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Remembering Optical Titles

🕑 Added 2025-01-14 13:34:36 +0000 UTC

Comments

Sadiq Mohamed

Back in the 70s I worked as Video Engineer at the BBC in West London. We used a roller system for end credits which used matt black paper rolls the same width as A4 (210mm or 8.25"). They were made using a special typewriter that printed in white using a large font. There were occasions when the roller was not properly set up and was not vertical. Mostly this was caught during rehearsal, but occasionally it would happen on a live show and nothing could be done. The same typewriter could also type in black on yellow paper to make rolls for a teleprompter.

Sadiq Mohamed

About 20 years ago I was working as a freelance Video Editor and was regularly employed by the manufacturer of Lightworks. This was a very good digital system used mainly by film editors as it had a GUI which mimicked a Steinbeck film editing table. In this instance I was employed to help out on a low budget movie called "Seaview Knights". I had taught the film editor how to use the system and found him a good assistant who had Lightworks experience. The movie had been shot on 35mm and was going to be shown theatrically on film. At the end of the editing I got to supervise the titles and credits. The distributor had a set of rules for the size and duration of each of the front titles, and a list of end credits had been produced. I timed the titles by using the Lightworks subtitling feature to make a demo. I then took everything with text files on floppy to the animation house that would be making the film version. They used a computer captioning system to make the final versions and had a special printer that printed onto high contrast reversal 35mm film using lasers. That went to the film lab who produced a composite print of the front tiles so we could project it. It was a fascinating job. I had a lot of experience with film by that time though this was my first cinema job.

Bob Pockney

I used microfiche a lot at work in the 80s/90s. We had complete operating system listings on fiche and I had a set at home too for reference when we had system crashes.