Timeline Analog 4. John Buck
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Название: Timeline Analog 4
Автор: John Buck
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Timeline Analog
isbn: 9781925330182
isbn:
One was the Data Acquisition Group which was basically creating modules that translated analog signals to digital whether it was thermocouples or any form of analog data and the other division was the Imaging Group, which was more for things like machine vision, medical imaging and scientific imaging.
Data Translation was becoming increasingly successful because it adapted general hardware technology that it built in house into niche products for specific industries. Engineer Ned Kroeker recalls:
By this stage our Imaging Group had developed everything from 8bit boards with low resolution right through to higher resolution boards, as well as line scanning products.
DT encouraged third party software companies like Automatix Inc. in nearby Billerica to write programs for its hardware. Once complete it bundled the PC add-in boards with the third party apps and marketed the complete product to specific groups.
The young product manager charged with marketing the new DT card with Automatix’s Image Analyst program was John Molinari, son of the company's founder. In time, Molinari became the champion of video editors everywhere but for the moment his audience was meteorologists, scientists, industrial engineers and researchers.
While DT had previously discounted the abilities of Apple’s computers to house its products, several technology shifts occurred to change its position.
First came the release of the Macintosh II with NuBus technology that made Apple's computers were better placed to handle the demands of video throughput.
Ned Kroeker recalls:
I had been involved, on the periphery with NuBus at MIT and the commercial release of NuBus had provided personal computers with a much higher bandwidth capability, a much more efficient bus mastering capability than the PC. So we started looking at what we could build with that.
PHOTOMAC
The Mac II became the IIx with the Motorola 68030 processor and joined Commodore’s Amiga, NeXT’s Cube and Sun’s 3/80 workstation as a potential platform for digital video.
In late 1988 the Avalon Development Group in Cambridge began shipping PhotoMac which let publishers perform many pre-press functions on a standard Macintosh. Dr Rudy Burger told the press:
Color publishing is no longer the exclusive domain of the professional pre-press house. It has finally reached the desktop.
Data Translation, a neighbour in Marlboro, had to this point supplied only PC users with hardware boards but it could see that publishing was moving to the Macintosh. They needed a way to acquire and manipulate colour still images for that platform. In house engineer Ned Kroeker recalls:
Data Translation became involved at arm's length with Avalon to see how we could grow new markets for our boards. And PhotoMac was Photoshop, before Photoshop was Photoshop.
The U.S. company L.L. Bean was a well established trusted source for quality apparel and reliable outdoor equipment. It had started as a single product company in a similar vein to Data Translation. Electronics Magazine asked:
Can Data Translation translate its L.L. Bean expertise to a new market? The mail-order supplier of data acquisition boards is jumping into Macintosh image processing.
Data Translation re-designed the PC based product QuickCapture for the Macintosh and within months PhotoMac and a dozen other companies were bundling it with their software. DT's John Fierke continues:
We ended up selling to a lot of newspapers and media outlets, as at that time there was no other way to get a video file to your computer.
Marshall Housekeeper landed a summer job at DT converting existing code.
After getting my degree, I started a full time position at DT working on the QuickCapture and ColorCapture frame grabber cards for the Macintosh. With the success of these cards, DT contemplated developing full frame video hardware.
John Fierke knew that it would take an extraordinary effort to make the leap from capturing one video frame from a video camera for PhotoMac to acceptable real-time video results at 30 or 25fps. In order for video to be manipulated by a desktop computer, the signal had to be digitized into pixels.
A standard full-frame broadcast image contains more than 10 million pixels that in turn had to be dealt with continuously. Fierke recalls:
There were projects at Data Translation trying to grab NTSC color video and the lesson from that was that ‘basic’ components to do this gave really lousy results.
COLORSPACE
While Data Translation continued its research, others sold video boards that could drive color monitors and be used as 'frame grabbers'. By plugging in a camcorder users could 'grab' video frames to incorporate video images into a document or pass into an application like Aldus' PageMaker.
Pixelogic had the ProViz digitizer, SuperMac the Spectrum/8 board, RasterOps the Colorboard 104 but it was Mass MicroSystems that promised desktop video with its ColorSpace card. Mass Micro founder Thomas Massie declared:
We want to bring video production to the desktop.
Trade magazines used the words ‘video’ and ‘Mac’ in the same sentence but the early marketing claims by video enablers were misleading.
You can do things with this board and the Mac that you could only do before with $100,000 to $150,000 systems.
The ColorSpace card claimed to ‘capture’ live video images at a rate of 30 frames per second in full color when in reality the only live component was the user’s monitoring of a video source on an Apple monitor. To capture video, an editor had several options.
It was possible to immediately capture a single frame of video in 256 shades of gray or digitise a single frame of video at VHS quality that tok two to three seconds. Per frame.
Teams from Boston to Toledo and Texas experimented with computers and video.
A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) underscored how far there was to go before genuine full-frame video editing arrived on every Mac. The ‘Movies of the Future’ team in the MIT Media Lab succeeded in playing compressed digital movies from a Macintosh's hard drive even though the one minute video clip used in demonstrations had taken a week to prepare using a DEC VAX minicomputer.
Graduate students Bill Butera and Pat Romano developed algorithms to transmit data to a video board designed by John Watlington and built with help of Apple engineer James Lundblad.
To accommodate the size of the custom video board, the MIT team had cut a slot in the case of the Mac II.
Another team were pushing the boundaries of video images on a VAX at the Medical College of Ohio.
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