On the verisimilitude of bleeps and bloops
So today I dragged out a few of the old Odyssey x00/x000 dedicated consoles from the early 70s. For those not in the know, these were relatively-low-price-point machines which usually played a Pong-like game and maybe one or two other variations on that theme dressed up as hockey or soccer, released between the original Magnavox Odyssey (1972, the first home video game) and the Odyssey2 (1978, still my favorite). Magnavox, in trying desperately the make the things seem futuristic to you, the consumer, called these games by names such as “Odyssey 100” and “Odyssey 4000” (really, if you think about it, they almost made the Odyssey2 sound like a step back in retrospect). I’m singling out three of these intermediate Odyssey consoles as historically important in PDF Level 2, and therefore I needed video…so therefore I needed to hook them up.
Not so fast, though! Just hooking them up and recording their video wasn’t enough. Each of these machines generated its own internal sound – bleeps and bloops came from a little piezo speaker inside the plastic casing. Not only did I record the video straight to a DVD-R (through my infamous RF-to-digital rig, which was responsible for a heap of the first DVD), I also shut off everything else in the room – even the ceiling fan – and did sound recordings of each machine. I discovered that the Odyssey 100 and 500 had an identical bleep-and-bloop generator (that’s a highly technical term there), so I captured “the perfect beep” from one recording and manually synced it up with the video. The Odyssey 4000 produces a variety of bleeps and bloops, so it’ll be a slightly more complicated process, but the point of all this is that I want the resulting video on the DVD to present the true experience – both sound and picture – of what you’d see and hear while playing these games.
This is important because the Odyssey x00/x000 consoles – with only a couple of models excepted – all have analog components, and therefore can’t be emulated, strictly speaking: there’s no chip to emulate, just a rat’s nest of discrete logic wiring. This point was made to me very thoroughly when I plugged in the Odyssey 500: the analog circuit that generates the vertical lines that form the boundaries of the screen (and the center “net” line for the tennis/pong game) has gone way screwy on me. The vertical lines have groovy waves going through them, which also distort everything else on the screen – any video I gathered would’ve been useless. Fortunately, the early Odyssey x00 consoles had a knob that could be used to literally yank the center line off the screen completely. So that’s what I did – without that line on the screen to warp everything, the game appeared perfectly normal. I’ll reproduce the missing center line with the Avid’s graphics tools and it’ll look like it’s supposed to. That experience reminded me of why it’s really important to get this stuff right – because these machines won’t always be working. Compared to the video games you play on your Xbox 360 or Wii today, of course, these old Pong variants are cave drawings. But you know how excited real archaeologists get about cave drawings, don’t you? It’s history. In its own way, so is this.
I’m hoping to have the 1970s done by the first of the year, but I keep finding so much neat stuff to add – old Odyssey consoles, Studio II and Astrocade and Channel F games, commercials for stuff like Blip and Merlin – that it’s dangerously tempting to just make this one “Phosphor Dot Fossils: The ’70s.”… Read more
So I had to rebuild some of PDF Level 2 tonight when I discovered that Evan had apparently done some…ah…work on it. Note to son of mine: if you’re angling for an “assistant editor” credit, you actually have to leave intact some of what was originally there. :shocked: No sweat, though, because this one’s almost a breeze to put together compared to the first one, at least where compositing and other things come in. Part of the whole reason to have an Avid at home, whether I’m still “in the biz” or not, is to keep discovering new tricks and, yes, new workarounds. Knowing how/why the machine does some of the things it does helps me find ways of tricking it into doing certain things for me, perhaps more efficiently than I’d done them before, and occasionally allowing me to do stuff that I simply hadn’t worked out how to do before now. It keeps me in the loop. Or it keeps me loopy. Not sure which, really. Suffice to say, even Evan deleting a couple of layers of effects/text/compositing wasn’t a disaster – it was a head-scratch and 15 minutes of rebuilding what had been there before. No sweat. I really wish I’d known some of these tricks when I was working at the station, but hey, no biggie. I still like what I’m doing now better.
For the 1.7 people interested, a few tech notes on PDF II – well, not really so much tech notes as stylistic descriptions. I was accosted in #vbender about a couple of these issues and thought maybe I’d elaborate on why the first DVD was the way it was in places, and why the second one may not be the same. More after the jump (to be merciful to the folks who just aren’t interested, which I completely understand). … 
Evan’s birthday is today, and I’m working on a little video piece to celebrate the occasion. I temporarily ceased any other video work I had going so I could load every piece of Evan video I have into the Avid. I won’t tip my hand about the music, other than that it involves the Traveling Wilburys. But going through all that video has kinda made me realize how much he’s grown in the past year, and how much I have too – I kinda had to grow the hell up, a bit more than I’d realized. I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing, really – I don’t have a playbook that I’m operating by. All I do know is that it’s now been a year since I become A Guy With A Baby. Somewhere in that year that’s passed, I’ve become Dad. And I don’t doubt for a moment that it’s an improvement. He’s the best part of being me, and from here on out he always will be.
