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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: flickerful who wrote (8527)	5/18/1999 11:38:00 PM
From: Hal Campbell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Randy et al ......this is largely off topic, but I got a kick out of it. From a 1995 video professional message board ... <<Mike Orton (orton@earthlink.net) Fri, 28 Apr 1995 01:09:28 -0700 Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ] Next message: g250001@ibm.net: "Re: forwarded" Previous message: Craig Nichols: "Re: forwarded" Maybe in reply to: Steve Darsey: "Tape Transport Of Choice" Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 01:09:28 -0700 To: craign@PrimeNet.Com (Craig Nichols), telecine@xyzoom.alegria.com From: orton@earthlink.net (Mike Orton) Subject: Re: Tape Transport Of Choice At 11:49 PM 4/27/95, Craig Nichols wrote: > I thought I would never say it, but I am partial to Ampex DCT. I've got to agree! There was a time when I swore we would never even= consider a compressed format VTR in the place. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Ampex= have demonstrated pretty well conclusively that real pictures have enough= redundancy in them to throw away and still be able to recover the= identical (not the almost-the-same, but identical) information after the = decompression. Editel was a double-whammy for Ampex. Compression was an obscene= word, and we were still smarting after having suffered through three= miserable years with the VPR300 D-2 abortion. When Mike Arbuthnot wandered= into the facility with his new machine, he practically faced a lynch-mob!= =20 Notwithstanding, we took the machine for a week and threw the book= at it, (chose a particularly heavy one too!), expecting to smash tape, jam= housings, run away servos, crappy pictures, and generally demonstrate that= the apparently dying Ampex had produced another total boat-anchor. There= were some dim mutterings that maybe they were smarter than we gave them= credit for, because they were getting into data storage, whatever that wa= s. SURPRISE! The damn thing worked like a champ for the entire week.= Pictures locked up in a heartbeat, no errors, and the more we tried to bust= it, the more stubbornly it worked. It even worked flawlessly with a Henry= (despite some childish "spoiler" disclaimers from Quantel (since retracted)= ). We need a good mastering format, pref dual-standard, and we were= totally over the D-1 / BTS incompatibilty issue. All these PG phase and= scanner tach and capstan tach and and and .... problems which had been a= bit of a bggr with D-1 and a royal pain in the rse with D-2 were= addressed in auto-setup* with DCT. We couldnt believe it. We had to keep= pinching ourselves to make sure we werent dreaming. Then came the issues of Ampex the company. Werent these the guys who= had the video world by the nuts with ADO and then just let it slip away?= Didnt they have a potentially really great edit system, that kinda expired?= Didnt they just lay off a pantload of people at Colorado Springs? Would= Ampex still be around in six months time? Back to the data storage thingy= again. We found out people, NASA, the Government, those kind of people,= were eating up DST by the truckload at $100k a pop. So we decided to take= the risk and build a Component Digi-bay around DCT, hedging our bets with a= couple of RTDs for good measure. I think its true to say that we never= looked back. They still have a habit of occasionally popping a PSU, but= replacement is fast and painless, and there's no alignment. All the= clients who are working on them love 'em, and everyone I have spoken to= in our post world who has them, loves them. If I have a gripe, it is that= Ampex have not got their act together in Europe, so we dont do as much PAL= (OK-625 component, smart guy) as we would like, we are still sending boring= old D-1 over the pond. I guess the editors over there have two hour lunches= to go to while their source machines lock up. In an ideal world, Ampex= would have sold a bundle of these to the BBC instead of that whacky D-3,= and then we would all be out of a job as tape maintenance spuds, and could= do something productive like farming or running a pub. Conclusion: Editel, the world's biggest skeptics about the twin= evils of compression and Ampex end up building a $1.2M bay around DCT. Mike= Arbuthnot, are you one smooth talker or what?>>