On 01/15/2014 12:08 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Wednesday 15 January 2014 13:06:41 Jon Elson did opine: > >> On 01/15/2014 02:20 AM, Gene Heskett wrote: >>> In a sense it was. Its Achilles heel was that everything in and out >>> of it had to go thru acca or accb, then moved to/from the register it >>> was to/from. A full machine cycle was several microseconds. But >>> despite that, it did manage to get my job done, which was run a tape >>> machine with tight timing control, backwards and forwards, doing >>> audio and video inserts to lay a new digitally generated academy >>> leader on a commercial, and lay the cue tones on audio channel 2 to >>> make it work with a Microtime Automatic Station Break machine. All >>> dead on the money frame accurate. >> Oh, wow! Years ago, my company (Pico Systems) started out >> making >> a low-cost controller for animation, using editing VCRs. We >> supported >> several 3/4" U-Matic machines and industrial 1/2 VCRs, as >> well as >> the M-series machines that had separate heads for >> chrominance and >> luminance. Those SURE looked good! >> >> First, you had to format the tape, which laid down a timing >> track >> on the audio channel. We had a circuit to generate an 18-bit >> time code with CRC. Then, when coming up to the insert point, >> it would read the time track until very close, then count off >> sync pulses to the exact insert frame, in case the frame of >> the insert had an audio dropout. This was pretty hard on the >> VCRs as they would sit with the heads spinning and tape >> tensioned >> for hours, while rocking back and forth through a couple seconds >> of tape repeatedly. >> >> I did it with a Z-80, a UART and a little additional >> circuitry for >> the time code processing. Overall control was via serial >> cable from the computer that was feeding the images to >> a frame buffer. >> >> When I started, Lyon Lamb was the only game in town, >> for $14000. Shortly after I got on the market, they lowered >> their price to $7K. I sold about 25 of them at $2K, but the >> magazine >> advertising was eating all the profit. The, VideoMedia came >> out with the VideoLan, little $600 boxes that communicated >> over 75 Ohm coax. One box connected to your computer, one >> to the VCR. So, for $1200, you could control one VCR. For >> an additonal $600,, you could control TWO VCRs! Well, >> that was so much more flexible, no way would anybody >> buy my gizmo, so I quickly pulled the ads. >> >> Jon > Videolan was yours? I bow in respect, that was great! No, no no! VideoLan put my inferior product out of business!
Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CenturyLink Cloud: The Leader in Enterprise Cloud Services. Learn Why More Businesses Are Choosing CenturyLink Cloud For Critical Workloads, Development Environments & Everything In Between. Get a Quote or Start a Free Trial Today. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=119420431&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
