[Tig] More memories please

[Bob Kertesz]

>There was also a CBS/Thomson color corrector in the 70s, I don't  
>recall if it was programmable, but was quite useful at the time.

It was sort of programmable of you had the one-of Holtz color corrector
system, as we did at Editel L.A.

There was an operator's panel with 16 sets of preset positions emulating the
corrector's front panel and using ten turn pots, and a thumbwheel control to
assign any of those 16 presets to any of 16 trigger points. The trigger points
were metal tabs I would press on to the film print a certain number of frames
before the cut. There was a detector for the tabs in the Singer projector
(part of the TK-28 chain) which then triggered the event counter, which then
triggered one of the 16 presets into the color corrector.

All done using composite video, with some pretty bad envelope delay and
ringing from the CBS color corrector itself. But it worked.

Sam Holtz designed it, and I built some of it, as did other engineers working
there at the time. This was around 1974 or even earlier, and to my knowledge,
the first "scene-by-scene" corrector in use anywhere.

I still have a CBS corrector here somewhere, and use it occasionally to
correct monitor feeds, although it's been a while.

--Bob

Bob Kertesz
BlueScreen LLC
Hollywood, California
bob at bluescreen.com

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