People mixing the terms video and film drives me crazy.
I’ve worked with 60s era 2 inch quadarplex machines and to get a playback with good tape stock took about 30 minutes or so including scraping the tapes, usually twice. That doesn’t count the 24 hour warmup period I did which helped immensely.
The quad needed compressed air so the air bearing that the heads were on would spin. Air was the only way that a video head system would turn fast enough.
Thanks for giving your experience. I’m a retired lawyer who graduated from law school in 1967, which puts me straddling both sides of the massive technological revolution that moved us from film to video and mechanical word processing and data manipulation to electronic. You clearly were far more into the actual technological side than I was. My comments were more as an observer and lay user than someone who was actually into the daily developments. Looks like my informed layman’s observations were fairly well on target.