Computer Animation Industries - demo from 1972

This video comes from a day LONG before the digital revolution, widescreen images, stereo TV, or high definition media.
This demonstration by Computer Animation Industries, Inc. was created in 1972 and used as a sales tool to promote the earliest integration of computer generated images recorded frame-by-frame to film.
Keep in mind that this was produced before
many of you were even born!

[@jbvideos6605]

There’s something about the 1970s aesthetic that fascinates me: graphic design, film editing, even fashion (as garish as it may have been, especially towards the end of the decade)

[@dilbyjones]

Exactly

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

There was still HEART here.

[@rippingmyheartwassoeasy]

Its beautiful in everyway

[@DAngelCM]

It's been fifty years. What a CGI evolution.

[@tron3entertainment]

Decades later and Microsoft still does not have screen savers this good.

[@skylius]

Windows 11 might.... We just need to hope. LOL

[@trashyraccoon2615]

Microsoft has always been sh*t

[@jeromeglick]

Around the 7 min mark actually reminds me of Windows Media Player visualizations from the early 2000s.

[@lulugamer8082]

@@trashyraccoon2615 youre right! MICROSOFT IS A PILE OF SHIT

[@belstar1128]

Screen savers where very popular in the 1990s but does anyone care about them now.

[@tbp_entertainment]

Back when the Scanimate system and synthesizers were brand-new toys for companies to play with...

[@markyannitell8508]

This is so hippie and pretty. I hope some of it made it on the air back in the day.

[@MadameSomnambule]

There's something about analog computer animation that always fascinated me since I discovered it in middle school. You could make some trippy and abstract stuff with it all those years ago. Also, my mom would've been in kindergarten when this demo was made.

[@Queenskii004]

My mom would’ve been 7 years old😭

[@AkiraMidori]

That editing on the very first ident though, so ahead of its time.

[@gavinthecrafter]

Everything about this demo, the graphics, the music, everything, seem so native to the 1980s, yet it was made 8 years before the decade would begin. It's fascinating.

[@tandy5811]

the 80s is overrated, nobody talks about the 70s

[@malaiseexpert-]

Early to mid 80s tv shows and commercials used the exact same Graphics and computers as the 70/

[@nsputnik]

Your perception of the 80s is just slightly off. This is totally 70s. I was there when this type of stuff of on TV, and it was the 70s.

[@belstar1128]

The music in a lot of these are very 70s but i always assume that things are newer than they are i am young so i always assumed 80s tv looked like this nice its computer generated but very different from the stuff i grew up with in the 90s but 80s tv looked more similar to the 90s tv that i am used to.

[@timbermicka]

1980's computer graphics were on another level. Hell, Pixar were around. In the 1970's it was 90% wireframe, mostly basic stuff.

[@IronClaw99]

Way ahead of its time.

[@Flamingbro69]

It’s crazy to think that this is almost 50 Years Old!

[@VTSGsRock]

It's probably now 50

[@nxx99]

@@VTSGsRock over 50 now

[@rippingmyheartwassoeasy]

Its sad actually. Decadism is the stealth destroyer of worlds. I love the 1970s 😢

[@Ian16545]

2:31 - "We interrupt this program-to bring you a fresh new idea in animation!" 3:34 - (insert obligatory Bern Bennett, Roy Rowan or Bill Gilliand VO here) 4:06 - (insert obligatory Ernie Anderson or Ed Jordan VO here) 4:42 - (insert obligatory Don Pardo, Bill Wolff, Bill Wendell or Bill Hanrahan VO here) This sounds like a variation on "The First NBC Affiliate Package".

[@MaRoFu]

I personally really adore the Radar Weather logo at 3:03 with its trippy guitar backed by a bunch of morse code-esque noises, and the Weather logo that comes after it with the echoey ukulele-like sound at the end.

[@isabeld.paredes4923]

5:34 The music here has some psychedelic touches. As they used to say in the late 1960's and early 1970's, groovy... Considering that the animation was from 1972, it was pretty good for early computer animation

[@belstar1128]

I love the look of these animations and sounds.

