Videotape Is Vanishing From Hollywood Set

According to Hollywood lore, comedian-director Jerry Lewis first brought videotape to movie sets in the mid-1960s--so he could watch himself as soon as he finished performing a scene. The idea caught on. Soon nearly every TV, movie and commercial director was using what became known as “video assist” to play back instantly what they shoot on film.

But videotape on movie sets is rapidly going the way of the hand-cranked camera. It’s quickly being replaced by new high-tech recording systems that stores digital video streams on hard drives.

The exploding demand for the new method has three Southland firms struggling to fill orders. The original player in video assist, Doremi Labs Inc. of Los Angeles, is competing with two agile upstarts: Cinelogic Co. of Burbank and Rightmer Video Inc. of Sun Valley--the latter launched barely a year ago by a musician working out of his house.

It’s yet another example of Hollywood’s reliance on a cottage industry of small suppliers--and of how clever entrepreneurs can carve themselves a niche in a market always hungry for new products.

The tale of the tape is simply that it’s being replaced by digital hard-drive technology. Two non-tape systems, made by Sunnyvale-based TiVo Inc. and Replay Networks Inc. of Mountain View, hit the home-entertainment market earlier this year. Those two firms hope their products--the TiVo and ReplayTV--will eventually elbow videocassette recorders out of living rooms.

But digital recorders have been on Hollywood sets since 1995, when Doremi (as in the first three tones of the diatonic musical scale) ushered in the post-tape era of video assist. The company’s V-1M, as it’s now called, is a model of simplicity--if not always performance.

“It has a VCR-type format that’s really easy to learn,” said Bob Schmidt, owner of On Tap Video of Redondo Beach. “I’ll meet you on the set and have you editing in about 10 minutes.”

Priced from $4,000, the Doremi video-assist recorders have enjoyed widespread popularity.

“There are 3,000 in use around the world,” says Camille Rizko, Doremi’s managing director. “We usually sell about 100 a month, but we’ve got orders for 300 in December. A lot of buyers want them for Y2K 1/8productions 3/8.”

The Doremi sold like hot cakes, but video-assist operators soon began demanding more performance than the Doremi could deliver. For instance, they need such features as a quick, easy and reliable way to keep track of shots--which run into the hundreds in a multi-week project--plus the capability to export edits directly to a post-production program, says Chris Blakely, co-owner of Play It Again Video Assist of Santa Monica.

Some operators customized their Doremis with accessories such as printers that spit out yards of time records on narrow paper upon which the operators scribble production notes.

Enter video-assist operator Samuel Cherroff, who designed a system that, among other things, can keep an exhaustive log of scenes--shown thumb-nailed on a monitor--and a program that makes shots easy to retrieve and replay--even spliced together in a form of rough editing. He enlisted a European computer programmer and, just over 2 1/2 years ago, introduced the Cinecorder. Starting at $6,500, it quickly drew a loyal following.

“It’s the best computerized system out there,” says Stephanie Powell, president of Video Assist Systems Inc. of North Hollywood. “It records sequentially, but you can jump to any take at any time, review it for the director, change the speeds, do a lot of manipulation you aren’t allowed to do in the analog world.”

“We plan to buy five or six more 1/8Cinecorders 3/8 in the next year or so,” Powell said.

“It seems nobody wants to use tape anymore,” says Cherroff, who was at the elbow of cinematographer Bill Pope (“Matrix,” “Clueless”) one day this month on location for a golf club commercial in Hancock Park.

A one-time technical and service specialist for the movie camera maker Panavision Inc., Cherroff keeps busy updating the Cinecorder. The latest touch was encasing it in a rugged metal shipping case to match those in which other camera and grip equipment is customarily hauled to sets.

With more than 50 sales of his product, Cherroff seemed to have a clear shot at No. 2 in the market until last May, when former rock musician Jerry Rightmer introduced Digital Lightning.

“Up to now, being on ‘American Bandstand’ was the highlight of my life,” said Rightmer, once a bassist with the Sanford/Townsend Band, whose song “Smoke From a Distant Fire” climbed to No. 9 on the pop charts in 1977.

Rightmer recalls moving from the sound studio to video-assist jobs in the early ‘80s. He began tinkering with a hard-drive recorder a year or so ago, and enlisted software engineer Kenneth Yeast, president of We Do Windows Inc. of Redwood Valley. They teamed up to create Digital Lightning with its proprietary StormVision software, which they claim is even faster and more user-friendly than Cinelogic’s system.

Digital Lightning has its own fan base, led by Hill Production Service Inc. of North Hollywood, the oldest video-assist specialty house in town. Company President Lindsay Hill says he started in the field on the 1974 disaster epic “The Towering Inferno.”

“There’s a real need for computerized systems,” Hill says. “All the directors want to see 1/8their work 3/8 cut together right now.”

Buyers have snapped up 30 Digital Lightnings and new orders are rolling in.

“The potential market for this is huge,” said Yeast, who is an investor in Rightmer Video and stays busy fielding technical support calls--providing service that even Cherroff admits is a plus for his upstart competitor.

Cherroff and Rightmer said they are hoping that customers who have bought Doremis will want to switch to their product. Rightmer said he has customers in small markets whom he suspects are using his product for final editing--which would position the Digital Lightning as a low-ball competitor against Avid Technology’s sophisticated editing system.

For movie makers, the modest cost of video assist pays off in faster production.

“It’s beyond a luxury; it’s really a necessity to have that video-assist person on board,” said Bart Brown, co-producer of Universal’s “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.”

Brown said video assist was budgeted for about $50,000 over about three months of shooting--which he said translates to about $30 to $40 per hour.

And though the Digital Age is here, video-assist specialists haven’t yet discarded all their old equipment, says Hill at Hill Production Service.

“There are still guys who like to use tape,” Hill said. “They don’t want to see any edits; they don’t want any of that fast stuff. They just want to see the last scene played back.”