[geeks] I'm bored

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 05:26:34PM -0800, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> > I thought the kitchen sync was an ISA card.  Maybe they made a PCI version.
> > 
> 
> Kitchen sink, as in "everything including the kitchen sink"

Oh.  I should have realized that.  Guess this something about where my head is.
Too bad.
 
> > It was pretty cool.  It sat in the computer in an ISA slot, but it didn't
> > interact with the computer.  You had a cable coming from the card to a box
> > with a bunch of buttons and a small LCD display. Quite cool. Cost a fortune
> > back in the day.
> > 
> 
> What did it do?  Sounds fun...

It was a dual chanel TBC (time base corrector).  It was useful for linear
editing.  You connect it to two VCRs, and then the output from both VCRs will
be in sync.  It allowed you to use cheaper VCRs without wierd distortion on
transitions.  More expensive VCRs only needed a time code generator (which, 
memory fades, but the kitchen sink might had done that also) rather than
a device to actually currect their output.

The friend of mine who had one used it with his Video Toaster (get it, Video
Toaster and Kitchen Sink?).

Just thinking back to his old setup, one thing that disappointed me was that
apparently you couldn't really script the video toaster.  I mean, I believe 
that you could script it from ARexx, but you couldn't give it a script to
follow.  Higher end dedicated hardware systems could be driven by serial ports
so that you could have a PC that would start and stop the various VCRs, trigger
fades, preprogrammed CG elements, DDR playback, etc.  But there weren't built
in capabilities in the toaster to do such.  Perhaps someone made a seperate
add on program that added those capabilities.

I was just thinking of this because he used to have a 386 sitting next to him
with a program that would start, stop, rewind, etc the VCRs in a certain 
order, so all the editor had to do was manually operate the switcher.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd