oh very cool! Must have been a pain to get the timing right to sync with the film. I assume you modified the video drivers then, or was it solely hardware based? Was it using a Thunder II? Is there anywhere these stories are written up?
From memory this was very much pre-Thunder cards (I designed the Thunder graphics accelerator).
We had done a lot of early video-work prior to quicktime actually being released, we had hacked together a motion-JPEG card as a daughter card on one of our unaccelerated cards that could play video in a window, I suspect this was based on that (but could be wrong, it was a long time ago!).
We certainly hacked on the drivers to slow down the refresh rate, but that was just a matter of changing some numbers in the video timing controller - in a time prior to multi-sync displays it may have involved getting a bespoke display manufactured.
I don't know of any archive, here's a few stories:
- when we first went to Sony to buy 19 inch monitors we asked them for 15k/year, they laughed at us, they had never ever made that many, unlike TVs 19 inch monitors were made by hand on a single manufacturing line, the didn't believe there was a market for that many , in the end we sold 25k+
- when we first sold monitors to Australia/NZ they were crap, people returned them, turns out all monitors were aligned in Tokyo facing east .... southern hemisphere ones needed to be aligned in a special magnetic faraday cage
- we first demoed quicktime in a window at MacWorld on an HDTV monitor, one of only 5 in existence in the US at the time - most people had never seen video in a window, or a screen that big before - the monitor was so heavy it required a forklift
- Premiere was written by a Supermac employee, partly in his spare time, to work with our video capture card, we sold it to Adobe, he quit and followed it very soon after
- one April fools the boss carefully locked his door and set traps (people went in thru the false ceiling) next morning he started work, his screen slowly got greener and greener, he rebooted his machine, it happened again, he started removing suspicious inits from his system folder, rebooted again, it did it again .... just before he wiped his harddrive and did a full install people offered to put his original video card's rom back in ....
Speaking of faraday cages - one of the NYC firms got a sweet deal on office space. Turns out it was close enough to the metro/rail system that it would cause a magnetic disruption to the monitors. The "cheaper" fix was putting in flat screen monitors that were crazy expensive back in those days. Apparently the hardware cost wiped out any rental savings they thought they were going to have.
heh - before I worked for SuperMac I worked for the company that ported A/UX to the Mac for Apple, the SuperMac guys brought in one of their early (not Sony) monitors for me with the hope that I'd make it work on A/UX for them (I did) .... I was sitting there showing the port of X I'd just done to some co workers when suddenly the screen did this weird twisty spiral thing .... just outside the window was a truck carrying some ex-BART railstock was driving past ... essentially a giant bar magnet
Lots of stuff, I did many of the device drivers, the low level display console, the appletalk stack, the kernel event manager, the code that would build new kernels with new device drivers when stuff changed - A/UX 1.0 was essentially our stock System V port with BSD networking with drivers for the Apple hardware
My naive assumption would've been that they could composite it into the scene. After all that movie was a relative breakthrough in compositing more difficult digital content into live action.
(running at 3x would likely have resulted in banding)