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31 Oct ETC: Day 5 and 6

Saturday was mostly a blur of activity. I hit a kind of lull at the end of friday in terms of thinking of ideas, but I got several things done yesterday. I made a couple drafts for simple music videos for random songs that came...

28 Oct ETC: Day 2

Another day in fabulous Owego at the Experimental Television Center (need I remind you it was voted the coolest small town in America by the readers of Budget Travel Magazine!). Last night I took a long timelapse out my window and let it run until this morning. Came out ok, but was about as exciting as most timelapses are...I have a better idea for tonight, but I'll have to see how it plays out. After breakfast, my first lessons on the ETC system began led by the incredibly patient and knowledgeable Hank Rudolph. After flipping on three power strips, the entire beast sprang to life. I was run through the relatively simple router for getting my inputs and outputs to their final destinations. The really impressive piece for me is a 64 x 64 switching matrix where absolutely everything is labeled and used. (Click all images in this post for a larger size..way more pictures in a picasa link at the bottom!) That's 64 separate sliders with 64 positions each. Essentially everything in the system can be run into everything else with a few relatively mild exceptions....it's a really impressive piece of technology. We then moved onto the Jones keyer, a custom luminance keyer that is controllable by control voltages (CV) provided by an external oscillator or MIDI. Next was the Jones Colorizer, a 4 channel color mixer that is also controllable by CV, and the Ross Switcher, a pretty straightforward video switcher. Pictures and other fun stuff after the jump!

26 Oct ETC: Day 1

I arrived in Owego, NY (no not Oswego...) in the mid afternoon and wandered down the tree lined streets to the ETC. Owego, apparently one of the "coolest small towns in america" is really nice. It's a very interesting mix of downtown and residential. Coming in the fall is really great because everything has that sort of overcast look to it, while the trees are exploding with color. I sort of expect small towns to eternally look like they do in the fall. I would like to see this place under a blanket of snow though. Also, this is the kind of place where people will ask you why you're taking pictures of the surroundings... Arriving at the Experimental TV Center, up the stairs past the storage area of a gift shop, I actually went into the office at first. I was saying to myself "Oh...is this all?" There was a desk, futon for sleeping, wall of tapes and a toilet facing the Susquehanna river with no curtain to hide yourself. After relaxing in there for a while, I decided to poke around to see if I had missed something. Opening the adjacent door, it was like that scene in the Goonies where they find the secret ship room full of One Eyed Willy's treasure. Words of course, don't do it justice: (Click images for the larger version) There will be more detailed pictures and descriptions after the jump. Tomorrow I learn how to actually turn the equipment on and how to patch my computer into it and stuff like that. Lots more pictures after the jump!