Timeline Analog 3 - John Buck Timeline Analog

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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 cut list for the negative cutters

      Standard SMPTE code was not capable of finding events below the frame rate that it had been originally designed for. Kary and the Grey Engineering team created a new approach for the EPIC that they labeled ‘field-rate’ timecode. In order to solve the impasse they doubled the frequency of the timecode itself and by doing so removed the ambiguity between 24fps film and 30fps video.

      Meanwhile the CFI team experimented with editing on videotape in tandem with television programs edited natively on film. The hit TV show Magnum P.I. was posted at CFI and served as a test for the Film 5 system. Schneider recalls how the unique test was organized.

       Universal Studios made a black and white duplicate of the original Magnum film footage, as well as the magnetic sound track. We took the episode and ran it through the Film 5 process to compare with their standard film procedures.

      Magnum's editor cut on a Moviola while Schneider used Mach One:

       Their editing time to first cut was 135 hours, compared to my 69 hours with videotape.

      During the development Kravits, Schneider and Dan Brewer experimented with the feasibility of editing videotape at 24fps to eliminate the 24 to 30 frame conversion problem which they outlined in a SMPTE journal of the day. Kravits recalls:

       Except for the inconvenience of having to view these tapes on specially converted VTRs, the inherent frame accurate cut lists generated by this 24 frame system open up a new potential for a simplified editing system. It was about then I started to notice the film editors working on Moviolas and I started to take note of how they worked, the old fashioned way of using a cutting table and you could see this was a long and convoluted process.

       CFI’s President Tom Ellington asked me “Can you develop some kind of a system in which these film editors who are very electronic phobic, can really understand and work in an electronic environment”. I studied them and realized how tactile a craft that it was, they worked by hand

      Across at Harris, the EPIC system was used to edit the EPCOT rear projection projects including American Adventure but the entire project was abandoned.

      Loran Kary knew that the methodology would eventually find a technology to fit and he wrote a paper (Coincidentally at the same time as Schneider and Kravits) describing the system in his SMPTE paper.

       It was way ahead of its time and probably unrealistic because of a number of reasons. One was its cost; it was very expensive.

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