It made me smile a little realizing I'm now the old guy with stories. You should definitely follow up with more old greybeards (beard not required) to find out their stories. Shortly after leaving that DVD shop, I wound up moving to LA for another post house. My engineering team worked in a cubicle farm, but there was this one senior engineer that had his own office with a door! Who was this guy? He only worked on "special projects". One day, we had an offsite meeting with the full engineering team. I got the chance to chat to this mysterious engineer, and whoa did he have some stories. This guy was LEGEND! The conversation started with our common experience with film telecines (the equipment used to transfer film to video). He was surprised that I knew what a flying spot scanner[0] was, and proceeded to tell me his story that showed me how LEGEND he was. He and his brother had received a Rank telecine and over the course of a summer, converted it to a method of continuous scanning of the film by storing frames into a custom made memory bank to allow for the creation of the 2:3 telecine cadence. Because they had this bit of memory buffer, they also introduced a bit of noise reduction. Apparently, this was one of the first live capable noise reductions. So much so, that in July 1969, a certain image of a certain person taking his first steps found its way through his equipment for a little bit of clean up before hitting the air waves. After picking my jaw up from the floor, I proceed to buy this man another round from the open bar, but still. I now always try to get the senior coworkers talking.
