Jordan Gzesh

Myself and a friend bid on several lots and eventually won a single lot from Kerner. We are in Los Angeles and drove up to San Rafael to pick up our loot and were shocked and awed to find that Kerner was in fact the origin of ILM. Furthermore, much of the gear we have gotten was certainly used on many cinema classics to have come out of ILM, but who knows exactly which ones. The most exciting part, undoubtedly, was talking with other people who were claiming the respective lots they had won themselves. It turned out that a lot of them were ILM veterans who were sad to see the liquidation and wanted to buy up a lot of the gear they used to work with. These guys were incredibly humble and had amazing stories dating back to the production of the original Star Wars through all sorts of awesome movies. Not only were the stories amazing, but so were the seemingly endless ingenious proprietary construction and configuration of electronics and film equipment to pioneer the effects. With these guys, there was no impossible. We started rolling video on our phones of Marty, one of the main engineers for 30 years, talking about some of the gear we got and how it was used. Really amazing experience.

Things may have changed and I may not be able to offer total insight, but one piece of interesting information that I learned a little while back is that the waveform and vectorscopes built into color and final cut are actually sampling a single interlaced field of information from the source. Take this into consideration when questioning the reliability of the scopes.