[QuadList] CMX Edge

Scott Thomas scottgfx at mac.com
Fri Jan 29 01:46:26 CST 2010


On Jan 29, 2010, at 1:27 AM, Ted Langdell wrote:

> Park Seward now has the CMX Edge package pictured near the bottom of the page.  I acquired it from a Sacramento television station.  It has an interface and cables for three Sony BVH-1100's and interface for a GVG 1600 (at the bottom of the stack.) One of the two chassis has Sony 5800/5850 interfaces.
> 

The CMX Edge was the first true computer editor I ever used at WFTX-TV in Cape Coral, FL in the early 1990's. It looks like a prop from Kubrick's "2001 a Space Odyssey", but behaved quite differently. We had it connected via the parallel interfaces meant for BVU-200 machines, to Betacams. We believed that the ballistics of the machines were fast enough to confuse the CPU. You would sometimes hit the edit button and watch the thing just force everything into rewind.

The Edge had two GPI triggers. One was connected to the GVG-200 switcher, and the other was connected to the Abekas A-53D (+Warp) DVE. The only thing I had to do was manually hit the cart playback.

What was also fun was our lack of storage. We didn't have any way to save EDL's as there was no floppy drive, and there was only a 50 event list in the computer memory. We would painstakingly write down every in and out on a list to be able to go back if we had to.

I learned a lot from that machine, and I was later able to move to a Sony BVE-900 and GVG VPE-215 with ease.

The station I'm at now *had* a Ampex Ace (200 perhaps?). No one bothered to learn it. It was sold sometime ago. Production is still producing things just like they did 30 years ago. Sometimes it's all you need to "Press and Prey", but they haven't even learned the tools of just 20 years ago. *sigh*




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