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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.
@jcburns January 15, 2020 at 9:59 pm
The @maddow interview is excellent. And I think one of the reasons it’s so good is it’s NOT live. It’s tight, it’s sober, it’s super-smart, and it doesn’t have all that live faux hoopla and “can you stay with us?” “We have 30 secs.” @npr please note!!
@jcburns January 11, 2020 at 10:46 pm
When a big ol’ front comes through, I’m still old school enough to be reassured by televised weather coverage. Live! Local! Rainy and windy!
@jcburns December 22, 2019 at 7:13 pm
Old green Columbus Citizen Journal newsbox for the holidays. Merry newspapers, everyone.
@jcburns February 10, 2019 at 10:22 pm
Those old quad videotape machines sometimes took as long as 10 seconds to lock up and make a stable picture.
@jcburns October 1, 2018 at 1:17 pm
It’s interesting to travel with someone who has an overlapping, yet distinct view of the world—I learn so much. Here’s my someone.
