[amccollum]

My uncle (John Monsour) worked on this movie as the “24 Frame Computer Sync Engineer”. Because film cameras and CRT monitors have different frame rates, you needed to use specialized electronics to synchronize them with the camera frame rate otherwise you would have banding and weird moving artifacts on all the screens. It’s crazy to imagine needing to do this for all the screens visible in these shots.

Later monitor technologies like LCDs don’t have this issue because they don’t have the same moving electron beam illuminating each line of pixels, and it also became cheaper to just replace all the computer screens with CG, so eventually this specialized technical work wasn’t needed anymore, and my uncle ended up doing other things on the movies he worked on.

[kalleboo]

If anyone is curious about 24fps CRT displays on set, I loved this [2 hour] video on the subject https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicQUvSUbPM

[krabizzwainch]

I absolutely knew who made this video before clicking on the link too

[_def]

How was the syncing actually achieved?

[toast0]

You want to look into genlock[1]. Tldr, everything that needs to be synchronized (at least your video outputs and your camera; possibly lights and audio recording) needs to accept a clock input from a centralized clock to signal the start of vblank. Maybe one device can generate it, and the others follow.

It's conceptually easy, but I'm sure there's lots of technical issues. Some devices might need slightly earlier or later timing of their pulse. Many devices don't accept a genlock input from the factory, and might need to be modified or substitited. In this case, all the video screens were controlled from outside the room, so they would have picked genlockable devices.

There's a lot of details around the time the shutter is open and the time the image takes to draw... You would need to do a lot of test shots to find what works best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genlock

[fabiensanglard]

What a cool anecdote. I have added it to the article!