Timeline Analog 3. John Buck

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ for a BCG consultancy job, so I had a basic understanding of that area too. What the headhunter was describing didn’t sound realistic, or achievable and I didn't want to join something that was potentially short lived. But my incredulity really came from the question “Which film company would want to invent a set of new film tools that would turn the industry on its head?”

       I said to her “You have to tell me who the client is”

       And the headhunter replied “Lucasfilm”

       And I said “As in Star Wars Lucas- film?”

       And she said “Yes”

       I was annoyed that I didn’t guess it before being told. It had to be Lucasfilm. No mainstream studio would do this, make such changes to post-production. To make a complete transition to digital with effects and integrate sound so wholly. That’s when I asked “Can I come and see these projects we have been discussing?”

      Doris made the trek to San Raphael and met Greber and project heads Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull.

       I saw the stuff that Andy Moorer, Ralph Guggenheim and Alvy Ray Smith had created and was amazed. It was far ahead of anything anywhere in the world. From what I had seen during the BCG consultancy work in Hollywood, I could see how in a broad sense that these new tools could be adapted in the post production world.

       I went from incredulous to very excited. And there was a little hint from the senior management, but never a commitment, that would consider spinning it out as a separate company at some point. And that hit my entrepreneurial button. I wouldn’t be the founder but very close to that.

      Doris accepted an offer to return as General Manager. He recalls some thirty years later:

       The short story is Bob Greber said to me“Here’s an office. Get to know people. Come back to us with your thoughts.”

      Ralph Guggenheim adds:

       He must’ve felt like a fish out of water when he first arrived, surrounded by all these PhD computer scientists who didn’t know how to balance a check book(!).

      Doris continues:

       The longer story is Lucasfilm wasn’t a typical corporate working environment. They did say, “Come in have a look at what we are doing, create a commercialization strategy for each of the projects (Sound, Editing and FX) but most importantly make an assessment of what needs to be done to get these tools to be used”. That was more important than selling systems, getting working tools. But.

       Any important, and some not so important, decisions were made by George and/or Marcia Lucas. The management of Faxon and Greber was probably less independent than what I was accustomed to with BCG but there were far fewer restrictions on me at Lucasfilm than I had previously.

       There was a general notion that we (at Lucasfilm) do not want to get into the business of making, marketing and selling hardware systems like Grass Valley or CMX. Greber, Faxon and of course George Lucas were very familiar with the notion of licensing things from the film industry.

       And later on we would discover that the paradigm of putting a product ‘ in the can’, getting rid of the production staff and continue to sell the product (the film) or the licensed products (such as toys, soundtracks and games) did not extend to computer technology products.

       If a product, in this case EditDroid, was successful you actually needed to add staff and keep improving the saleable product - in a sense the product was never ‘in the can’. But that was for us to find out in the months and years ahead. I took the job at Lucasfilm

      FILM 5

      Despite the advances in Lucasfilm's work there was a critical road block ahead for any group using an electronic medium. Films were still recorded to film. The Rank Cintel Mark III had improved the quality of film to tape transfers but nothing could change the difference between film's 24fps recording rate and NTSC videotape's 30 fps (or PAL's 25fps). When 24 fps film is transferred to NTSC video, the closest it can get to 30 fps is 29.97 fps.

      Engineers and editors alike had been cutting film projects electronically using ways to circumvent the difference in the frame rate of film and video but nobody had been truly successful. If the issue could be resolved, a huge reward lay waiting for the post-production industry. CFI engineer Don Kravits (photo below) and editor Art Schneider wanted to solve the 3:2 problem. Kravits recalls:

       We started to work on a program to convert the 24 frames per second rate of film rushes to 30 frames of video.

      They created a software program to convert film material sent from a Rank telecine in 24 fps to ¾” videotape at 30 fps, obviating the problems of 3:2 pull down. Editor Art Schneider recalls:

       We couldn't come up with a clever name for the film program but we were developing the software in one of CFI's offline edit rooms called Edit Five, so we figured that would be a good name for this new program that we then called Film-5.

      The new Film 5 system used either the factory film key numbers or the laboratory applied edge code numbers. Kravits documented the task for his peers.

       It is not easy to convert film to tape and back again without a massive and complex software and/or hardware program designed to accurately determine the precise film frame on which to cut with respect to any given videotape frame.

      At the same time, others were tackling the same quandary.

       EPIC

      The EPIC system was now owned by Harris Corporation.

      Loran Kary lead EPIC's software engineering when the Walt Disney Company's research division, WED (Walter Elias Disney) Enterprises expressed an interested in using EPIC for film editing. David Spencer and Richard Barns from WED needed a way to edit millions of feet for promotional films for Disney's EPCOT Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Disney wanted EPCOT to stimulate American industry to develop new ideas for urban living. Kary recalls:

       Instead of the normal way of cutting their film projects on a film flatbed they wanted to know if it was possible to transfer the film to videotape, cut on videotape and then use a list to cut the film using edge numbers. I worked with the market leaders in timecode devices, Grey Engineering Laboratories to develop such a system.

       They developed the hardware that interfaced with the film transfer chain and then could read the edge code numbers off the telecine and encode them into the U-bits of the videotape copy's VITC.

       This was very advanced technology for those days and then of course you needed another piece of equipment that would extract the film information from the VITC in real time while you were editing. When you were complete it would help you automatically create a film СКАЧАТЬ