BBC shows us how awesome CGI was in 1982

[Reefa]

The BBC wants to take you back to the future. No, not the one with Marty and Doc Brown — our own future, from 33 years ago.

Welcome to the world of cutting edge CGI in 1982! The revolutionary effects you’re about to see in the Beeb’s video were made possible by the Quantel DVM-8000: the Digital Video Mirage.

The Mirage was a fully-programmable machine. A Hewlett-Packard computer took care of the processing, and new effects could be scripted in Pascal. It wasn’t exactly an easy process, though, so Mirage operators primarily relied on the built-in effects to jazz up their productions.

It was a beast of a machine — weighing nearly 900 pounds — with a ravenous appetite. It could consume a staggering 4 kilowatts of electricity. The massive beige brick presenter Peter Macann is holding is the control box for the Mirage.

Punch a button, and you could turn the BBC’s globe logo from a flat, static image into a twirling sphere. You could also warp it into a tubular shape, or turn it into a “stupid square,” like the physical one Macann holds up at the start of the show.

It’s an amazing glimpse at what we used to think was cutting edge. We take effects like this for granted today. Heck, our phones are capable of doing things a hundred times more complex than what the DVM-8000 could pull off, and they don’t need anywhere near 4 kilowatts to make it happen.

In 30 more years, the BBC will probably share a new video that shows us just how quaint our smartphones have become. I can’t wait to see that one.

http://www.geek.com/news/bbc-shows-us-how-awesome-cgi-was-in-1982-1616939/