Digital video recoders: first formats and when they were introduced?

I've been wondering for some time about the first digital video formats and when they were developed and introduced.
I remember some time in the 90's about D2 and D5 which were Panasonic formats and that D2 recorded composite video and D5 to component video, if I remember well.

 

I had a very long running and intimate relationship with this beast: D-1 (Sony) - Wikipedia »

 

Thanks for your very informative reply.
I didn't know that digital video recorders started as early as 1986. I'm sure all those formats, digital SD or Digital HD were intented for Television, News or Sports broadcast, made-for-T.V. movies and series,but that was it. In the end, HD video Cameras ended up on Hollywood films, being the two last movies on the Prequel Star Wars Movies , Attack of the Clones and Revenge Of The Sith under the two first movies tobe fully shot and post-produced digitally.

 

We had D1 machines back in 1987, but that was uncompressed component digital standard definition, switchable to NTSC or PAL:



I actually preferred the later compressed DigiBeta system, which used a smaller cassette and roughly 5:1 compression, but was a lot hardier and more reliable. That was a terrific format that lasted a solid 10 years until HD rolled in.

D5 was the Panasonic component digital HD format, which came out around 1999-2000. It took a year or two for them to figure out how to do 24-frame video (technically 23.976 and 24.000), so the early years of D5 were rocky. Sony had a competing HD recorder, HDCam, which many felt didn't quite measure up to D5. Sony eventually released HDCam-SR around 2004, and that quickly took over a lot of the mastering business until it all went to digital files -- no tape at all, just hard drives and servers.

 

Thank you Vidiot

 

Digital 8 used pretty much the same compression system as MiniDV, but DV went to HD sooner with HDV. All of these were technically "digital" video recording systems, but they were kinda sloppy and not that reliable. I think once they went to shooting on flash drives, it became a lot more reliable, since there was no friction and no moving parts.

 

It's interesting how D1 lingered in Post Production. The editors hated it, but our Compositing Artists and Colorists preferred them - mostly because of the lossless color band (which held up better over multiple generations).

For an engineer like myself, DigiBeta ruled. The company I worked for in the '90s sent me to Sony in San Jose to train on servicing the A500 series machines. Built like a tank, and the first deck I worked with that could perform its own electronic alignments and calibrations after major parts changes. Brilliant engineering.

It's funny how many certifications I acquired over the years - all of which are completely irrelevant now. I took them all off my resume years ago.

 

Can anybody say the name of famous T.V. series from the 80's (if any) and the 90's that used digital video either for shooting or in post-production?

 

Believe it or not, I work for a company that has a large tape/film library of many formats that we still get requested to capture and encode to a file. I just had our Digibeta machine serviced... we still have two active, both a DVW-500 and a A500 model, several PVW BetaSP machines, a Panny DVCPRO HD AJ1400, DVCAM and even a 3/4" deck that still gets used occasionally. The plan is to eventually have everything digitized into digital files at some point, but as with all large corporations, budgets keep getting pushed or cut.

Having worked with just about every professional format, for some reason I remember Sony D2 fondly. D-beta was king for us editors though.

 

Why was it king?

 

DigiBeta took over the entire broadcast video and post-production business in America for about 10 years, bringing to an end the long run of 1" C analog video recorders.

 

That makes 2 of us. The company I used to work for had the 1st one in the mid west.

 

Plus, you could master a program that had a max length of 124 minutes, had 4 channels of audio and you could embed video and audio on one SDI BNC cable... and the tape cases/shells were the same size as analog Betacam SP. And of course for those of us who still used it in linear editing platforms, it's pre-read capabilities were relatively easy to work with. Pre-read was a way to use what you had just recorded onto the master tape (like a composite of graphics, and video effects) and then use that signal (the master) as a source to build another composite or simply just dissolve out to another scene back onto the same master tape. Of course, non-linear editing put an end to that need.