🚀 go-pugleaf

Just saw a demo of a rather interesting product today. It's a system
that uses optical disks as the intermediate step between the video
camera and laserdisc mastering. Works like this:

You have a system that allows you to shoot direct to the optical
disk (which is a huge thing, like about 15" square). I missed this
part of the demo so I can't tell you much about it... But you have
a two-disk system, and so instead of an edit suite, you do your editing
from the "raw material" disk to a "library" (pre-master) disk (these
are both optical disks). There's software to let you do editing, and
it also lets you lay narration over the recorded video/natural audio.
It makes an edit list rather like regular video editors, etc. etc.

When you've got your "library" disk finished, you can send it to 3M or
a couple of other folks and they will master a laserdisc straight from 
the optical disk (i.e., no need to transfer to 1" tape first). Also, the 
Panasonic player they use for the optical disks can be hooked up to an 
authoring station and used just as though it were a CAV videodisc... in 
other words, you could do authoring with your video before the laserdisc 
was even mastered.

Kinda neat. For the demo (which was both of the optical system and of
some authoring software), they shot a 5 or 10 second segment of video
right there in the demo room, and then I authored a little demo around
it (play video, pause, add graphic arrow, finish video, add another arrow,
clear screen and ask user to identify the first item by pointing to it
on a video freeze frame, with appropriate feedback for right and wrong 
responses). It was pretty impressive to be able to author a
piece from video shot just a minute earlier!

--K

-- 
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:   Kathy Strong               :  "Try our Hubble-Rita: just one shot,     :
:  (Clouds moving slowly)      :   and everything's blurry"                :
:   clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  :                           --El Arroyo     :
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