Vintage demo reel from CGI firm behind the original Tron lifecycle

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Came for my love of vintage computing, stayed for a cathartic step in in curing my 80ies nostalgia.

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Does anyone know how they got these images out of the computer and onto film?

Iā€™d guess either a TV monitor, which would add distortions, or separate red, green and blue film scans, like with a laser plotter or a microdensitometer run in reverse.But Iā€™m sure they had something more exotic and obscure.

Memory dump from the big machine at the office

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I worked with a bunch of ex MAGI people in '84 and at that time we used a Celco film recorder, which scanned images off of 9 track tape (about 5 frames per tape) and was run by a PDP-11. Each frame took about 30 seconds per R, G and B color separation to film onto (typically) Kodak 5247 film. Iā€™m sure they used something similar at MAGI. I could ask. It was very flat and repeatable so we could shoot mattes onto hi-con and send the color beauty pass and hicon mattes to an optical printer and get composites without matte lines.

A bunch of ex MAGI people started Blue Sky, btw.

The story I always heard was people were working on the ā€˜hidden line removal problemā€™ and MAGI president at a speech said, "what problem?ā€™ Made people think they didnā€™t understand the field (they were into other things than CGI) but the MAGI software was designed to analyze how solids absorbed radiation and one day an engineer suggested, ā€˜if we analyzed how solids reflected radiation we could make pictures.ā€™ And skip over the hidden line removal problem in the process.

Thatā€™s was how I heard it, anyway.

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Some other interesting thingsā€“

Their solids were analytically defined, so a sphere was round at any distance and never resolved into tessellated polygons on screen. They did a lot of Boolean CSG stuff at render time.

If youā€™d like to see some photos of the MAGI parking lot circa 1982 reflected in a low dynamic range light probe (a Christmas tree ornament) then check out their reflection mapping work. Examples are hosted on Paul Debevecā€™s site:

http://www.pauldebevec.com/ReflectionMapping/miller.html

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While MAGI and Abel & Associates could output to a film recorder, I remember seeing ā€˜making ofā€™ footage once that showed how some of the animation was done by outputting the wireframe art to a plotter and then tracing each frame on paper and painting it like an animation cel. A lot of the art in TRON was extremely low-tech. The whole movie (the computer world parts) was filmed in 70mm black and white, the actors wearing leotards with electrical tape and lines drawn on in Sharpie, and then hand-colored frame by frame.

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I think I remember them using Foonly PDP-10 clones at the time. In fact a friend at MIT was convinced that the movie was named TRON because the PDP-10 TRON instruction was opcode 666ā€¦

Iā€™m pretty sure the making of footage with MAGI comes from the special edition dvd of TRON.

This footage isnā€™t ā€œvintageā€ in the sense that it is just now being found. Itā€™s been around on dvd for a while.

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