[QuadList] Grass Valley

Fri Jul 6 11:14:00 CDT 2012

Hi

The plane and later two planes landed right here in GV.

I think that at the peak, probably around the 200 - 3000 time there were
around 1300-1400, mostly here in GV. Sales and Service guys were located
around the world.  Everything at that time was located out on Bitney
Springs Rd. Four large buildings held most everyone. I think the Nevada
City site opened in the early 90s.

The profile editing project never was introduced. We may have had some
customers come in to have a peak at what we were doing.

I got really good at using a glue stick pasting together the printouts for
the 200's panel! And, the Mac Plus only had a 5" screen to work with.

Randy

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 7:09 AM, David Crosthwait <david at dcvideo.com> wrote:

> Randy,
>
> I don't recall who's plane we came up in. May have been a regional flight
> as we landed in Sacramento and rented a car for the trip to Grass Valley.
> Did the Grass Valley corporate plane land in Grass Valley?
>
> Thanks for the reply and insight into the GVG 200 design project. The 200
> switcher was a big seller for those wishing to upgrade from the 1600 series
> but could not budget the 300 in any configuration, in my opinion. The E-MEM
> sequencing took a bit to get used to (for me) coming from years of 300
> usage. And you did the design on a Mac with that much power? You must have
> been high flying! How many employees would you estimate that GVG had at
> that time after the NAB introduction of the 200? One of my first 200
> sessions (which went on for weeks) was for a Rolling Stones documentary<https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=224283817598984&set=a.224283780932321.70184.123809690979731&type=3&theater>.
> In the end, we had a great program (which by the way, included a lot of 2"
> quad transfers).
>
> In regards to the profile demise, I do recall that disappearing all of a
> sudden. Thanks for the background.
>
>
> Mike Guess and Bob Johnson's caption might read: "Thanks for shopping at
> Grass Valley!".  Bob is mentioned here<http://articles.latimes.com/1988-05-16/business/fi-1970_1_grass-valley-group> in
> a 1988 GVG article. Sorry to hear of his untimely passing.
>
>
> Certainly customer service throughout the years (who has not needed a
> power supply shipped overnight) was excellent at Grass Valley. I hope that
> legacy of high quality product and service after the sale continues in this
> business.
>
> David
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 5, 2012, at 10:34 AM, Randy Hall wrote:
>
> David
>
> Did they fly you up in the company plane? The was a great sales tool! It
> was great when I came home from an international trip into SF. Clear
> customers, call on the white phone for pickup, get on the plane, have a
> drink, and be home in GV in 45 minutes. Those were the days....
>
> Yes, I was a Field Engineer 76-82 (1600s, 300s, 440s MKII dves), then into
> Engineering on the 100 and 200 switcher projects. Then into a group that
> was designing mac based editing around the time Avid was getting started.
> We had many projects, but the last on the drawing board was a set of
> real-time video/dve/audio cards to plug into the Profile mother board,
> which had crosspoints. This was to be real time effects processing along
> with the disk channels. The front end was on pc to control the Profile. We
> had 26 engineers on the project. I had left that group and moved into a
> project management group a couple of months before Tek bought Lightworks
> and shut the whole project down, and laid off about half the people.  Now
> with Nvision/Miranda, soon to be owned by Belden.
>
> The fellow on the left is Mike Guess. He was probably the product manager
> for the switchers back then.
>
> The other fellow was Bob Johnson. He was GVG employee #2. He held many
> different positions and was the keeper of the GVG culture. He died years
> ago tragically doing what he like doing best, riding his Harley.
>
> I was part of the 200 team, I designed the panel, all on a Mac 512K and
> Image Writer dot matrix printer. The E-MEM sequencing was a struggle for
> us. What we really wanted to do was a timeline that would jog slaved with
> the VTRs from a editor. We just weren't able to do that and ended up with a
> poor solution. We sold lots of 200s. I think the first NAB we sold over
> 125. After the show, there were 40+ job postings to hire 3 shifts
> of assembly and test people. Interesting concept in view of the news that
> we are reading.
>
> Randy
>
> On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 9:34 AM, David Crosthwait <david at dcvideo.com>wrote:
>
>> Hello Randy,
>>
>> I can presume that you were at GVG in '90? One of the most impressive
>> trips I participated in was when the GVG sales rep. (Eloy Chairez) flew a
>> group of us from Hollywood up there to see the GVG 3000 prototype for our
>> evaluation. What a delight it was to see GVG abandoned the 200 layout and
>> return to the 300 style of Emem. All of us breathed a sigh of relief! That
>> tour resulted I believe in an immediate sale of 5 or 6 of those switchers
>> and six channels of Kscope for the new facility being built in Burbank.
>> When delivered, I did the testing of the system for the first edit session
>> (perhaps in LA) using the GVG 3000 which was not fully functioning (no
>> frame stores, not all keyers working etc. ) but enough to do what I needed
>> to do for the client the next day (from CBS). All went well. A few years
>> later, all 3K's (4fsc) were upgraded to 4K's (601).
>>
>> The point of the above story is this: Grass Valley listened to the
>> customer base and went the extra effort to involve us in their design. The
>> result was many deliveries of great products. That trip alone probably was
>> worth over a $1,000,000 sales ticket. As to whether outsourcing some of the
>> manufacturing will change overall reliability and trust in their product,
>> only time will tell I suppose.
>>
>> These two guys were the ones who hosted us that rainy weekend (I cannot
>> recall their names):
>>
>> <GrassValley3K.jpeg>
>>
>>
>> Part of the campus tour was seeing other customer orders in progress. I
>> don't recall if any M/C switcher automation projects were geared towards
>> ACR or TCR operation but there may have been some as stations were still
>> operating around the country at that time with 2" quad carts.
>>
>>
>> Best Regards,
>>
>> David Crosthwait
>> DC Video
>> *Videotape transfers and more!*
>> 177 West Magnolia Blvd.
>> Burbank, CA. 91502
>> david at dcvideo.com
>> www.dcvideo.com
>> Follow DC Video on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dcvideo
>>
>>
>> Please trim posts to relevant info when replying.
>
> Change subject to reflect thread direction. Thanks.
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