[QuadList] Vital... Gainesville

[Chill315 at aol.com]

Bill
 
She was known as Vital Nancy.  As we all know sex sells to men.   And the 
industry has been historically dominated by men.  She knew how to  put herself
 in the spotlight.
 
I had one switcher and a Squeezoom from them.  For the extra cost of  the 
Grass Valley, you got a switcher that would work forever.  The used  market 
reflected the value of Grass.  I would never recommend a Vital   to anyone.  
They were that poor.  Great ideas but poor  execution.
 
Chris Hill
WA8IGN
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 2/28/2011 1:20:17 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
wcarpen107 at yahoo.com writes:

Hey Folks,

I guess most of you are too young to  remember how the products from 
Gainsville were demostrated at NAB. (I  went 32 years straight, starting in 1967)

A beautiful girl, and  in a great dress and NOBODY ever looked at the 
picture or transition  quality.

I learned many years later that she was the daughter of  a great chief 
engineer in Florida, and she was married to a guy in the  industry who was once 
an Ampex pre-A format sub dealer and later became  a manufacturer of editors.

I also worked with a field engineer  who said when he worked for the 
company, he used a Squezze Zoom power  supply as an Arc Welder!!

Bill Carpenter

PS: Let's see if  anyone can remember why Nubar ran the company from  
Atlanta?


--- On Sun, 2/27/11, rabruner at aol.com  <rabruner at aol.com> wrote:


From:  rabruner at aol.com <rabruner at aol.com>
Subject: Re: [QuadList]  Vital... Gainesville
To: quadlist at quadvideotapegroup.com
Date:  Sunday, February 27, 2011, 9:13 PM


I both maintained and operated the VIX-114 switcher and the  SqueeZoom.  
The problem Vital had was rushing things into  production.  That was also the 
advantage they gained in the  market place over GVG.  They would be out a 
year earlier with all  the bells and whistles at the expense of getting the 
bugs out of the  device.  For Instance, they were on the market first with 
'clock  wipes' and 'ghoul wipes.'  The clock wipe generator was really  four 90 
degree quadrant wipes that took an infinity of pots to set up  so that all 
the quadrants had a common center, etc.  The 114  switcher was used by CBS 
to produce shows like Sonny and Cher that  featured a lot of those kinds of 
tricky transitions.  It was used  in Nashville to produce Hee Haw for the 
same reason. The 114 had  a lot of potential as a switcher, but it suffered 
from a lack of  development to knock the rough edges off. It just wouldn't stay 
 adjusted.
    The SqueeZoom was also let out of the box  before it was ready in order 
to get it onto the market before GVG  could integrate the NEC EFlex into 
their switchers.  It suffered  from a lot of design shortcomings, not the 
least of which was the  quality of the circuit boards as has been mentioned 
here.  The  problems with the boards in all products, I have been told by 
someone  who worked at Vital at the time, was twofold.  They put the first  
artwork into production and then tried to clean it up after the fact  by blowing 
out incorrect traces and using rework wire.  The  second problem was that 
they made large runs of boards for all  products and then didn't de flux them 
properly because the machine  they used to clean the boards was 
malfunctioning and no one knew  it.  So flux was left on the boards, washed into the IC  
sockets, etc. In a period of a few months, the  residue corroded away 
traces, and fouled the contacts in all the  IC sockets.  I spent hours removing IC 
sockets from SqueeZoom  boards and replacing them with Augat machined pin 
IC sockets. If you  pried the plastic tops off the IC sockets, the pins and 
board  underneath were covered with a black residue.  
    The squeezoom was under designed in a lot of  ways.  Due to a lack of 
CPU horsepower, it cut a lot of  computational corners.  The motion was 
mostly 8 bit  functions.  There were 128 steps of squeeze and 128 steps of  zoom, 
or 256 steps from infinity to off the screen. As long as you  flew things 
up pretty quickly, it looked o.k., but anything stately  had a definite 
'steppiness.'  The color interpolation was  troublesome too. as I recall each 
channel had 8 y memory boards, 5 r-y  memory boards and 3 b-y.  So trying to 
zoom an object in a  blue screen always produced strange edges, especially at 
small  sizes.  Then Ampex put the ADO on the market and all this became  
academic.  
Bob Bruner 
W9TAJ


 





On Feb 27, 2011, at 8:01 PM, Chuck Reti  wrote:
> 
> I never had the "pleasure" of using a Vital.  Did use some ISI 
(Gainesville) 
product, and also American Data  (worst-construction-ever. From Alabama, 
maybe).
> 
> Chuck  Reti
> WV8A
> Detroit MIl






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