U-matic
You might not know what that monstrous hunk of plastic and whatever they use to make magnetic tape is, but it was a big part of my life from 1996-2002. U-matic (also known as 3/4”) is a videotape format developed by Sony in 1969 (?!), one of the first to put the reels inside a plastic casing. It’s very similar to VHS except that it’s comically large, too big even to fit into one of those oversized boxes they used to package porno in.
Why have I spent so much time with this antiquated behemoth? NYU didn’t get their batch of DV cameras and Avids until the semester after my video class. So we made our dumb little movies by lugging around a giant tape deck on a shoulder strap, attached to the camera unit which was the size of a shoulder-missile launcher. Each battery was as big as a carphone and lasted nearly long enough to shoot a whole 20-minute tape (the longest they came). An entire generation of film students has entire bodies of work archived on U-matic, where they mercifully won’t be heard from again.
But my tryst with U-matic doesn’t end there. Oh no. See, the advertising industry continued to use the format for passing around commercials and demo reels, even into the aughts, when I worked as an archivist/editor for a commercial production company. In this, the age of vimeo, imagine enormous modular racks of unwieldy, prop-comedy-sized boxes of video that looked like garbage and were expensive to ship. In 2002. That’s seven years ago.
I will never wear 3/4” U-matic on a t-shirt, not even for nostalgia’s sake.
