Chapter 2 Page 1
Cinetron Early Systems and Sales
At last Cinetron actually had money in the bank. They paid everyone what they owed, took a little for themselves and had a few pennies left to finance the next installation which was to be for Carlos Sanchez at I .F. Studios, also in New York.
IF Studios was located about a block from the UN in New York’s East Side. IF’s owner, Carlos Sanchez, was intrigued by the potential of the system and received positive reviews from The Optical House owners and animation operators on their experience with it.
Carlos was interested in the idea of having the system contained in desk housing with a CRT monitor for communication with the system rather than just the Teletype unit as installed at The Optical House. In addition, it was fitted with a television camera mounted on the rack-over viewfinder of his system. The video camera connected to his console and allowed visual alignment without leaving the desk.
The IF system was fabricated entirely in Charlie’s basement and transported to New York in a VW Bus that belonged to a former Storer Studios Sound technician, David Patterson. This is just one example of the long friendship and cooperation with David stretching back to the days at when we were both at WAGA-TV.
The usual suspects, George and Charlie along with Gene on weekend and a night-owl visits were the installation crew.
The installation at IF was considerably less stressful than the first but not without its own frustrations. First, the building was old and its wiring, unbeknownst to us, was done with aluminum wire and the wall plug fittings were brass. The metallic dissimilarity caused the outlet to overheat and it was by pure chance that Gene and Charlie discovered on a Sunday morning when they arrived. If undiscovered another 24 hours it would almost certainly have resulted in a potentially devastating fire. A second issue that occurred was that the power to the building was lower than standard voltage and subject to brownouts. This made a circuit for the Oxberry camera drive motor fail occasionally when the camera was operated. {It turns out that this problem was common with the Oxberry solenoid operated motors and was one factor that prompted Cinetron to invent and manufacture its own stop motion motor… More on that later}. The third issue centered on the Hewlett Packard supplied interface cables. It turns out that the cables were made using twisted-pair solid wire. This is great if you plug something in and don’t need to remove or bend and twist it to fit in a desk console, and maybe remove and re-insert the cables numerous times. The result: Each of the 50 wires in the two cables had to be disassembled and a length of stranded wire soldered to each wire and then reassembled. This excruciatingly tedious task involved moving the cables to the HOJO headquarters and completing the fix by spreading everything out on the bed to work.
The installation at IF was handled in much the same way as the Optical House except that the experience gained at the Optical House along with improved software and hardware made things much faster and smoother. Once again, everything was finished, the system was running and the customer, Carlos, was happy with it.
After returning to Atlanta, George, Gene and Charlie encouraged Storer Studios Director of Photography Don Hudgins, to join them at Cinetron. Don would prove to be invaluable to the growth and ongoing success of Cinetron.
Now there was a way to create an income stream while simultaneously improving and marketing the system.
Barely crawling, the infant Cinetron decided to spread the word of its birth even wider: A postcard mailer sent to animation producers and optical houses across the US. A decision was made to have a booth at the SMPTE convention in New York. But How? They couldn’t take an animation stand to New York and they didn’t have a spare computer either.