Sony BVU-950
The 3/4" U-matic workhorse that shows up in the gear lists of nearly every post house of the late '80s and early '90s - usually three or four at a time.
Overview
The Sony BVU-950 was a 3/4" U-matic videocassette recorder built for professional post-production. The spec sheet isn't the best evidence of what it was. The equipment inventories of working facilities are. A 1994 Mix directory listing for East Side A/V in New York counted five BVU-950s alongside three BVH-2000 1" machines and a pair of Sony DVR28 D2 digital video recorders. That puts the deck in the middle of the hierarchy: not the top-format machine, but the one you bought in quantity. The same pattern shows up north of the border. Vancouver Studios in Burnaby, BC ran a pair of BVU-950s next to a BVU-900 player. KRCA-TV in Burbank kept a BVU-950 in the rack with a BVU-920 and a BVH-2000 for live music television production.
Fostex built its G-Series 16- and 24-track audio recorders to emulate the BVU-950 over RS-422. The company advertised the feature heavily in Mix (November 1991, p.28). The pitch was that a G-Series multitrack could assume the electronic identity of a video edit controller. A tape-audio manufacturer picked this specific VCR as its emulation target.
Collectors and facilities people who know these decks describe them as the SP-generation U-matic. This was the version with the time-code option, which made it viable for frame-accurate editing rather than straight playback. Period listings confirm the configuration. Mix (September 1988, p.221) catalogued a "BVU-950 3/4" VCR w/Time Code option" in a studio inventory. A 1992 classified in the same publication offered an SP machine with "less than 125 hours" for $7,500, which shows what these commanded on the used market once the format was already being displaced.
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