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amccollumtoday at 9:00 AM3 repliesview on HN

My uncle (John Monsour) worked on this movie as the “24 Frame Computer Sync Engineer”. Because film cameras and CRT monitors have different frame rates, you needed to use specialized electronics to synchronize them with the camera frame rate otherwise you would have banding and weird moving artifacts on all the screens. It’s crazy to imagine needing to do this for all the screens visible in these shots.

Later monitor technologies like LCDs don’t have this issue because they don’t have the same moving electron beam illuminating each line of pixels, and it also became cheaper to just replace all the computer screens with CG, so eventually this specialized technical work wasn’t needed anymore, and my uncle ended up doing other things on the movies he worked on.


Replies

kallebootoday at 9:05 AM

If anyone is curious about 24fps CRT displays on set, I loved this [2 hour] video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicQUvSUbPM

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fabiensanglardtoday at 8:36 PM

What a cool anecdote. I have added it to the article!

_deftoday at 11:23 AM

How was the syncing actually achieved?

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