Timothy Liebe on ancient 1970s film CGI
© Timothy Liebe (@timeliebe)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAazTp87VI&lc=UgxZRuy4lYPdoDZb8PV4AaABAg
I remember being in college in the late Seventies and seeing digitalization of a live image for the first time—some friends of mine were building minicomputers and I asked them to bring in a bunch of them for a SF project I was shooting in Advanced Television Production. Among the gear they brought in was a one-frame-every-two-seconds digitizing camera...and all of us, including my Instructor, was staring at this going "Do you KNOW what going to happen to television once this gets as fast as, oh, ten frames a second?"
You could see the future happening back then (I remember years later seeing THE LAST STARFIGHTER, and being blown away by the computer graphics at the time!), and it was kind of amazing....
© Timothy Liebe (@timeliebe)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAazTp87VI&lc=UgxZRuy4lYPdoDZb8PV4AaABAg.AD2C1qTohPLAD9uWAtsH3x
@GamingDad - why? My friends had brought all this gear from their job, so they knew what was being taken. Things were at the stage where, unless the government was interested, it was all so new that nobody especially cared about "trade secrets"—I remember my friends joking about what a pissant Bill Gates was, whining about his "copyright" for his flavor of BASIC, when people were sharing programs and even languages freely and openly....
Of course, that's why Bill Gates owns the world now and not my friends—because he was such a greedhead. 😮💨
© Fred Werza (@fredwerza3478)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAazTp87VI&lc=UgxZRuy4lYPdoDZb8PV4AaABAg.AD2C1qTohPLADDaqKrPDux
Imagine going to see Douglas Engelbart's "mother of all demos" in 1968 and thinking "this weird techno stuff will never work" LOL
© Bruno Cesar Cerqueira (@brunocesarcerqueira2525)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAazTp87VI&lc=UgxZRuy4lYPdoDZb8PV4AaABAg.AD2C1qTohPLADHdyr1fU52
I imagine what a guy from that time who could do this would do with a modern computer in hand. Well, certainly many of them are still alive and active, and tinkering with current machines. But imagine them having access to the best machines and software of today, AT THAT TIME, with the energy and creativity of their youth.
© KSoft Games (@KSoftGames25)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAazTp87VI&lc=UgxZRuy4lYPdoDZb8PV4AaABAg.AD2C1qTohPLADYpCB9whbe
@timeliebe I would have loved to grow up in that time just to experience the growth of technology. All I got to see was the last years of innovation and polishing, the birth of the internet, and then the inevitable end point: the death of retail parts stores and specialty PC shops, unless you wanted an Apple PC.
© Timothy Liebe (@timeliebe)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAazTp87VI&lc=UgxZRuy4lYPdoDZb8PV4AaABAg.AD2C1qTohPLADZNtoTI_eQ
@KSoftGames25 - that was back when something the size of a sewing machine was considered a "portable PC"—you still had to plug it in to run it, but it came with its own active-matrix LCD screen...in 8-bit color! Given everybody else in the department had Wang Word Processors where you stored your documents on 8" single-side, single-density floppies if you wanted to "sneakernet" it to another location (my then-wife wrote two books on the Wang at the office, and I think sent the discs off to some library collecting her manuscripts).
A friend of ours had the first "microcomputer" we'd ever seen, a Commodore 64 you'd plug into the RCA ports on the back of your color TV if it had them, and used a RF converter if it didn't. My wife was still my girlfriend when she bought her first computer—b&w screen, CP/M operating system, two 5-1/4" floppy drives (no hard drive, and you by GODS had better remember to save every five minutes!), had a proprietary word processor and spreadsheet program that her then-roommate used for the radio drama company they'd formed (I joined later).
About the time we got married we splurged and bought a 286/12 desktop with a 5 Megabytes hard drive and monochrome display—which stank for images, but that was a BUSINESS computer, not some toy! We used it for years to write on, having graduated to WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 since our jobs had. Somewhere after that we started to go "online"—we'd heard about BBSes, but our first taste of what would become The Worldwide Web was CompuServ, where we could go into "discussion rooms" with like-minded people. We didn't have a color computer in our home until we bought a 486/66 in the Nineties so I could write about "hybrid editing", "nonlinear editing", and "computer graphics" for VIDEO Magazine....
© Timothy Liebe (@timeliebe)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAazTp87VI&lc=UgxZRuy4lYPdoDZb8PV4AaABAg.AD2C1qTohPLADsrsZ0Kgqq
@aurorauplinks - that was what George Lucas did initially, or rather John Dykstra did. The problem with that is it requires an elaborate infrastructure to work, unlike CGI which you can do on your home computer.
ILM developed something called "go-motion", would use the setup you're talking about to create stop-motion animation by recording the images as they moved between positions for more realistic action.
https://3dvf.com/en/the-empire-strikes-back-almost-featured-cgi-x-wings-here-are-the-renders/