[QuadList] Grass Valley

Sun Jul 8 17:16:00 CDT 2012

Hello Randy and all,

Since there were five of us traveling from LA (D of E Al Hart, Engineer Bruce Bayer, editors Roger Berger, Richard Russell and my self), perhaps the total onboard weight was too much for whatever craft GVG was flying then. It's just a guess as to why we went through Sacramento.

I would have surmised that the peak of employment at GVG might have been in the 200-3000 era as those switchers were all over the place, particularly the latter here in LA and in trucks. When the 4000 upgrade happened around the time Digital Betacam was coming into play more and more (in addition to D1), the integration was flawless where I was working. Brilliantly, GVG kept the same control panel as the 3K. All that was done was to swap out the 3K chassis for a 4K in the racks. I think we put a new sticker over the 3K and that was it in the edit rooms. The K-Scopes were already 601 so off we went in component editing. In effect, the 4K as delivered worked right out of the box and was in service for the most part over 10 years. The LA client base loved what we could do in those rooms, equipped with GVG 251editor controllers, 6 channels of Kscope and the 4000 switcher. Congratulations on contributing to a winning team of manufacturing and customer service. 

Pictured above is one of seven edit bays in the building. The 4K can be seen on the right. Producer Don Voorhies is standing, one of the most talented mulit-taskers I have ever worked with. Using GVG products, we cranked out five seasons of "Malcolm in the Middle" till we moved into Nitris DS for HD in the last two seasons. Rooms similar to this down the hall did a major amount of TV episodic's also. 

Just to put the quad "spin" on this subject, these type rooms were often used to composite shows from legacy formats such as 2" quad. Having the Kscope in a 601 environment enabled us to do blanking blow-ups when needed.

Best Regards,

David Crosthwait
DC Video
Videotape transfers and more!
david at dcvideo.com
www.dcvideo.com
Follow DC Video on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dcvideo

On Jul 6, 2012, at 9:14 AM, Randy Hall wrote:

> 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. 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 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
>> 
>> 
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>> 
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