Glenn Farr sits at a shiny silver metal table amid boxes of red and yellow plastic film cores. For 12 hours a day, his world is the acrid environment of an editing room, where rolls of film twisting back and forth always leave a slightly burnt smell in the air.
So began Alijean Harmetz's 1982 New York Times article about the editing of Philip Kaufman's movie adaptation of the Tom Wolff novel, The Right Stuff.
Baldish, bearded and dressed in blue jeans and a maroon pullover, Mr. Farr sits at his KEM editing machine focusing on ''a way to deceive the viewers'' of ''The Right Stuff'' when the movie is released. He is searching for the ''little moment'' that will bridge the staged and the real footage.
Farr wasn't alone in his endeavors. Kaufman worked with Glenn Farr and Tom Rolf, Lisa Fruchtman, Stephen Rotter, and Douglas Stewart to get through an enormous volume of rushes and archive film.
Stacked in bins on the walls of the cavernous former cannery that is ''The Right Stuff's'' headquarters are 600 rolls of stock footage containing 500,000 feet of reality from the past. To get the 500,000 feet, Mr. Farr looked at ''hundreds of miles of film'' at the National Archives in Washington and at ''at least one million of NASA's nine million feet of film".
PAINTBOX
One company that understood the limits of storage and instant recall was Quantel of the UK. Quantel had previewed a prototype of the Paintbox at NAB 1981 and the team of Roddy Pratt, Tony Searby and Rick Brunwin had spent the following year building the production version.
The shipping Paintbox relied heavily on technology that it shared with the Quantel DLS6000 still store system including storage subsystems, CPU cards and some video processing cards. Pratt recalls:
At this point, the familiar Paintbox 'look' started to form. The second terminal was replaced by on-screen menus accessible by 'swipe' gestures and features like library browsing, text compositing, masks and cutouts all appeared. The on-screen text for the menu s was created by digitizing letters from a sheet of transfer lettering and storing them as a 'font', I don't even want to think about the copyright implications! From a technical aspect, what amazes me in hindsight is how much of the system was "custom".
The digitizing tablet was based on a normal Summagraphics one, but with the stylus totally redesigned to give pressure sensitivity, now it was based on a Parker pen 'chassis' fitted with a pressure transducer which was prone to fracturing if artists pressed too hard!
The storage system used 'off the shelf' winchester disks with SMD interfaces, but all controller boards were custom designed. Even the 8" floppy disk used for single-picture backup required a custom controller board to squeeze the 1.2MB required for a picture and stencil onto a single disc.
Broadcast networks, production companies and post-houses rushed to use the futuristic device that allowed artists and designers to draw and paint with an electronic stylus. Quantel decided to use a touch-tablet and pen, rather than a mouse. The pressure-sensitive pen was another breakthrough as it allowed artists to control, in a natural way, the opacity of the paint applied to their canvas. The paint actually mixed with the colours already on the canvas.
The Paintbox's real-time graphics were unsurpassed in quality and became crucial to the on-air look of its first customers The Weather Channel, MTV and the BBC. Roger Thornton from Quantel recalls:
It was not only the broadcasters that took to the Paintbox; postproduction houses too quickly saw its potential and ads such as the Crown Paints 'painting by numbers' and music videos such as director Steve Barron's seminal 'Money for Nothing' for the band Dire Straits, quickly demonstrated its enormous potential.
The Paintbox gave television producers the ability to create 2-D visuals that had not been accessible away from mainframes and dedicated hardware previously and it hinted at what might be possible with digital editing if the right hardware and software could be built.
With the rise of affordable chip processing power and the widespread acceptance of personal computers there was a window of opportunity for other companies to take Quantels’ lead and deliver similar capabilities to smaller companies. The two companies that changed broadcast graphics were Dubner and Cubicomp.
CUBICOMP
24-year-old Edwin P. Berlin (next page) and Pradeep Mohan established Cubicomp Corporation in Berkeley to create broadcast modelling and animation equipment. Berlin recalls:
I started Cubicomp because of earlier work I had done with Geoff Gardiner at Grumman Aerospace. In addition to designing fast hardware, we developed efficient algorithms, in that case, for rendering 3D objects composed of textured quadrics bounded by planes.
We simulated the system in software on a Data General minicomputer and that convinced me that with proper attention to algorithm design, one could do 3D modelling and rendering on a PC, which was unheard of at that time
Cubicomp had created a way to convert a line drawing of an object into a simulated 3D image for under $20,000 and it soon became the leader in the PC graphics space. Joey Ponthieux recalls:
Plug and play did not exist and PCs did not come with standard graphics cards that would or could run these graphics applications. There was no NT, no audio, no mice, no Win95, no zip disks and no TNT cards at the local Compusa or Egghead, nothing.
The CS-5, PictureMaker 3-D and PolyCad10 systems empowered individuals and small companies with capabilities that many found hard to believe as Berlin recalls:
When we demonstrated the units at SiGGRAPH, people would look under the table and ask, “Is there a VAX under there?”
Steven Horowitz moved between post-production houses, manufacturers and startups offering advice and building a knowledge base of the emerging editing and graphics industry.
Cubicomp were the first to make a video animation system on a standard PC, primarily because Ed Berlin is a technical genius. The company set an amazing precedence for a revolutionary tool set with an ease of use not seen before.
Berlin, Mohan, Jamie Dickson and Steven Crane proved that a small company with brilliant, well-executed ideas could apply digital technology to an analog industry and change it overnight. Cubicomp became an engineering magnet, a mini-Ampex of sorts.
Michael Olivier had grown up in Berkeley and was dragged into industry.
I was always experimenting with programming with friends and even back then I was always the guy who understood code and who could see what the user experience should be. I seemed to be able to pull the pieces together in a sensible way
Olivier attended UC Berkeley but left before graduating to work at 2D games company, Genigraphics.
It was a very exciting time in the computer industry. They were happy to get people who could program or draw pixels back then! And there really wasn’t any formal training. I became the UI guy there and built their menuing systems and the library that would let other programmers build UIs.
