Here is a closeup of the CRT section of one bay in the final version. If you look carefully, you can make out the subscreen CRT. Rather than the awkward protruding camera like Scanimate had, I chose to fold up the whole optical path using front-surface mirrors. The whole thing fit into a rack-mounted slide system, and plans were to introduce filtration mid-path at some later point. The CRT was scanned by a COHU camera, which turned out to be a very poor performer. Later plans were to take an old studio camera and split the individual red, green, and blue electronics out to allow registered RGB signals to be animated. Alas, advances in digital framebuffer technology just did a better job of storing an image than the face of a CRT. Also, as it turned out, our high-resolution CRT was TOO high-res! The Scanimate had used that big fat point to fill in a lot of space between scan lines.

This was the VersEFX control console, manned here by Jim Ryan, the project software engineer. The bay came out very much like the original artists rendering above. Unfortunately, despite having shifted all costs over to the SFP, Image West ran into financial difficulties, and the only system built was shipped to France. Peter Koczera claims he went over and that the system was working and they did some interesting things with it, but it was never completed, partly because the design goals were moving targets throughout its development. I learned a lot about managing projects of this size, most specifically how fast technology can change, often before a big design can be completed. It also became apparent how quickly a small company can be swamped trying to do R&D on this kind of level.