Click here for a picture of an ACR-25. Like the RCA TCR-100, it had two complete tape transports and servo systems. There was one common video signal system and timebase corrector for both transports. These electronics were in a seperate unit. These machines are pneumatic monsters.
Air is used to move most of the non-motor moving parts of the machine.
Puffs of air were used to get the tape into the right spots for threading. They probably won't be in service much longer, as the disk based commercial insertion devices will eliminate all tape-based spot players at a fraction of their cost. The Ampex DST data recorder is a no-compromise data recorder with one of the highest throughputs available in a data recorder. Many broadcasters, large and small, are buying these units for high quality digital video storage. Available in a multi-transport robotic library system, they can store many terabytes of digital video data, and access it very quickly.