[@AllRequired]

Beautiful opening worthy of 1972.

[@barnumeffekt]

5:50 love that barberpole phaser

[@gilotovlog8703]

This is the kind of stuff that you watch when you attempt to fix your circadian rhythm by staying up for 24 hours.

[@hoppinggnomethe4154]

The 70s CG graphic and 70s synth music Man, it was something else

[@GeoNeilUK]

The section from 4:52 onwards is kind of a cross between the internval grpahics on the early 1970s Discovision laserdiscs and screensavers used in computers 20 years later!

[@mr.h2111]

My favourite part is when it cuts to the words “ready” outta nowhere

[@skylius]

I think it's something to do how this was digitalized? I honestly don't know! I'd love a comment explaining why these frames are there because it seems very interesting?

[@jmitchhopper5091]

The "ready" is on the IBM disc drive. Big giant boxes with 1 foot diameter discs. The fast one-frame cuts were just to be interesting and let you know that some technology was behind it all. And, NO, much of this pre-dates "Scanimate".

[@mmojdeenettfsavecanadathxt191]

@@jmitchhopper5091 3:36 it sounds like THX

[@brianarbenz7206]

Advertisers and TV station managers saw this and breathlessly said: "I. WANT. THAT."

[@jess648]

vaporwave as hell despite it being from the early 70’s its also surprising that there was any sort of computer animation back them

[@belstar1128]

I think the 1970s are the start of what i call the early digital age that ends around the year 2000 its kind of like a proto version of the look of the 80s and 90s so it all looks very weird so perfect for vaporwave.

[@jess648]

@@belstar1128 yeah that’s about what I was thinking the crazy geometric patterns accompanied by someone going absolutely wild on a Moog synthesizer is my kind of aesthetic (tbf the 70’s always felt like a prototype of the 80’s as well in a way I can’t describe)

[@stewartlynch1284]

1972 - The year technology changed the world.

[@Penguins1987]

how is it that the logos and animations back then have way more energy and pop then today's logos

[@LendriMujina]

The novelty of experimental tech wore off and fell into the thrall of the forgives-no-mistakes-and-demands-playing-it-safe stockholders, that's how.

[@juliahart8593]

Creativity died in lieu of profit like with almost everything else

[@RyanSchweitzer77]

@@LendriMujina All I gotta say to that is fuck a stockholder. They ruin everything.

[@ActuallyHoudini]

idk why, but the legion between digital and film is something that's always interested me. just taking something that was intentionally made digitally and then putting that on physical film is just beautiful to me. a relationship between the two photi magics.

[@progressman95]

3:33 the things...

[@MarrloChare2000]

This all originated on film, as evident by the scratches and the gate weave (which is the image shaking/moving around).This was then transfered from film to videotape (this process is also called telecine). The video quality and in areas with solid backgrounds (like on the CBS logo) have a discolored spot, and film doesn't do that, so this is presumably a film-to-videotape transfer.

[@user-yx3mx3xr6n]

This is beyond awesome.

[@rty1955]

And none of this was direct to tape. It was all in film so they could do frame by frame sequencing. I know i was in the broadcast business back then. All special animation was in film

[@rty1955]

@@Dez_The_Fox i dont know how much you know about quads, but back then it was nearly impossible to do 1 frame edits accurately. They exposed film a frame at a time and they had much better control over exposure on film. They later transferred the film to quad. I have never come across any computer animation that was direct to video in the early 70s.

[@rty1955]

@@Dez_The_Fox then as you known scanmate was a direct to film process. They used film because scanmate displayed to a CRT that was a special design. They used film because they could control every single frame. Scanmate did not have standard frame rates at the time so it would have been impossible for a quad to record it. Quads are vert sensitive to input signals I restore/redesign Ampex quad machines now for a museum. I work on every machine from the 1000 to the ACR-25 Back in the day I worked in the NYC broadcast market for the longest on-air television station. I operated every machine Ampex made, later on, i worked in the largest post house on the east coast.

