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Video Data Systems- a small company in Hauppauge, NY. They made titlers "Chyrons", ad machines and community bulletin board things, oh and the NY Off Track Bett

Video Data Systems- a small company in Hauppauge, NY. They made titlers "Chyrons", ad machines and community bulletin board things, oh and the NY Off Track Betting video stuff. Oh, I bet you had this experience: 100s of monitors whining at near 15734 Hz, damaging your young ears..

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I worked for Quanta in Salt Lake. They made the Delta character generator, and the Orion, and some others before my time. Yeah, I've heard that whine. Haven't heard it in years, though. Both monitors and my ears have changed... Did you ever go to the National Association of Broadcasters trade show? That was loud. Hundreds of monitors, but dozens of booths, each trying to play catchy audio loud to attract attention.
- LocalH 6y ago
  I used to work with a QCG-500 at a local TV station about twenty years ago. I can still pick out the way certain fonts looked at certain sizes on that thing. It eventually got replaced by a Chyron Maxine. Prosumer and professional character generators are woefully underdocumented. Anyone wanna donate any old functional ones to me? I'll set up and make a Youtube series about them lol. I'd love to see them eventually be emulated in the way that classic game consoles and home computers have been. I'm 40 years old and I can still hear flyback. I actually have a Roku Express+ hooked up to a 27" Trinitron. I miss the days of CRTs, except for their weight.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    I am 52, and it's getting tough to hear flyback. I miss CRT's too, and I have a couple. One, near my work desk, is a lightly used SONY PVM, high pitch Trinitron. I love to have movies playing on it when working. Above it, on a shelf, are a reasonable VHS that I use for capturing tapes and watching movies on as well as some not so special DVD/Blu-Ray player I should hook up via RGB, but is running S-video. Rambling aside, I would enjoy a video series on character generators. Lots of us geeked out on broadcast details. Personally, I would enjoy any tech info on how the characters were done and what trade-offs got made any why. Some of what was out there looked very good. Other gear, not so much. Bet it's a few minor details that differentiate those outcomes too.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      It's been 24 years. I probably don't owe a duty of confidentiality any more. So... We had descriptions of each character of each font in a scalable, vector form. To draw a character, we'd draw it as a bitmap (1-bit depth) at 4 times the size. Then we would shrink each 4x4 cell down to one 8-bit value (weighting the center more than the edges). That 8-bit value was the alpha (transparency) value for drawing the character over whatever was already there in the frame buffer. When drawing (compositing) one thing over another with an alpha channel, we used true Porter & Duff compositing, with pre-multiplied colors. We had a custom ASIC that would do it, so it was fast. One of the trade offs was the rise time (or number of pixels, same thing) of the edge of a character. Too fast and the NTSC video signal couldn't handle it (and you'd have visually obvious stair-steps on the diagonals). Too slow and the characters looked soft rather than crisp.
      - jhallenworld 6y ago
        At VDS, there was 68000-based titler called Vidstar or Videostar, something like that. This was before the great DRAM price decline, so every effort was made to reduce the memory including the frame buffer. (on previous products they experimented with bubble memory and even shipped a product using CCD memory). So the frame buffer was compressed using run-length coding. The hardware decoded it on the fly when generating the video. Anyway, we could get very high resolution this way with a tiny fast SRAM frame buffer, it looked great. A problem was that even with the 68000, composing a page from text was quite slow: 10 seconds for single line, something like that. One of the products was a teleprompter. To make smooth slow scrolling without complex sampling we moved the screen by changing the vertical sync position. This is not so easy to do well because the vertical sync detector in the monitor is pre-charged by the nearest horz sync (this is why NTSC has the double-rate serration pulses for interlace). On the other hand, we did roll and crawl effects using fast 6809 assembly on other products. The font on this type was very crude- either fixed width characters like a terminal or semi-proportional spaced, where the width had to be a multiple of some number of pixels (so still character cells). You could get away with it on CATV bulletin board devices, but not in high quality titlers.
      - ddingus 6y ago

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

I worked for Quanta in Salt Lake. They made the Delta character generator, and the Orion, and some others before my time. Yeah, I've heard that whine. Haven't heard it in years, though. Both monitors and my ears have changed... Did you ever go to the National Association of Broadcasters trade show? That was loud. Hundreds of monitors, but dozens of booths, each trying to play catchy audio loud to attract attention.

LocalH 6y ago
I used to work with a QCG-500 at a local TV station about twenty years ago. I can still pick out the way certain fonts looked at certain sizes on that thing. It eventually got replaced by a Chyron Maxine. Prosumer and professional character generators are woefully underdocumented. Anyone wanna donate any old functional ones to me? I'll set up and make a Youtube series about them lol. I'd love to see them eventually be emulated in the way that classic game consoles and home computers have been. I'm 40 years old and I can still hear flyback. I actually have a Roku Express+ hooked up to a 27" Trinitron. I miss the days of CRTs, except for their weight.
- ddingus 6y ago
  I am 52, and it's getting tough to hear flyback. I miss CRT's too, and I have a couple. One, near my work desk, is a lightly used SONY PVM, high pitch Trinitron. I love to have movies playing on it when working. Above it, on a shelf, are a reasonable VHS that I use for capturing tapes and watching movies on as well as some not so special DVD/Blu-Ray player I should hook up via RGB, but is running S-video. Rambling aside, I would enjoy a video series on character generators. Lots of us geeked out on broadcast details. Personally, I would enjoy any tech info on how the characters were done and what trade-offs got made any why. Some of what was out there looked very good. Other gear, not so much. Bet it's a few minor details that differentiate those outcomes too.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    It's been 24 years. I probably don't owe a duty of confidentiality any more. So... We had descriptions of each character of each font in a scalable, vector form. To draw a character, we'd draw it as a bitmap (1-bit depth) at 4 times the size. Then we would shrink each 4x4 cell down to one 8-bit value (weighting the center more than the edges). That 8-bit value was the alpha (transparency) value for drawing the character over whatever was already there in the frame buffer. When drawing (compositing) one thing over another with an alpha channel, we used true Porter & Duff compositing, with pre-multiplied colors. We had a custom ASIC that would do it, so it was fast. One of the trade offs was the rise time (or number of pixels, same thing) of the edge of a character. Too fast and the NTSC video signal couldn't handle it (and you'd have visually obvious stair-steps on the diagonals). Too slow and the characters looked soft rather than crisp.
    - jhallenworld 6y ago
      At VDS, there was 68000-based titler called Vidstar or Videostar, something like that. This was before the great DRAM price decline, so every effort was made to reduce the memory including the frame buffer. (on previous products they experimented with bubble memory and even shipped a product using CCD memory). So the frame buffer was compressed using run-length coding. The hardware decoded it on the fly when generating the video. Anyway, we could get very high resolution this way with a tiny fast SRAM frame buffer, it looked great. A problem was that even with the 68000, composing a page from text was quite slow: 10 seconds for single line, something like that. One of the products was a teleprompter. To make smooth slow scrolling without complex sampling we moved the screen by changing the vertical sync position. This is not so easy to do well because the vertical sync detector in the monitor is pre-charged by the nearest horz sync (this is why NTSC has the double-rate serration pulses for interlace). On the other hand, we did roll and crawl effects using fast 6809 assembly on other products. The font on this type was very crude- either fixed width characters like a terminal or semi-proportional spaced, where the width had to be a multiple of some number of pixels (so still character cells). You could get away with it on CATV bulletin board devices, but not in high quality titlers.
    - ddingus 6y ago