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How TV Logos Were Made Before Computers (2017)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- will_raw 7y agoScenes created for star wars (19xx) are also quite fascinating.
- muterad_murilax 7y agoYou're aware that "(19xx)" also includes Episode I, right? :)
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoThat goes for Phantom Menace as well. The heads in some of the shots of the pod race stadium were painted q-tips, and they couldn’t digitally get the waterfalls in Naboo to look right, so they poured table salt.
- Theodores 7y agoAnother joyful detail is how the ident bounces around in the frame. This is because the ident was recorded on film and the film jumps around on the sprockets. This you would not notice in the cinema or on a CRT TV in a darkened room but is quite apparent in a YouTube video. In latter years when the ident would be put onto videotape for playback the bouncing on the sprockets would still be there as a result of the telecine process. This did not come to an immediate end with the introduction of proper tools from the likes of Quantel. Some broadcasters were quite small, regional and proud of their long-standing analog idents. The whole channel would have to be rebranded and, as part of that exercise, the proper hardware added to do modern idents.
- DonHopkins 7y agoI recently used AfterEffects motion tracking, plus some blurring and glowing effects on a text overlay, to reproduce the jiggling of the telecine process of an old film recently digitized to video, and match the titles and credits at the beginning and end of the original film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI I'm in the progress of researching and writing an article about the subject of this video (light pen driven pie menus on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector display, in an early CAD system called PIXIE developed at Cambridge University), which I'll submit to HN when it's ready some time soon I hope. Neil E. Wiseman, Heinz U. Lemke, John O. Hiles, PIXIE: A New Approach to Graphical Man-Machine Communication, Proceedings of 1969 CAD Conference Southampton IEEE Conference Publication 51, pp. 463–471. https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20approach%20to%20man-machine%20communication.pdf https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/PIXIE%20a%20new%20... https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/library/archives.html Check out Munching Squares on the same kind of hardware currently running at the Living Computer Museum, with an AM radio so the computer can play its own music synchronized with the graphics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc Here's the fucking manual! http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340_Display_Programming_Manual.pdf http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340... (Be sure to order all the luxury add-on options for your 340 Precision Incremental Vector Graphics CRT Display, including the 342 Symbol Generator for drawing text along with your vector graphics, the 370 High Speed Light Pen for pointing at said text and graphics, and definitely the Type 347 Subroutine Option -- a big fan cooled cabinet with a powerful hardware subroutine accelerator that is super useful! Otherwise you have to simulate subroutines in software, which sucks.) http://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/types http://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/types
- akx 7y agoThe AM music is unsurprisingly similar to bytebeat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o
- DonHopkins 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ggm 7y agoI visited BBC Shepard's bush in the eighties and saw the mechanical globe. It was very cool. In a hokey, home made ah-haaa kind of way.
- DonHopkins 7y agoMax Headroom is a real model trying to look like a computer model in the eighties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU
- toolslive 7y agoIt's one of these things where age shows: If you're old enough, you just know this (at least:I do, and I think it's because I am).
- DubiousPusher 7y agoNot television but the 1936-46 Universal Pictures one was especially pleasing and impressive to me. https://youtu.be/nLx4ucZ8v4Y https://youtu.be/nLx4ucZ8v4Y Recreated in 1972 for "The Sting" which at the time was a film made as a bit of a nostalgia trip. https://youtu.be/AsMEneC7F4o https://youtu.be/AsMEneC7F4o
- russellbeattie 7y agoHeh. I just found 40 minutes of BBC's hot air balloon idents. https://youtu.be/tdKbtvaSskA https://youtu.be/tdKbtvaSskA I love the internet.
- 867-5309 7y agoI speed read that as "incidents" and and after brief viewing and realisation am both disappointed and relieved
- DonHopkins 7y agoI speed read that other word as "baboon" and had the same feelings.
- DonHopkins 7y agoCBS's children's television news spot "In The News" had an iconic spinning globe animation, to mesmerizing electronic music in the style of Raymond Scott. (I don't know if he personally made that music, but it sure sounds uncannily like Soothing Sounds for Babies, etc.) CBS' "In the News" - from 1977!! (In which President Jimmy Carter sets up strict code of ethics and rules of conduct for public officials. Turns over peanut business to prevent appearance of conflict of interest.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stX3zM2oL8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stX3zM2oL8g CBS' In The News On Chernobyl (1986) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgWVjmDabAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgWVjmDabAg Synesthopia: CBS’s In the News Theme. (The comments link to some other cool intros and theme songs.) https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/03/17/in-the-news/ https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/03/17/in-the-news/ Raymond Scott - Soothing Sounds For Baby Vol. 1 (1962) FULL ALBUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k66nGplNRmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k66nGplNRmQ HN discussion of "Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into Long, Strange Trip for Engineer (cbslocal.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997110 >nineteen999 10 months ago | parent | favorite | on: Repair of Iconic ’60s Era Synthesizer Turns into L... >This reminded me a little of the story of Raymond Scott's "Electronium" machine, which was not a digital synthesizer, but a very early analog "algorithmic composition/generative music machine", back in the 60's and 70's: HN discussion of "Ask HN: What, if anything, do you listen to while coding?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17119729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17119729 >scyclow on May 21, 2018 | parent | favorite | on: Ask HN: What, if anything, do you listen to while ... >I'm a big fan of Raymond Scott's electronic stuff because it's interesting, non distracting, and usually doesn't have lyrics. https://youtu.be/rYVIDJtKU-A https://youtu.be/rYVIDJtKU-A HN discussion of "Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pioneer (2008) (theguardian.com)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995733 >firstworldman on Jan 29, 2016 | parent | favorite | on: Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pione... >Raymond Scott is probably more well known, particularly because of having been sampled by Dilla. Oram and certainly also Delia Derbyshire deserve all their due... I can't imagine how exciting it must have been to be creating these sounds that no one had heard before. >The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is more influential than they're ever given credit for, even now that the story is somewhat well known. And they were at the time too... If you're looking for 'pop' musicians who were influenced by those experiments in early electronics, check An Electric Storm by White Noise (band that featured Delia and Brian from BBC RWS), as well as United States of America's self-titled 1968 record. Both radical and timeless.
