Timeline Analog 2. John Buck
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Название: Timeline Analog 2
Автор: John Buck
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Изобразительное искусство, фотография
Серия: Timeline Analog
isbn: 9781925108583
isbn:
Strobele recalls:
Because it was an FM signal and we had to ensure that the bandwidth of the two signals didn’t impinge on each other, we had to come up with a technique of limiting the level. The answer was to create a hard limit with a slow decay but we didn’t limit the sound limit except for the first cycle.
Lee Scaggs created, and patented, a new method that logarithmically amplified low level signals and logarithmically de-emphasized the original input signals. Then further video issues as Strobele recalls:
There were some image issues with artefacts when using 24fps footage. You would see it particularly on footage with zooms clashing with key stoning from the lens, but because we knew this was going to be purely for offline editing, and it was a technical limitation of the field and frame conversion that it was impossible to fix, we let that go.
Faroudja recalls:
My job was to get decent pictures for the two black and white monitors that were planned for the system. The picture had to be vaguely recognizable but not use too much storage space. Through trial and error we discovered that with about one quarter of the original camera data being used you could edit well.”
Strobele’s work on defining the analog signal process and its circuitry was almost done.
We had made sure the electronics played RF to RF, and the RF reproduction of the disks was good enough. Once Tony (Eppstein) could reliably run the packs at 3600rpm, we could put the first field’s audio on and the second field’s audio on and then combine them and do all of that processing and have a data stream ready to put onto the disks.
The digital team was now in a position to improve and finesse the process. Better flying heights for the heads, make vertical recording possible for increased bandwidth.
Faroudja continues:
Remember this is 1970 and I was fascinated by how easily you could click and click, decide this shot or that and then you would see the shots on the screen as an edited version.
Across America, Harvey Dubner was out of work.
He had graduated as an Electrical Engineer in 1949 and was then employed by companies to work on military projects during the Cold War.
In 1958 I was involved with a missile system that required extensive optical calculations so that we rented a new thing called a digital computer. To make a long story short, that changed my life.
Dubner joined Computer Applications Inc., then the largest software company in the East, and became a Vice President in charge of all special hardware projects.
All my projects included a computer, programming the computer, and designing and building peripheral equipment for the computer. As an example, we designed and built Ticketron, a ticket reservation system (1966) that could service 1200 ticket selling devices in real time.
Dubner's Ticketron work, done with Joseph Abate, defined a generational change in using microcomputers (CDC 1700) to solve problems previously assigned to mainframes. Dubner explained his frugal 5000 lines for the entire TIcketron system as a system where sophistication and generality must be traded for economic and reliability.
Their work was seminal: "Ticketron - A Successfully Onerating System Without an Operating System."
Dubner continues:
Unfortunately, CAI was forced into bankruptcy in November, 1970. Without planning it I suddenly found myself starting a new company because several of the companies for which I was doing projects, wanted to continue with me.
This was the start of Dubner Computer Systems (DCS).
2. Right now
The CMX 600 System could now record and play video. Its capacity was about five minutes of black and white video per Memorex disk pack and the system usually ran four to six drives per system thereby getting 20 to 30 minutes of storage. VP Martin Fletcher was readying the marketing campaign. Yves Faroudja was impressed.
Our marketing guy, Martin was a very sharp guy and he understood what the market wanted with regards the image resolution for editing.
Strobele recalls:
It was amazing to see it working as a unit for the first time even though it was strung out across a number of work benches. We had all of the audio and video coming off a disk pack in sync and sure it was a black and white image on a standard definition monitor but we were shouting and cheering.
Jerry Youngstrom recalls:
The skip field disk drive was a marvel but it was a real challenge for David Bargen and Jim Adams when edits had to be “assembled” into a broadcast quality tape. Probably more time was spent on that technical issue than any other in the CMX development.
There was more work to do because put simply, the original specifications weren’t a true list of what was required. For various reasons many things had been missed. We just didn’t know any better but despite that I started to think we might have a real success on our hands. As an engineer that’s what you strive for.
Bill Butler recalls how the team used resources like the Stanford Research Institute which was newly independent of the university:
In those first days we spent a lot of time at SRI, which was the seminal source for input/output devices concepts. We had to find a system that was appropriate for creative editors who were mostly terrified of computers, more used to pencil and paper for records and being able to see each individual frame.
Lon Priest wrote of early interface development.
Originally, the console was designed to be alive with push buttons marked 'splice,' 'dissolve,' 'forward,' 'reverse,' 'transport’. A push button for all the myriad of electronic orders needed to edit videotape. When it was determined this would be incredibly cumbersome, an idea was taken from the computer industry itself.
CMX used the CC light pen originally chosen by Adrian Ettlinger on the CBS’ Autocue lighting system and CBS RAVE system.
Joe Flaherty later explained:
At the tip of the light pen is a photocell that senses the control words and characters on the monitor when the light pen is pointed at them and pressed. The identification of the specific control word or character is determined by the timing of the light detected by the photocell relative to the sweep timing of the picture monitor display.
The pen was used to select editing tools from a superimposed Menu displayed on the console’s СКАЧАТЬ