[@RyanSchweitzer77]

@@rty1955 Scanimate was not just direct-to-film, although it was used that way for a few productions. All of the Scanimate systems were also video-capable for output, equipped with a standard B&W 525-line NTSC "rescanning" video camera pointing at the special hi-res (945-line) CRT that the artwork was displayed on, fed by a 945-line video camera aimed at the artwork to be animated, usually a back-lit Kodalith transparency (with the hi-res CRT being manipulated by the Scanimate hardware), rescanning the image to make it compatible with standard NTSC video, with video colorization circuitry downstream from the rescanning camera's monochrome video output to provide color. Film cameras were used in place of the rescanning video camera, with any colorization being done optically in the film lab, for the few times the Scanimate was used for film work. The Scanimate could always do real-time 60-field/second video animations due to the analog nature of the system, via the rescanning camera installed. Now early digital CGI animation from the 70s (like CAI's animations shown here, I'd reckon) and 80s that was rendered digitally via computer (and not an analog system like Scanimate) was recorded to film a frame at a time in non-real time fashion (usually with a CRT-based film recorder connected to the computer's graphics hardware or frame buffer output), because computing power was quite a bit less than it is today; it took quite a bit of CPU time (minutes, sometimes hours depending on the resolution and number of polygons to be rendered in each frame) for the host computer to render each frame of the animation into a frame buffer to make it ready for display on a monitor or output to a CRT-based film recorder. Most film recorders were triggered by the host computer to take a frame of the graphics rendered, intervalometer-style, once the whole frame was rendered into the frame buffer's memory. Later CGI in the 80s and 90s used 1" Type C-format helical VTRs (and later digital VCRs like D1 and D2) to record the animation, that could accurately record 1 frame at a time, also triggered by the host computer & frame buffer, due to the helical nature of the video tracks recorded to tape. As you mentioned, the segmented transverse layout of the video tracks for 2" quad tape did make single-frame recording quite difficult for the format, requiring 15 separate segmented transverse tracks on a 2" quad tape to record & play back one field of video (in contrast to helical video recording's 1 diagonal track per field on the tape), as you probably already know, considering your expertise with working and restoring Ampex broadcast VTRs. Almost all of the Scanimate's works were direct to video for television post-production, especially those done at Image West, the former studio operated by Computer Image Corporation, the company that developed Scanimate (and later systems like CAESAR and VersEFX,). Dolphin Productions in NYC was also another studio in the 70s that had a Scanimate system used for video/television work. There are demo reels for both Image West and Dolphin Productions here on YT, and they're all video work they did for television, whether commercials, program intros, station IDs, or production company logos. The only Scanimate work I've seen myself that went direct to film is some of the animated lyrics displayed with the "Oompa-loompa" song during the scene with Veruca Salt in "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory": kzbin.info/www/bejne/d4HNY3Soit5prJYsi=wdZUiqP9c-8KLopT

[@benkleschinsky]

Unlike Scanimate which was real time graphic animation, this was essentially still hand drawn frame by frame.

[@simonebernacchia5724]

I actually think those were mixed techniques: computer animation, scanimation, traditional animation mixed together - most of computer animations seems to be mostly math functions, remember at the time output was majority on the time on vector screens so supposedly they did photographies of the frame and put it together with traditional animation techniques, before TBC and single frame recorders

[@rty1955]

@@simonebernacchia5724 they could also be done a frame at s time as well, so not so much in real time. The displays had long persistence phosphors so the animation device would draw one frame and they recorded on film a frame at a time. We would get all our logos, movie intros & some bumpers from a film house. We would also get slides to be used at sign on & sign off for the news

[@benkleschinsky]

@@Dez_The_Fox In the description it says, computer generated images recorded frame-by-frame to film. So a computer would generate thousands of images, and the film would capture each drawn image. Scanimates were real time animation recorded to video. Not computer generated. 100% analog.

[@teachersouth4310]

冒頭の演出が無駄にホラーで好き

[@DanteTube]

The NBC ident was SO rare

[@jayden6538]

like the first two minutes feel like something from a completely unrelated show

[@RockinEnabled]

This is obviously done so to show the contrast between the natural and the artificial, between landscape and computer graphics. As an introduction.

