Sony BVE-500A
Two self-returning search dials, a row of blinking prompt lamps, and a control-track counter that runs from -79 to +79 minutes. This was the console that made broadcast tape editing feel like cutting film.
Overview
Most of what survives from the BVE-500A era is advertising, and Sony's own copy is blunt about the lineage. The earlier BVE-500 had already been "accepted as the state of the art in control track editing by broadcasters around the world," and the 500A was the follow-up that added speed, versatility, and convenience to the process. The headline change was BIDIREX - two self-return search dials replacing the ordinary pushbutton search controls that operators had been stabbing at. Sony's advertising billed the arrangement as giving U-matic editing "a true 'film' feeling." Marketing language aside, the functional argument is sound. An editor could shuttle tape forward and reverse at various speeds without taking eyes off the monitors, and the dials eliminated the mode-selection errors that pushbutton panels invited.
The second piece of the redesign was the Decision Prompter. Function lamps blink until an edit command is made, then latch to steady-on. In a busy newsroom with constant interruptions, an operator can glance at the panel and know the status of the last instruction without reconstructing it from memory.
Automatic Entry saves a step by entering the "IN" point automatically when the preview button is engaged. If the operator has already selected an IN point, the auto mode stands down and preview runs without disturbing the pre-selected mark. The Full Time Counter runs from -79 minutes through 0 to +79 minutes counting control track pulses, so the operator need not worry about the count when initiating an editing sequence. Short Pre-Roll cuts pre-roll from five seconds to three when the unit is used with external sync. Cue Control provides built-in cue record and erase - a 1 kHz tone laid down on Audio 1, useful both for automatic control systems and for pre-cueing a tape to air. The unit also carries auto shut-off, an external interface of control logic, and manual edit capability. All of this comes from Sony's own promotional material, not an independent bench test. There is no published measurement data for this console in the sources reviewed here.
Despite first impressions, the BVE-500A was not a U-matic-only box, and Sony's advertising pushed back explicitly on that assumption. The console was given specific features to make both 1-inch and U-matic editing faster, easier, and more accurate. The company built a separate Editing Interface Adaptor, the IF-1000, to open the BVH-1000 1-inch video recorder to the 500A's feature set. As Sony pitched it, that allowed automatic control track editing between two BVH-1000 recorders, between two BVU-200A U-matic recorders, or even between a BVH-1000 and a BVU-200A running side by side. The company's line was that this amounted to two editing systems for the price of one. The console performs assemble edits, edit inserts, edit preview, and edit review automatically, and each edit point can be shifted by adding or subtracting individual frames.
Stations ran these consoles hard and in quantity. A station profile from the period describes an operation with five editing stations, each built around BVU-200A decks and a BVE-500A editor, with each room functioning as its own small production facility. The same account notes that the news editing equipment had been upgraded since July 1978 to include five BVE-500A editors alongside two Convergence ECS-1 units, so Sony did not have the control-track editing market to itself. DB-Magazine (January 1981, p.46) published a photograph of engineer Peter Jensen at a Metropolitan Opera recording session with a Sony BVE-500A editing console in front of him, alongside a PCM-1600 digital processor and a Mark Levinson preamplifier. A broadcast video editor in a classical recording chain is an odd pairing, but a documented one. The same magazine's business briefs columns record KBTV in Denver expanding its ENG coverage with nine BVU-200A editing VCRs and three BVE-500A editing consoles. They also record CNN's Jim Kitchell describing a fleet of 17 BVE-500A editing consoles running around the clock, week after week, "trouble-free." That claim is a customer testimonial in a Sony advertisement, so weigh the reliability verdict accordingly.
This is a control-track editing controller, not a recorder, and it earns its keep only when paired with the decks it was designed to command - BVU-200A U-matic machines, BVH-1000 1-inch machines, or the BVU-110 field recorders that show up in the same station inventories. A 500A without a period deck is a very heavy panel of dials and lamps. The documented feature set is solid, and Kitchell's remark that the equipment is "easy to use without a lot of super-technical know-how" is the sort of thing a working newsroom cares about. No independent test data, no published price, and no production-year documentation turned up in the sources reviewed for this entry.
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