Dave Tweed wrote:
> Close enough. I'll give you partial credit. I was working at Apollo at
> the time, and my own desktop machine participated in the effort.
>
> "Quest: A Long Ray's Journey Into Light" was actually the *second* such
> movie produced by the network at Apollo. The first was called "Fair
> Play" and was about 1:45 of actual ray-traced animation (the opening
> and closing credits add to the length of the overall recording).
> "Quest" is actually slightly over 2 minutes long, and the credits say
> that it was accomplished in 7 weeks of elapsed time, using 52,000 hours
> of CPU time. In other words, the 108 machines spent an average of about
> 10 hours each day on the project.

I'm sorry Dave, but you're confusing Quest and Fair Play.  Quest was
definitely first, and was produced before I joined Apollo.  Fair Play was
being planned when I joined Apollo in 1986, and I helped a little and my
workstation also contributed to the rendering.  If you can somehow get hold
of a copy or Fair Play, you will see my name on the credits.  I think I was
called "Waiter #1" or something like that as a joke.  I mainly kept the
finnicky Dunn camera properly adjusted, and I also contributed a little to
the rendering software.

The original recording of the Fair Play pictures was on 16mm movie film, not
video as many believe.  The Dunn camera was a device for recording computer
images onto film.  It had a black and white CRT with with camera pointed at
it and a rotation filter wheel in between.  The computer would display the
red image channel, the red filter would be rotated into place, the film
exposed, then the same for the green and blue channels.  This process took
several seconds per frame.

Bonus challenge: Why wasn't a color CRT used without a filter wheel?


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