- DonHopkins 7y agoI truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least!
- ken 7y agoIf you're excited by live physical effects, they still exist: in theatre! Well, maybe not this year.
- aasasd 7y agoThe most astounding thing there is how the entire page errors out of existence if I rotate my phone.
- rectangleman 7y agoAnother thing worth mentioning is Scanimate which was an analog video animation system used in the late 70s/early 80s to create a lot of the flying/metallic logo effects that were common on TV at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispW6-7b2sA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispW6-7b2sA
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoQuantel was another company producing digital hardware specifically for TV effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ma_jeU50rY&t=5m32s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ma_jeU50rY&t=5m32s My favourite part is 14:30 onwards.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpXMH9xJy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpXMH9xJy0
- gumby 7y agoBy the way despite all the great “AI” promise of lisp machines, flying logos were the big market for Symbolics. Sad but true. I love the creativity of these old techniques. It’s seems how absurdly amateur much of old TV was, but these logos show how much professionalism and technical creativity there was as well.
- crististm 7y agoIndeed, they were used for 1990 FIFA World Cup
- jerf 7y agoI enjoy watching the DVD/BluRay bonus features on how films were made in the 1980s and before. Lots of interesting stuff. Starting in the late 1990s and then progressively advancing until it is everything, all the special effects videos amount to "and then we used a computer." I mean, still a few interesting bits about how they got it into a computer (motion capture, etc), but it tends to homogenize. Technically there would still be stuff I'd find interesting, but it goes beyond what DVD features will have.
- karatestomp 7y agoLord of the Rings had some good effects stuff in the making-of. And Fury Road. Last cool one I remember before LOTR was Independence Day. So many are just “a computer did it, exactly the same way as in every other movie” now.
- inakarmacoma 7y ago
- VeninVidiaVicii 7y agoI just bought a mid century accordion a few days ago, and the amount of chords it can do with one button is incredible, not to mention the number of instruments it can emulate (9 on one side, 5 on the other). As a primarily digital artist, I am embarrassed to say how easy it is to forget the analog precursors of our modern tools.
- acidburnNSA 7y agoIn nuclear engineering, we use computational fluid dynamics programs and fancy neutronics codes to model reactor concepts. I was reading some history recently and found that back in the nuclear heyday they just used plastic cutouts and flowed special fluids that defracted light differently when under tension to design components. They also used electrically conductive paper and cut it out into odd shapes and applied a voltage since resistance is an analog of both neutron diffusion and heat transfer. Wild.
- mizunooto 7y agoThat’s Emacs for you
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoI had a neighbor who was a veteran from this era. Did some of the MTV stuff, some eighties news globes. Once I found the sculpture that this is based on just lying around in the hallway: https://img.discogs.com/2YTnJ0ck1qdsZWJJ7R-xs8kKgew=/fit-in/600x781/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-13130539-1549221247-8899.mpo.jpg https://img.discogs.com/2YTnJ0ck1qdsZWJJ7R-xs8kKgew=/fit-in/... He was always asking me for some help with getting into digital 3D, but was hung up on building a server farm for rendering first. I could never convince him that he should take the time to learn Blender or Autodesk first and worry about hardware later...
- deltron3030 7y agoSearch for Scanimate on YT, that's the name of the machine used to produce most TV logos in the 70s and early 80s, it's an analog synth for graphics basically.
- open-source-ux 7y agoIn the 1981 BBC TV series of the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy', the animated sequences simulated the look of a computer display but weren't actually computer generated. They were drawn on sheets of acetate as traditional 2D animators had done for decades. The animation is one of the most memorable aspects of the TV series and, despite being almost 40 years old, still holds up really well: https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=127 https://youtu.be/iuumnjJWFO4?t=127
- srachamim 7y agoThis website is so bad. I scrolled too much and the address has been changed. Now when I'm trying to share it to others I get the wrong URL . Then I refreshed and I found myself in a different article without a way to get back to the one I read.
- cryptoquick 7y agoDVNO, four capital letters, printed in gold, cuz details make the girls sweat, even more, while they're shaking their belt, no need to ask my name to figure out how cool I am