Technicolor Video Moves to Camarillo, Bringing Jobs : Business: The country’s largest tape maker had been based in Newbury Park. Its plans include production of cutting-edge computer discs.

The country’s largest maker of videotapes announced Thursday that it has completed a move from Newbury Park to Camarillo that may ultimately set the stage for a major expansion and create up to 1,000 jobs in coming years.

Technicolor Video Services, which grew from making $50 million worth of tapes in 1981 to an estimated $500 million in tapes this year, has been slowly moving into its new Camarillo facility since the first of the year.

Company officials said the sprawling new Camarillo plant will allow TVS to work side by side with a new subsidiary that will manufacture thousands of computer discs that executives hope will be the wave of the future in the video industry.

Between 800 and 1,000 employees already work for TVS at the new plant, depending on production needs. Although officials said the total could ultimately double, fewer than 75 workers will be immediately hired by the new company, Technicolor Optical Media Services, said Chief Executive Officer Thomas Epley.

Technicolor Inc., the parent company to both firms, is gambling that the photo and video compact disc market will expand exponentially once computer CDs replace videotapes as the primary unit of information storage and retrieval.

If the computer disc market of the later 1990s and beyond even comes close to enjoying that kind of growth, the Camarillo manufacturing plant might need as many as 1,000 new employees, Epley said.

“Over a 10-year period, this could be as large as video is now,” Epley said. “It could have the same kind of growth profile.”

The compact discs, which will be molded to fit most personal computers, will contain audio and visual data that can be recalled by the press of a button, Epley said.

Epley envisions a world where routine household activity is based around the home computer, which also would function as a television and entertainment center, a reference library, a telephone and message bank, a resource index and other informational systems.

Users, the CEO added, will be able to research in minutes what now takes hours or even days to find out.

“You end up spending less time getting the information,” he said. “And by the time you’re done, you’ve got more time to bike or ski or do whatever you do in your spare time.”

Within two decades’ time, the compact disc-read only memory, compact disc-interactive, and other types of computer discs will have replaced traditional videotapes as the leading mechanism of providing information, Epley predicted.

“There are going to be all kinds of new applications,” he said, “from encyclopedic data, to live-action video and all kinds of games.”

Epley said the company, which purchased the Camarillo site for about $18 million, according to its 1992 annual report, would begin producing the computer CDs before June.

The announcement came at Thursday’s grand opening celebration of the new Camarillo site of Technicolor Video Services.

Scores of company officials and local dignitaries converged on the old Everest & Jennings medical equipment manufacturing plant on Mission Oaks Boulevard to formally welcome the multimedia conglomerate to Camarillo.

“We selected Camarillo based on the excellent location, cooperation of local, county and state officials and California’s acknowledged reputation as the entertainment capital,” said Emmet Murphy, president of Technicolor Video Services.

Many of the videotape producers have been working at the Camarillo site since January, while the move from Newbury Park was under way, employees in the cafeteria lounge said before the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

But company officials said the Newbury Park plant, which grew to eight separate buildings and up to 1,000 employees as the firm’s video production business blossomed, is completely closed as of this week.

The company also operates a major film processing plant in North Hollywood.

Technicolor Video Services has contracted with some of the largest entertainment companies in the world to produce videotapes of many of their hit movies.

Framed posters of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” Columbia’s “A League of Their Own” and Warner’s “Lethal Weapon 3” adorn the whitewashed, sterile walls of the main plant.

Inside the $35-million, 484,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, security officers closely monitor the employees, requiring workers to pat themselves down on their way out to make sure they have not stolen copies of what will become the latest videotaped movie releases.

One security guard said that if even one copy of the newly released “Aladdin” had found its way outside the plant, Technicolor and Disney stood to lose millions of dollars.

Technicolor Inc. was purchased in 1987 by Carlton Communications of London, a media giant with holdings in broadcast television, digital video production and imaging and other services.

Carlton officials say the conglomerate is the world’s largest theatrical film processor and video service provider, with locations in five sites around the globe.

Last year, the company reported pretax profits of $182 million, according to the firm’s annual report.