Chapter 2 Page 6
Trafco owned an animation stand housed in what used to be a recording studio in Nashville, Interestingly, one in which Elvis Presley had done some early recordings. Tony was interested in a system but seriously constrained by budget restrictions.
The limitations of the original computer that Cinetron was using prevented much further development of the operating system software and they had discussed purchasing a larger capacity computer for development purposes if funds were ever available. Now there was a way to accomplish two things at once: they proposed to sell the updated solid-state version of their original system to Tony at a substantially reduced price.
This allowed them to build a new system of their own like those in the field and replace their computer with a larger more powerful model to use for development as well as production. Naturally, a fair amount of work was required to bring that original system up to date with what was being delivering to customers.
That reborn original system was installed by Don and Charlie on Trafco’s Oxberry camera stand and they trained the operator Wayne Smith, a transplanted Hollywood camera operator, on its operation.
Things worked out well at Trafco for everyone concerned and as it turns out the operator, Wayne Smith later moved on to other things but was always a vocal evangelist for Cinetron systems. He purchased several systems for use in his own production company. Wayne was also the inventor of the “Steadi-Film” system for transferring film to video without the annoying image float prevalent in film transfers at that time. Gene and Wayne designed and built the transport system electronics for the Steadi-Film device. Wayne was awarded a national Emmy for his invention.