256 Shades of Gray: The MacVision

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Technical work by Joseph William Lewis.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Heya, your LC III is "screaming" due to leaking or bad caps in the audio output stage. It appears the Laserdisc player may also be having issues with caps due to those rolling bars. Odd thought the capture from the camcorder also had a rolling bar. The PSU on the capture device may also be having issues as there are strange sync issues. Interesting stuff!

[@8antipode9]

Hey Adrian! I was thinking that maybe there are bad caps in the capture device.

[@madmanfrommars]

Maybe send to Adrian for a new repair video?

[@RacerX-]

Awesome. That noise is because of bad capacitors. Mine made the same noise before I recapped it. Apparently all 68k Macs from the 90s need to be recapped.

[@fattomandeibu]

In the '90s, my high school art dept had an A1200 with something similar. We were allowed to use the device, but the teacher would take the photos and give us a floppy containing the picture, and the assignment was to do something with it in DPaint.

[@MarquisDeSang]

Love the Lawnmower Man, best movie in the history of ever.

[@sdsck]

LOVE THE “ QUICK STOP “ EXAMPLE 🤣

[@joshhiner729]

Id like to second the comment made earlier on warning that the mac is screaming from failing capacitors. They leak and eat the board so its imperative to have them replaced preferably with polymer versions that will never leak (PREFERABLY not tantalum). Soon the mac will likely not function at all and eventually have bad damage to the board. Just a caring warning. Fun video!

[@ericwazhung]

10:25 Interesting mental puzzle... my guess is that the box only has enough onboard memory to capture a fraction of a scanline at a time before sending it serially, then has to wait for a certain amount of time after the appropriate hsync to capture the next set of pixels, and so-on. So, the weird melting, which happens both horizontally and vertically, may have something to do with trigger-thresholds on the vsync and hsync pulses... Introduce some 60Hz, or other, noise in the signal, and those trigger-thresholds would occur at slightly different times on the sloped-edge of the sync pulses. Or plausibly even, may occur in the middle of a sync pulse, if there's enough noise on it... Which could explain the vsync error (since its rising/falling-edges are each probably unmistakably between two specific hsyncs, but its active duration spans numerous hsyncs). As someone else said, I'da first thought of ground-loops... but yeah, bad caps could be to blame, as well... (and maybe more likely, since they'd've probably had to address this in "help" or the manual if it was as common as a ground loop) I dig the way this thing must be kinda ridiculously complicated in order to work at all in a time when microcontrollers were slow and RAM was scarce... I've seen similar era professional-grade systems that got away with things like DMA with the main computer's RAM via the ISA bus, but even those were probably too slow to capture an entire frame in realtime, so required complex triggering and timing circuitry to get things right. But for a standalone system like this, with far less RAM and much slower communication, I imagine this system was actually a much more difficult design challenge. And yet, apparently at a much lower price-point. Heh! Something makes me think they chose serial as opposed to SCSI (which might've not only made it faster, but also alleviated some of those tight timing constraints, making it a slightly less-complicated design challenge), in part because they could probably throw the same system in a different box with a different connector to use with a PC (if they ever got around to writing PC software for it). I'm almost tempted to want to look at this thing's protocol. Also... layers... Heh! They suggest using a VCR! But pause on most vcrs at that time had far worse rolling than even yours. I wonder if they designed-in some amount of filtering to try to reduce that. TVs have to run those scanlines at a regular rate, and thus the source and the screen have to be perfectly in-sync. but this thing doesn't have to, it could be essentially lock-step-synced with the sync pulses. So the on-screen waviness during Pause with a VCR may not appear nearly as bad on this thing! edit: 13:14 appears to capture a single frame and uploads! Guess I was mistaken. OTOH, this appears to be halftone-mode, so i wonder if it's different in grayscale. But, still with what appears to be sync error on both axes, huh. Especially at the bookshelf behind your head. But maybe not, that could almost be the result of sampling too fast and too slow purely horizontally. Very interesting.

[@larryk731]

Love the use of Clerks as a vcr image

[@TheReimecker]

Amazing Device Awesome Video !!!

[@f.k.b.16]

Underrated channel! I've never seen this before. And by the way... Your tea is ready!

[@Endzs768]

that's pretty impressive for the 80s. I remember in the 90s i was always so intrigued with how to get digital images and video created on a computer.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

I remember buying one of these brand new along with a Mac IIci.

[@BollingHolt]

Reminds me of capturing on the Snappy for PCs back in the mid 90s or so.

[@miked4377]

very interesting...cool

[@RyanAumiller]

the switch most likely selects between 0.7V peak to peak or 1.0v peak to peak composite video. and yeah, the hum bars are a manifestation of 60HZ AC noise, I would have leaned toward a ground loop between the source and the mac until you got the squiggles in the bars, that's definitely an unhappy stiffening capacitor in the chain.

[@KAPTKipper]

I remember the "scanner" you attached to the print-head of a dot-matrix printer. They were not very good.

[@drumboy02]

the image at 13:41 has huge meme potential

[@BustaHymen]

You should make a postcard of that thumbnail photo and sell as merch I'd buy tons of them and send as Christmas cards

[@joshm7769]

At 9:30, your light is flashing out of sync with your capturing device. Your eyes don't notice that but your capture device does.

[@sarreqteryx]

it looks like it's capturing scanline by scanline, but at 90° from NTSC. the speed of the serial port certainly isn't helping.

[@joshm7769]

Now use RGB filters to create color images with the camera 😃

[@davideocassette6312]

You just gave me a flashback of doing that on an Amiga 2000. The results were really impressive for the time but nowadays we'd probably find the process incredibly frustrating!

[@xargos]

Overall a good video, but the screaming sound from obvious bad capacitors made me want to scream. I would immediately turn off any computer making that noise until it was recapped.