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Saturday, January 18th, 2020
The cool thing about old analog video switchers was that they offered these incredibly inappropriate visual transitions between one source and another. And in the shorthand of American control rooms, they had distinctive names. A barn door wipe! A clock wipe! A corner wipe! A diamond wipe! A star wipe! A purple modulated football wipe!
You don’t see these employed much these days for obvious reasons of taste and style, unless, of course, you’re trying to evoke an earlier era, as in…the Star Wars films.
But at the trade shows where these mammoth vision mixing panels (as they would say in Europe) were displayed, the upper right corner with these buttons implied power and versatility…versatility that might have been a bit more ideal than real, once you sat down behind one of these things and tried to get a newscast on the air.
