A preliminary step towards a language for picture control in a real-time mode
Lou Katz, Bill Etra · 1976
With the proliferation of extremely complex analog systems for the control of television images it has become evident that some more efficient system has to be found for dealing with the mire of knobs, switches, levers, and patch cords which make up any video processing device. In planning an attack on this situation, we soon realized that a major aspect of the problem is a linquistic one. Television has only a few terms which deal with the almost infinite number of effects possible in any given system. The specification of wipes, fades, dissolves, keys, etc. tells one the process used, but does not go into great detail as to what it looks like on the screen. A circle wipe, for instance, may start in any part of the screen, have an edge in any of several degrees of softness, may be modulated by a wide range of frequencies, and may have a number of outlines around it in any combination of colors. Given these technical capabilities, the problem of how to catalog the possible effects and how to specify them was approached in terms of a description based on a Cartesian coordinate system representation of the multidimensional video space.