video executives with large libraries are wondering how to crack the $10 barrier and still make a profit. They'll be giving Master Sharp a close look.VIDEO QUESTION
Q: I bought my VCR in 1981 and it still works. But it has only 12 channel selections (2 to 13). I have cable TV and would like to record channels higher than 13. Is there a way to do this without buying a new VCR?
A: Your "antique" apparently predates the VCRs that have cable-compatible tuners built in. If your cable company does not provide you with a converter box, you can buy your own cable-TV tuner, available at electronics stores like Radio Shack and often priced below $75. Such tuners, of course, do not allow you to tune in scrambled pay channels. Also, the range may not cover all the higher channels on your cable system. - Andy Wickstrom (Knight-Ridder)NEW VIDEOS
TIMEBOMB - Sen. Lloyd Bentsen would say it best about "Timebomb": "I knew `The Manchurian Candidate' and let me tell you, you're no Manchurian Candidate." Just as Dan Quayle failed to strike Bentsen as a credible successor to John F. Kennedy, "Timebomb" fails to live up to the movie that informs its plot. Michael Biehn is Eddy Kay, who's been brainwashed to be part of an elite corps of killers. Problem is: The reprogramming failed to work. Kay is living a mundane existence as a watchmaker. When he runs into a burning building to save a mother and child, he makes the TV news. Quite conveniently, the head of the government program that developed the killer elite sees it and mobilizes his henchmen to hunt down Kay, fearing he will somehow foil their assassination plot. All of this strains credulity. - Douglas J. Rowe (Associated Press)