[QuadList] Scanimate - was CMX-600

[Dave Sieg]

(CMX-600 discussion - SNIP)

Speaking of huge relics that belong in museums...

I've communicated with several of the QuadList members about this but
thought I'd take the opportunity to throw this out to the group.  Its not
exactly QuadTape related, but close.
So you can fine me for going slightly off-topic but I'm broke anyway... :D

I have the dubious honor of owning the original R&D Scanimate system.  It
works.
Its in my studio currently.  You can see more about it at my site
http://www.scanimate.net
Scanimate is an ANALOG computer that makes computer animation in real time.
For about 10 years in the seventies, if you saw computer animation on TV it
was
generated by one of the eight Scanimates.  Lots of Sesame Street and
Electric Company
graphics, the stomach-swelling Pepto-Bismol "indiGESTion" spot, NBC Nightly
News opens, etc.

The Scanimates were produced by Computer Image of Denver, CO.  There were
two at
Dolphin Productions in New York City, two at Image West in LA (where I was
CE for awhile)
one at RTL in Luxembourg, one in Sydney, Australia at the 9 network, one in
Japan, and
the machine I have was in Denver then briefly at Interface in DC.  I have
kept the machine in
good working condition, and in fact recently did a job for buck.tv in LA
where we shot the
CRT directly with a RED digital cinema camera at 4K and got some amazing
results.

I am relocating to Asheville, NC and would like to find a better home for
this machine.
I have gotten offers from several museums, although none want to even pay to
ship it.
They all want to turn it into a static display of a dead machine.  I would
like to find a home
for the machine where it can still be operated, since there seems to be a
resurgence in
interest in all things analog, and in the work these systems produced over
the years.

To further complicate things, I was recently contacted by a guy who has all
the parts and
pieces (including manuals and spare parts!) to a complete Scanimate system
in Denver.
(Long story, I won't bore you with details here!)  He is selling his house
and needs to get
rid of it.  Much as I would love to get this machine too, I've already got
one too many.

Analog animation is of course a dead art.  The "animator" had to design a
complex circuit
and patch together phase-locked oscillators, ramps, summing amplifiers, bias
pots, and
multipliers to "build the animation".  Toggling the Initial/Final switch
recycled and restarted
the animation, which came out in real time and was recorded on Quad
machines
(SEE! I told you there was a connection, albeit slight!) and IVC-9000 2"
helicals which
allowed things to go down an embarrassing number of generations.  It helped
that the
"Look" that was in vogue was kind of glowey and saturated (that's really all
it could DO!).

That being said, once the animation was set up, there were thousands of
knobs that could
be tweaked to get the client (who usually sat breathing down your neck as
you worked!)
happy enough to sign off on it and walk out the door with a quad tape of his
project.
You just had to hope he didn't show up the next day requesting one SLIGHT
tweak, since
there was no way to even come close to doing the same animation from scratch
again.

So.. I know there are many of you in the same boat, having lovingly cared
for and kept
the flame alive on some ancient, once-glittering marvel of technology thats
now so far
beyond obsolete that its very existence is a minor miracle.  This stuff and
the ephemera
we talk about in this group needs to be kept alive somewhere.  The interest
the Scanimate
website has generated, and the continued sales of the DVDs I produced of its
old work
and the people who "animated" with them demonstrates that this old
technology is far from
dead or even dying.

One of the groups I've had brief contact with is the Moog Foundation, which
is building a
museum in Asheville, NC to house some of the legacy of Robert Moog, the
inventor of
the Moog synthesizer.  There is a lot of commonality between the Moog and
Scanimate,
but the Foundation is having trouble getting funding for their own efforts,
much less
trying to expand to include Scanimate.

So I'm throwing this out to this group to see if anybody has any brilliant
ideas for the
long term.

**How do we protect and preserve some of this old technology that was the
equivalent of the Apollo program in its own field back in the pioneering
days?*




-- 
Dave Sieg, President, ZFx inc.
www.zfx.com      www.linkedin.com/in/davesieg
www.davesieg.com
www.scanimate.net
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