Animated Battle

Television wouldn’t be the same without motion-control machines, devices that combine old-fashioned optics with high technology to bring still photographs to life on the small screen.

Now, with an upstart Hollywood company selling its device for half the price of the well-entrenched leader in the field, business hasn’t been the same in the field of motion-control machines.

In TV production parlance, motion control refers to the process of transferring still images to videotape, while imparting a simple but effective animation in the form of pans and zooms.

It’s not a big-ticket item, and it won’t make its manufacturers rich. But the competition in the motion-control business illustrates how the entertainment landscape is populated with small-business people trying to fill the needs of a fast-changing industry.

Motion control is commonly used in commercials, on reality programs--”Unsolved Mysteries” uses it to show old newspaper clippings and photos of missing people--and in the steadily growing TV documentary segment. That genre is full of producers who were strongly influenced by director Ken Burns’ stirring use of old photographs in the immensely popular miniseries “Civil War” and “Baseball.”

Producer David Grubin, for one, used motion control extensively in his recent biography of Harry Truman for PBS’ “The American Experience.” Grubin points to one gripping scene dramatizing marital tensions bedeviling the 33rd president. Zeroing in on a photo taken just after Truman’s 1944 vice presidential nomination, Grubin opens with a tight close-up of the nominee, then zooms out and pans to show Bess Truman sitting nearby, wearing an expression of utter woe.

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“As soon as you see her face, you can see what she’s thinking. She just didn’t want this man to be president,” Grubin said.

That shot was captured on an MPI Manipulator, a hulking piece of equipment that resembles a room-sized overhead projector with studio lights for wings. Manufactured just outside Nashville by Motion Products International Inc., the Manipulator is the workhorse of the industry, a high-end model that sells for $59,500.

But $29,500 will buy a fully equipped Video Imager Motion Control Workstation, introduced two years ago by Video Robotics Inc. of Hollywood, a company formed by independent producer Richard Lesser and Bulgarian-immigrant engineer Stefan Stanev. The product’s price advantage is already expanding the market.

Manipulators are found almost exclusively in larger TV studios and post-production houses such as HMA Digital Post-Production Inc. of Burbank, one of a dozen or so such businesses in and around Hollywood.

“The great thing about this is you can take a boxful of old photographs and slides and pretty much build yourself a program out of them,” said HMA co-owner Bryan Heath, whose customers book the Manipulator about 12 hours a day, paying up to $225 an hour.

Skilled operators can animate 15 to 20 images an hour on the machine, a far cry from motion-control sessions as recently as in the mid-1980s when, Grubin recalls, “I put the pictures up on the wall, took my camera on a tripod and shot them on film.”

That began to change in 1986, when Wayne Smith, who had been an animator on Hanna-Barbera cartoons, started tinkering with an old film animation stand. “Nobody had done the motion-control thing quite proper,” Smith said. “So I tackled it, since I had a special-effects and video background.”

Soon Smith obtained a patent for the Manipulator, a heavy stand with a movable table-like photo mount--it’s the picture that moves, not the camera--and a sturdy tower on which the camera travels vertically, aimed downward. Later he became known as the inventor of the Steadi-Film movie-to-videotape transfer system, which won the 1989 Emmy for engineering achievement.

The trick to motion control is achieving smooth, real-time movement with high-precision transport mechanisms powered by extremely sensitive computer-controlled electric motors.

The bugaboo is vibration, which can ruin a shot under high magnification. Motion-control taping is often done from 35-millimeter slides, which means that what appears to be a long, slow pan across an entire frame is actually done with the camera focused on a quarter-inch square of slide moving just 1 1/4 inches.

The Manipulator has proven particularly adept at that. Demands for ever-greater technical capability have driven the Manipulator’s price from $19,500 at roll-out to the current $59,500, Smith said.

Smith entered the field in 1987 in competition with an established Los Angeles-area firm, Interactive Motion Control. But some producers said they considered IMC’s machine overpriced, and the firm went out of business about five years ago, said Brian McKernan, editor in chief of Videography magazine.

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With the field to itself until recently, MPI has sold at least 118 Manipulators, plus one unit on order, Smith said. His buyers are primarily broadcasting companies, including CNN, MSNBC, ABC and NHK Tokyo, and high-end post-production studios.

Video Robotics’ Lesser said he first encountered motion control in the mid-1980s when he started in the video production business.

“I was doing wedding videos, and always opened them with the bride and groom’s baby pictures,” Lesser said. These he captured on tape as Grubin did, by pinning them to the office wall. When Lesser got clients with larger budgets who expected more professional-looking results, he found himself renting time on IMC machines--and musing about building a cheaper machine that he could sell to other producers.

In 1991 he met Stanev, a videocassette repairman who had just immigrated from Bulgaria, where he had been an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and an expert in robotic welding with a dream of making his fortune in America.

“The Hollywood sign was a magnet for me,” Stanev said.

Lesser pitched Stanev his idea for making a motion control machine. While Stanev liked the concept, the pair had no capital, so Stanev had to barter for time in a precision machine shop.

After four years of making and refining prototypes, he produced a working model. Lesser paid Stanev $10,000 for it, forming the basis of their partnership: Stanev builds the machines and Lesser provides marketing and sales services. They sold their first machine about two years ago.

The Video Imager is smaller than the Manipulator, with a footprint about the size of a copy machine, yet it performs all the necessary pans and zooms, Lesser said. McKernan gave it a positive review in Videography magazine.

“I think you can get a lot with what Lesser’s got,” McKernan said.

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After a slow start, sales have picked up sharply in the last year, and now total 16 units, with four on order. The price advantage has won customers who may have perceived the Manipulator as being out of their price range.

San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric Co. bought a Video Imager to produce in-house videos. Video editor Eric Williamson took one to Dallas-Fort Worth, where he does a brisk $200-an-hour business renting out time on what he said is the only motion-control machine in the nation’s No. 8 media market.

“One of my clients is an independent producer who used to go to Nashville” to rent a motion-control machine, Williamson said.

Video Robotics also landed a major broadcaster, New York-based USA Network Inc., the cable TV concern.

“With a $25,000 piece of gear, we can emulate what a $250,000 piece of gear can do,” said Eileen Ferrara, USA Network’s director of engineering.

Smith thinks that Video Robotics is filling the lower-end market, but Lesser said he is going head-to-head against the Manipulator.

Ultimately, advances in computerized digital editing--the current leader is Avid Technologies Inc.--may force both the Video Imager and the Manipulator into extinction. But digital systems are still too slow to compete with old-fashioned optics.

Ironically, the Imager and Manipulator earn only scorn from filmmaker Burns. The “Civil War” producer films pan shots by hand or has an animation studio shoot zooms a frame at a time.

Of video motion-control technology, he said, “I don’t do any of that stuff. I find it abhorrent.”