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Originally Posted by drh4683
Very interesting. thanks for great info and stories, Wayne.
Was this unit made at the Franklin Park plant? Im assuming it was introduced in 1969, if so, how many years was this device in production? Im curious if it works as its another auction of the seller saying what its all about, how great it is but no comment on its operating status.
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It was made for about 1 year in Motorola's Quincy, IL plant. IIRC, Mitsubishi got into the business also, doing their own player design. CBS never got the film production process under good control, and soon after, Sony brought out betamax, which was the final blow, since this film format couldn't be recorded at home.
Regarding the film, the master was recorded on high-contrast fine grain microfilm in an electron beam recorder in real time. The problem was that the film would outgas during the recording, gradually changing sensitivity and contrast. There had to be a complex program of changing the exposure level during the program.
Since the film has 60 frames per second, the recorder had to use a full frame store for interlace to progressive scan conversion. Easy to do today digitally, but at that time it required a room full of ultrasonic mercury delay lines. In addition, the video was modulated (or added to? not sure now) a 4xchroma CW, so the high contrast film could produce a better gray scale, like the half-tone dots in a newspaper image. These dots could be seen to some extent in the prints under high magnification. [Edit - I recall now that the beam was "spot wobbled" at this rate to make sure there were no visible scanning lines on the film. Any scan lines on the film would cause a moire' pattern due to the imperfectly matched scan lines in the player.]
Motorola licensed a company in London to set up the mastering process for foreign distribution. They continued the project longer than in the US, but eventually it succumbed to the competition of VCRs also.
Motorola blamed CBS for never getting the film process under control. We wanted the films to contain an AGC reference pulse at the top of the frame, but CBS refused.
Some of the demo/test films I recall:
10 minutes of a "Mission Impossible" episode (monochrome)
Excerpts of a classroom film on the sex life of grasshoppers (monochrome) - one of Peter Goldmark's favorites
A few feet of test stills for color:
Gilligan's Island (the Skipper and Gilligan in red and blue shirts). We discovered this at Motorola as filler at the end of a monochrome reel and proceeded on developing the color circuits ahead of time. When someone looked at the result, they noticed the shirt colors were reversed. We had missed the fact that the color phase was reversed on the film compared to NTSC. (This was done so it could be heterodyned back up to NTSC, which reversed the phase again. My design used direct demodulation and remodulation)
A red (or blue?) Chevy
Charlie Brown animated movie excerpt - color
"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" excerpt - color
"Shoot / Don't Shoot" - a training film for police that was distributed along with cap pistols (don't recall if mono or color)
"Football bloopers" - color
Some sort of underwater nature footage - lots of fish - color
Motorola tried to sell Ford on using the system for a series of product videos for distribution to Ford dealers. There was some enthusiasm, but don't think this ever got beyond the proposal/demo stage.