[@belstar1128]

In 1970s media they where really slow to get to the point i noticed.

[@staspastukh2005]

Thanks!

[@retronostalgiafan8635]

Who made this music it’s so groovy love it

[@PedroManX]

That's amazing!!

[@ThePlankton5165]

This was created 27 years before I was born! And also, before two of my aunts were born. Also, a person born in 1860 (before Abraham Lincoln took US office) was still alive at the time this was created. The computer is not just good if you want to surf the Internet, it's also a good musical instrument!

[@whattheheck1000]

20 years before I was born, and also five years before one of my aunts was born, who is now a grandmother with a 7 year old granddaughter and 3 year old grandson. April 17, 2023 12:27 am

[@sir275handsome]

I love that there's people into stuff like this like me 😍...😎

[@I_Stern]

1972....wow. I was -2 when this was made. 😆

[@user-yx3mx3xr6n]

1974? Damn. You're 30 years older than me!

[@I_Stern]

@@user-yx3mx3xr6n A simple "Ok, Boomer" would have been enough but you had twist the knife while it's in the wound. Now i feel old. 😆

[@1leon000]

for my dad it's the same

[@belstar1128]

I was -23

[@1secondarysmile]

i hope a higher quality version of this surfaces someday

[@baxtardboy]

Anyone know the music at 5:32? It's trippy as hell and I could listen to it all day

[@felipefidelistobias1905]

Darude - Sandstorm

[@manuelthecolombianvyonder2544]

⁠@@felipefidelistobias1905Absolutely not! This is not Sandstorm by Darude! That song didn’t exist in 1972 (it was released in 1999)!

[@larrywhitney]

The instrumental of The white ship by Chad Michelle

[@manuelthecolombianvyonder2544]

​@@larrywhitneyThat is correct!

[@manuelthecolombianvyonder2544]

​@@felipefidelistobias1905You're wrong! The music that appears at 5:32 is a instrumental version of The White Ship by Chad Mitchell, released in 1969.

[@andresbravo2003]

2:51 IBM 3:33 CBS 3:44 abc 4:20 NBC

[@maritesbuster8209]

Amazing evolution of tv animation intro or ads.. not that noisy and you are like in another dimension heee ... Very retro also hehe

[@theothercd]

pretty sure this isn't supposed to be for tv

[@LanceCampeau]

50..... years ago.

[@yusufsesay6648]

4:39 is the best

[@gustavoceballos5327]

The last NET logo before PBS (1970-1972) uses Computer Animation

[@ParaSpikyHyperGoomba]

I absolutely adore this stuff, especially the synth sounds. Can anyone point me in the direction of other logos/idents with similar vibes?

[@tandy5811]

3:31 goes hard

[@redeye_]

2:50 why is the logo seen the 1946-1956 logo

[@klaus-veen]

the sounds/tunes are very good. people back then were much more creative

[@HarvestmanMan]

Apart from the amazing animation shown here, this is also a goldmine for early-70s synthesizer noodlings. Curious to know the name of the song in the intro sequence.

[@spannmona]

Someone could have removed the “ready” slides and removed any computer/scanimate references entirety of 0:23-2:28 and used that as a “meditation” sign off sequence.

[@echomediastudios]

That opening sequence was torture.

[@SantiagoRevecoLepeReborn]

Nice Scanimate.

[@TheKeenTribe]

4:10 is my favourite

[@maryexstroughtonaire4244]

I was 9 years old.

[@La_EO_322]

1963

[@dirtlevel]

Can anyone identify the music at 5:32? I’m sure it’s probably a library record or something. Thanks.

[@larrywhitney]

The instrumental of The white ship by Chad Michelle

[@coyote778]

Forgive me if I sound ignorant, but were all these computer animations done on a Scanimate?

[@tannerin]

i’d love to know the name of the music that starts around 5:30, assuming it’s a library piece?

[@RockinEnabled]

I got some early Pink Floyd vibes. And I know there were other bands with similar sound at the time, but I can barely name any. Would gladly learn about them.

[@2GWs]

I have found one similar song to that. Most likely, it's just an instrumental version of Chad Mitchell's "The White Ship".

