The birth of a closed-circuit network

it’s impossible to guess how many Canadian parents-to-be have squirmed their way through neanderthal audio-visual presentations in the little rooms that double as prenatal instruction classes. But it’s because of one such class, wherein Marvin Berns and Kathy Kastner saw a poor quality 16mm film in 1985, that the pair started a video production business called Markay Enterprises. They have now launched The Parent Channel – with all aspects of the broadcast-quality material produced via Macintosh computers and compatible peripherals.

While The Parent Channel, billed by Kastner and Berns as ‘Canada’s first Macintosh-based closed-circuit television network,’ is not an on-air commodity at present, Berns says the material used on the channel is all broadcast-quality, adding his production methods could be used by anyone creating shows for broadcast.

Automated play-off

system

Berns, whose background is in sound mixing and who worked on several Nelvana cartoon series and features and on Canadian Sesame Street, describes the channel as ‘an automated play-off system’ supplying patient/baby information in maternity wards on a pilot project basis in three hospitals, two in Toronto and one in Kitchener, Ont. It features six hours of programming which loops to run day and night, at no cost to patients or hospitals.

The material, Berns says, plays ‘off an array of programmable laser discs’ across the hospitals’ closed-circuit system. ‘What they’re watching,’ he adds, ‘is actually compressed digital video…from Data Translation’s Media 100 system.’

Markay served as an original beta test site for Media 100, whose users work in a non-linear, random-access digital on-line environment to digitize analog video and audio, edit material and output the finished program to videotape or disc.

Parenting videos

Berns adds that about half the visuals used in the six hours of Parent Channel programming was drawn from material included in a series of parenting videos called Mom’s The Word, developed previously by Markay Enterprises.

But the Media 100 system, which Berns runs on a Macintosh Quadra 840A-V, is far from the only component required to produce the programming for the pilot project. He also relied heavily on ‘the videographics capabilities of the Video Explorer from Intelligent Resources.’ He defines the Explorer as a multi-card NuBus system ‘that allows you to manipulate, in real time, broadcast video through the cards so you can mix any live camera signal, rgb and component Betacam output. No transcoding is needed. It provides all the post-production functions of any component on-line suite – it does switching, keying, overlaying, rotoscoping and Ultimatte functions, combined with the graphics capabilities standard on the Macintosh. So the Explorer system gives that capability to desktop systems, and that’s never happened before.’

Berns says these technologies allowed him to go beyond the mixing of live action and graphics. ‘In The Parent Channel, the whole identity…is composed of animated graphics solely created on the Mac. I used COSA After Effects, which is like a dve (digital video effects) in a software package. I created commercials for companies like Procter and Gamble and Shopper’s Drug Mart as well as logos, channel ids and bumpers. I created them in cosa, Premiere, Adobe Photoshop and Infinity-D – a 3D modeling package – and we output them through Pixar’s rendering system on a network of three Macintosh Quadras.

‘We dump those pictures out a frame at a time through the Explorer to a component laser recorder (the type used by high-end animators). I then use that laser disc and the program material off Betacam sp as my video sources going directly into the Media 100. I cut it into the program material. And that’s exactly what fills up the six hours of programming that fills up our show.’

Berns says it took him a month to design, render and dump all logos, commercials and programs. Once done, he says it took him less than two days to package, from off-line through on-line, the six hours’ worth of programming. He adds a caveat to people interested in trying to achieve similar results: he says he spent about as much on hard-drive storage space for all of this work as he spent on the Media 100 system itself! (The Media 100 comes in at about $16,250.)

Kastner says she and Berns hope that after an assessment of the pilot project is completed, the channel can be launched in more Ontario hospitals next spring and go cross-Canada in 1996.