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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

Most people have missed the most obvious head-cannon in that Jurassic Park scene - when Nedry is talking on the 'video phone' to his guy he's really just watching a quicktime movie .... you can see the horizontal scroll bar running as it's being played.

Of course at the time almost no one had really seen video on a personal computer so to the vast bulk of the movie going audience it was just futuristic.

Also in order to film that scene the video card had to be slowed down to 24 frames/sec and synced to the camera, looked great on film but was probably headache inducing to the people present

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Could have run at 72hz (3x 24hz), a normal refresh rate for many video cards & CRTs of the day. The SuperMatch 20-T in the movie could do 72hz (why do I know this...)

could have .... but we at SuperMac had one of our best engineers on set for the filming doing what the film crew asked for ....

(running at 3x would likely have resulted in banding)

oh very cool! Must have been a pain to get the timing right to sync with the film. I assume you modified the video drivers then, or was it solely hardware based? Was it using a Thunder II? Is there anywhere these stories are written up?

From memory this was very much pre-Thunder cards (I designed the Thunder graphics accelerator).

We had done a lot of early video-work prior to quicktime actually being released, we had hacked together a motion-JPEG card as a daughter card on one of our unaccelerated cards that could play video in a window, I suspect this was based on that (but could be wrong, it was a long time ago!).

We certainly hacked on the drivers to slow down the refresh rate, but that was just a matter of changing some numbers in the video timing controller - in a time prior to multi-sync displays it may have involved getting a bespoke display manufactured.

I don't know of any archive, here's a few stories:

- when we first went to Sony to buy 19 inch monitors we asked them for 15k/year, they laughed at us, they had never ever made that many, unlike TVs 19 inch monitors were made by hand on a single manufacturing line, the didn't believe there was a market for that many , in the end we sold 25k+

- when we first sold monitors to Australia/NZ they were crap, people returned them, turns out all monitors were aligned in Tokyo facing east .... southern hemisphere ones needed to be aligned in a special magnetic faraday cage

- we first demoed quicktime in a window at MacWorld on an HDTV monitor, one of only 5 in existence in the US at the time - most people had never seen video in a window, or a screen that big before - the monitor was so heavy it required a forklift

- Premiere was written by a Supermac employee, partly in his spare time, to work with our video capture card, we sold it to Adobe, he quit and followed it very soon after

- one April fools the boss carefully locked his door and set traps (people went in thru the false ceiling) next morning he started work, his screen slowly got greener and greener, he rebooted his machine, it happened again, he started removing suspicious inits from his system folder, rebooted again, it did it again .... just before he wiped his harddrive and did a full install people offered to put his original video card's rom back in ....

Speaking of faraday cages - one of the NYC firms got a sweet deal on office space. Turns out it was close enough to the metro/rail system that it would cause a magnetic disruption to the monitors. The "cheaper" fix was putting in flat screen monitors that were crazy expensive back in those days. Apparently the hardware cost wiped out any rental savings they thought they were going to have.

heh - before I worked for SuperMac I worked for the company that ported A/UX to the Mac for Apple, the SuperMac guys brought in one of their early (not Sony) monitors for me with the hope that I'd make it work on A/UX for them (I did) .... I was sitting there showing the port of X I'd just done to some co workers when suddenly the screen did this weird twisty spiral thing .... just outside the window was a truck carrying some ex-BART railstock was driving past ... essentially a giant bar magnet

UniSoft? Cool, what parts of A/UX did you work on?

Lots of stuff, I did many of the device drivers, the low level display console, the appletalk stack, the kernel event manager, the code that would build new kernels with new device drivers when stuff changed - A/UX 1.0 was essentially our stock System V port with BSD networking with drivers for the Apple hardware

Thank you for the stories! The folks over at 68kmla would probably love to hear from you, if you're interested in reliving those times a bit.

My naive assumption would've been that they could composite it into the scene. After all that movie was a relative breakthrough in compositing more difficult digital content into live action.

This reminds me of my first ever video file on a computer.

Don't Copy That Floppy on a LCIII via a Nautilus subscription CD.

It was like a minor version of what I suspect the moon landing felt like. I watched with my jaw down thinking about the day all video is on computer.

Kind of surprising to me, given the thing that was most historically significant about that film, that they would have opted to do something like that, rather than just dropping some computer graphics in after filming.

You may be underestimating the cost of digitally replacing images in post production (in 1993 no less) -- why bother with CGI when practical effects get the job done?

Exactly. It was way too early, in 1993, to be doing that sort of thing in Post. Much cheaper to do it on set.

yes, exactly, and as I mentioned most people at the time had never seen video playing in a window on a computer, the moving scroll bar didn't mean anything, it was just part of the magic

That scene drives me nuts every time I rewatch Jurassic Park.

>was probably headache inducing to the people present

I doubt it. It probably just looked like film, no?

the phosphors on a monitor designed for 60+Hz are designed to degrade quickly, at 24Hz they'll be off ~1/2 of the time

Remember that when film plays back the projector shows you the same image for most of the 1/24 of the time before switching to the next frame

Random trivia: many of the old film cinema projectors are running with a flicker rate of 48Hz (showing each frame twice) or 72Hz (showing each frame three times).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_projector#Shutter

Film projectors also actually show the same frame 2-3 times in a row to reduce percepted flicker (effectively giving you 48 or 72 Hz)

PAL TVs ran at 25hz. They most likely could find a monitor that would have looked fine. Its hard to say what they actually did just from what you see in the film.

Filming monitors and TVs was and is a very common thing. You can probably get away with filming a 30 fps monitor if your shutter speed is tight enough and you're ok with a few pulldown frames sneaking in.

>Remember that when film plays back the projector shows you the same image for most of the 1/24 of the time before switching to the next frame

Is this true? Isn't it 50/50 or so? Take a look at a rotary disk shutter. Film is pretty delicate and you can't pull it through that fast.

TVs use different, slower, phospors than computer monitors, they also scan alternate (50 or 60Hz) fields within a frame to help with the illusion

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