[@baxtardboy]

@@2GWs Thanks mate. It's exactly this, Chads 1969 cover of H.P. Lovecraft's The White Ship (1967) from his album 'Chad'. I've hit a wall tracking down that groovy instrumental version though :(

[@epcotman32]

What's the name of the song at the beginning?

[@ahhahaha111]

37 years before i was born damn

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

5 years for me.

[@whattheheck1000]

In the middle, 20 years for me.

[@toma1610]

Which machine or cumputer was used? Brand and Model, release year, please?

[@red-trinity7390]

I like NBC one

[@sir275handsome]

🤔 It's like they use Magic something deeper than we can comprehend. Have to be a special person to create this 🌼so many decades ago! And yes I'm high🚀😁

[@nxx99]

Scanimate

[@juanahmed6528]

3:03 where you found

[@wrestlenet2406]

What happened to Computer Animation Industrial after the demo?

[@manuelthecolombianvyonder2544]

It permanently closed its doors! 😔

[@okiuto]

8:55日立のヒント商品を思い出した

[@La_EO_322]

何

[@REDEJB-bm7qm]

00:28 What's Video Images?

[@cortesdodanioficial]

3:33

[@danalmanza7728]

This is so 70s

[@cyberpowerjohn]

0:00 to 2:50 proves that analog horror existed in the 70s

[@gustavoceballos5327]

Antenne 2 did use CGI

[@Bunny_Elegans]

Que será el logo que salia que decía ready?

[@user-yx3mx3xr6n]

You mean 2:26?

[@La_EO_322]

Es el logotipo de CAI

[@kathleencapporrimo3255]

4:02

[@MylarDaleToloMDTTV]

3:17 Svanster Network 1 Weather Ident (now STV1weather)

[@rielovesbfb_aib_tpot]

50 yëārs øld

[@TowneCentreThundraTaurus_2016]

0:25

[@breannagrabowski2498]

Why is nature ever looked so wonderful, back in the day?

[@scrippswbparamounttelevisa]

ABC, CBS, NBC bumpers are still unused.

[@jennifermcbryde8887]

I hope three bumpers from the computer animation industry might air

[@UpinAndIpinRPGGirls1987YT]

Why Do This 60s & 70s & 80s Demo Reel

[@jmitchhopper5091]

Why not?

[@AlonsoH2K24]

0:07-0:23;Intro questions: 1.What music is this? 2.This is nothing compared to the other fonts. 3.From 0:02 to 0:05, It looks like a old film countdown from the 1960s. 4.Why is the music a ROCK?(It looks like that) There's millions to billions of ROCK songs. It's impossible to guess.(As in step 1.) Logo questions: 5.I seen a clip in the CAI logo that it says READY.Even another one. 6.I don't know how weird ABC,CBS and NBC logos are here. 7.In number 6,there's silent and B&W versions of ABC and NBC. 8.This video doesn't have an ending. 9.The last word or numbers in the last logo is "70".That might be from 1970. 10.The logo I'm watching now DOESN'T HAVE NAME. 11.The logo I'm watching now is very long. 12.In number 11,The logo I said is N°9. 13.In number 12,The logo is +3 minutes long.

[@newwinow]

the ABC CBS and NBC are unused

[@MylarDaleToloMDTTV]

2:50 IBM Films (now ontheFilm) 1973-1975 (Shellvkgft). Will Elton Lelo Android 2020 like this comment?

[@plushifoxed]

we stanimate scanimate

[@angrygrandpainfoundlincon4346]

Crosslands Hwy 4160 Is gone 1981 Hwy 4160 Canage 416 416 Canage business 416

[@luisreyes1963]

Looks like something from a creepy 70's Sci-Fi movie. 😰

[@SlapstickGenius23]

Wacky NBC logo.

[@hugues-ethanshamamba]

50 ans plus tard

[@wigwagstudios2474]

--cgi-- SCANIMATE doesn't look so good when it's filmed on 24fps with, obviously, film

[@CareggiStudio]

Now all basic filters in any hipster app.