[QuadList] Jeporady Question of the Day

[Scott Thomas]

I worked at two different stations with Odetics in the Naples-Fort Myers market.

At one station (Fox affiliate) it replaced a home-brew commercial system that never worked. Someone tried writing a program on a PC that would control two Hitachi HR-230's. It was supposed to dub from a tape containing the entire inventory of commercials to a spot reel that would then be rolled on-air. As far as I knew, it never worked. This station took delivery of an Odetics with standard Betacam (oxide) machines, probably in 1988.

The other station (NBC Affiliate) replaced a TCR-100 with the Odetics in 1989. This machine received SP Betacam. It wasn't well taken care of for a time and would drop cassettes a lot. Things got better though. It was later sold the first station for spare parts or replacement for it's Odie.

Yes, we called it Odie, after the dog from the comic strip "Garfield". We even had a stuffed character on top. When I directed, it was "Roll Odie... Fade"

All the station in this market except for the late-comer FOX affiliate had TCR-100. The ABC later on had two TCR-100's. They ended up buying some sort of U-Matic system in the late 1980's or early 1990's. Something like a La-kart.

On Mar 1, 2011, at 5:31 PM, Gary Adams wrote:

> Yes it was called Silverlake.  It was made by Odetics with and for RCA.  Several of the product group from RCA left for Odetics to continue the product which had several generations of kit and was quite successful.  They ultimately interfaced with just about any modern cassette type decks including the Tektronix Profile disk recorder.  I think some are still in use and are still service by a  couple of former Odetics Engineers.  I worked for them a short while and still keep in touch with some of them.  In early systems, the decks had to be modified, but later systems did not require any deck modifications.  This made it really appealing since you could choose your format and deck and still have the automation from Odetics.   Gary
>  
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