Editing VHS (section)

=== Recording capacity===
[[File:VCR load.jpg|thumb|The interior of a late-generation VHS [[Videocassette recorder|VCR]] showing the drum and tape]]
A VHS cassette holds a maximum of about 430&nbsp;m (1,410&nbsp;ft) of tape at the lowest acceptable tape thickness, giving a maximum playing time of about four hours in a T-240/DF480 for [[NTSC]] and five hours in an E-300 for [[PAL]] at "standard play" (SP) quality. More frequently, however, VHS tapes are thicker than the required minimum to avoid complications such as jams or tears in the tape.<ref name="Parekh" /> Other speeds include "long play" (LP), "extended play" (EP) or "super long play" (SLP) (standard on NTSC; rarely found on PAL machines<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.crumblenet.co.uk/palep.html|title=List of PAL VHS Video Recorders with SLP/EP}}</ref>). LP and EP/SLP double and triple the recording time respectively, but these speed reductions cause a reduction in horizontal resolution – from the normal equivalent of 250 vertical lines in SP, to the equivalent of 230 in LP and even less in EP/SLP.

Due to the nature of recording diagonally from a spinning drum, the actual write speed of the video heads does not get slower when the tape speed is reduced. Instead, the video tracks become narrower and are packed closer together. This results in noisier playback that can be more difficult to track correctly: The effect of subtle misalignment is magnified by the narrower tracks. The heads for linear audio are not on the spinning drum, so for them, the tape speed from one reel to the other is the same as the speed of the heads across the tape. This speed is quite slow: for SP it is about 2/3s that of an audio cassette, and for EP it is slower than the slowest microcassette speed. This is widely considered inadequate for anything but basic voice playback, and was a major liability for VHS-C camcorders that encouraged the use of the EP speed. Color depth deteriorates significantly at lower speeds in PAL: often, a color image on a PAL tape recorded at low speed is displayed only in monochrome, or with intermittent color, when playback is paused.{{citation needed|date=November 2019}}