Timeline Analog 2. John Buck

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      Central Dynamics (CDL) progressed with its video editing device, the PEC-102. Ken Davies led the team.

       We had finally mastered all of the software concepts on the PEC, like setting “in” and “Out” points on tape machines and the synchronizing of the Quad machines, the switcher control for dissolves and effects.

      Fred Jackson, Kathy McConkey and Herb Radford handled the software development for the PEC-102 project. McConkey worked on edit list functionality and Radford on machine control.

       There were difficult problems to be solved in the dynamics of cueing and synchronizing various manufacturers’ machines, with different motion characteristics and widely varying tape reel sizes. In cueing a machine to a cue point the only remote machine controls available were Fast Forward, Rewind and Stop.

       To slow down a machine in high speed wind mode the controls were shuttled rapidly between Fast Forward and Rewind until the machine was slowed down to near stop and a Stop command could be issued with the expectation of having it stop within a few frames of the cue point.”

      Unlike the CMX that used a PDP-11, the heart of the PEC-102 was a Data General Nova 1200 mini computer. Vesa Koponen recalls:

       The PEC 102 was developed in the era of minicomputers with then current technology of standard TTL (Transistor-Transistor Logic). No microprocessors quite yet. One or more cards would be magnetic core memory cards, one tiny ferrite donut for each bit of memory. Total capacity of the card, 4-kilo words.

      Ken Davies recalls that the Nova was cheaper and its developers had much in common with CDL.

       Not only was the PDP-11 a little too complicated for what we needed and therefore more expensive that what we could afford, the support wasn’t that great for the environment that we expected the systems to live.

       We picked the Data General Nova and over time we discovered that their team was very much like ours, a dedicated and wildly enthusiastic group pushing the limits of available technology in hardware and software.

       It was a reasonably simple machine to program, its i/o was fast and the Nova was reliable. It definitely gave us the best bang for the buck but to this day I am amazed that we got the Nova to do all of the work we needed it to do.

      With the decade barely started, editors would soon have two electronic systems to choose from. The CMX 600/200 and the PEC-102, had things in common but the differences between them was enormous.

      CDL was inspired by its broadcast clients to create a conservative linear online editing system based on a timecode interface. Ken Davies explains:

       Most of the source material for programs, 60 second spots and 4 minute packages, is close by on the tapes, whereas Adrian and CMX’s approach played to long form programs with rushes material all over the place. They had to have random access.

      CMX was a computer company that had created a digital nonlinear system for broadcaster client. The interface was more scientific and futuristic. Davies adds:

       On many occasions I have had to express the view that the cutting edge of TV production has always been very much ahead of the cutting edge of computers, especially in the days of the development of digital standards, when the computer folks looked down their noses at our work, carried out by a few dedicated pioneers, instead of the "suits" in the data processing industries and their suppliers.

       TOSHIBA

      In October 1971, Tokyo Shibaura Electric (Toshiba) delivered an automated editing system to the Kansai Telecasting Group in Osaka. Engineers Rokuro Shimada and Susumu Akatsuka had created a new A/B roll system that used helical scan machines to deliver an offline capacity to the television station.

      Editors used a dedicated editing control console to edit copies of the original Quad material transferred to the cheaper decks that also offered playback, slow motion and still frame capabilities.

      Much like the CMX, the Toshiba system displayed the exit frame of the A machine on one monitor and the entrance frame of the B machine on the other. The edit decisions were ‘memorized’ by the TOSBAC-3000 process computer and punched out to a paper tape.

      The process of using the edit list to create a master that CMX had called assembly was called 'Collation' on the Toshiba. The engineers claimed that a program with “forty cuts would require four minutes at most to collate”.

      The conform began with the Toshiba Random Access Controller (RAC) running the Ampex RA-4000 and two quadruplex machines with the original A/B rolls to create a master tape of the edited sequence. If no changes were required the process could be carried out “with no human intervention” but Toshiba had even made an allowance to let the editor continue working on the offline sequence with the helical VTRs while the program compilation began.

      For Kansai Television it was a breakthrough in staffing and resource management. One editor could achieve what had previously needed three staff and multiple 2” machines were only required during the assembly period.

      Toshiba claimed that the editing control had been specifically designed to protect against faulty operation and to accommodate editors from the production area and who it was believed were ‘lacking in technical background’. There was even a dedicated button on the console that allowed the original Quad tapes to be copied to helical decks automatically.

      While the Toshiba, CMX and CDL system all used microcomputers that were using 1960s technology. Two paradigm changes that were just around the corner would see the end of the era of computer hardware and film based production.

       CHANGE

      In a speech to the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the BBC Director-General, Sir Charles Curran, put forward the idea of video replacing film as the preferred production medium.

       At the moment film has all the advantages of flexibility of editing. It is more expensive than electronic methods in the studios but it is incomparably more mobile outside. It is also easier to duplicate and more universal as a medium from which to originate transmissions in a world where systems differ…

       But the day is clearly coming when it will be possible to take an electronically based picture with as much flexibility as can now be done with a film unit.

       What will happen then to all the union expectations about the handling of picture making gear in a mobile setting, I don’t know. But it is impossible to believe that the 1980s will not see the wholesale development of practical systems of electronic recording in the field, which could replace the film camera.

      If anybody doubted Curran’s prediction that such a change in professional production СКАЧАТЬ