© Copyright 2010 by Entropy Enigneering In case I never mentioned anywhere else on this site. Back in the late ‘80s I helped to start the Desktop Video revolution by writing a little program called Video Titler™ for the Mindset Computer. This was the first professional character generation system for PCs. (The back story is pretty straight-forward. Tom was broke. Microsoft was doing a number on licensing BASIC for the Mindset, and I ended up having to pull multiple miracles so that Tom wouldn’t be broke and the Mindset could perform graphics beyond its ability. Did I mention I had to write the thing in assembly?) Shortly after Video Titler™ was released, JVC North America picked up the system and released it as the JVC/Mindset Video Titling System. It was fun watching the Sony guys’ jaws drop at NAB when they realized they’d been trumped by JVC and a PC. Since you’ve probably never heard of a Mindset, or even the Mindset II, you can probably imagine how long lived it was. While Mindset was going through its death throes, I ported Video Titler to the PC. Did you know that if you interlace up an EGA card to better match an NTSC signal you can get twice the res of an EGA out to video, and overlay it on TV? With Video Titler™ on the PC and some guy writing columns about it at Camcorder Magazine, I started to get some attention from the Hollywood types. Meaning that they wanted free software. One of them caught me in a great mood one day, so I asked rather bluntly what would make me want to give up a car payment’s worth of cash to help him out. The guy gave me a good story, and stories are sometimes worth the cash. He said that Video Titler™ would be used on a TV in a scene in some movie that was being filmed, and if I ever got out to Hollywood, he could get me on the set of some movies. So I sent him the software and my brother Dan and I went out to California to meet him. True to his word, we got to hang out on the set for Ghostbusters II in the courtroom before it got blown up. We also talked about doing some graphics and special computing stuff for TV shows and movies. Over the next few years, we helped create graphics, programs and effects for a number of TV shows and some fairly major movies. Sometimes long distance and sometimes in person. Here are some of them.