Y-R-B

The result of spending late nights alone in edit bays: I’ve formed a relationship with video signals, although it’s far from being the engineering geek-out experience I would expect. On the contrary, I’m coming to know analog video as something organic. After all, aren’t pixels of video just another manipulation of electricity? Like the organic human, electricity moves constantly until it reaches its final resting place in the ground.

When input to an Avid break-out box, videotape decks tend to display different signal effects on an NTSC monitor, depending on their various connections — component, composite, serial digital interface, etc. The deck needn’t be playing a tape, just turned on with the Avid expecting to capture a signal. What results appears to be a sort of distortion or interference, like a relative of the white noise/snow of older TV sets. Various patterns and colors streak randomly along the screen as a visual representation of a pure electronic current.

The most obvious and unique and beautiful example I’ve found so far is the component video signal, commonly denoted as “Y-R-B,” for each of the three cables that distill the luminance and chrominance components into a picture. As a raw input into the Avid, the Y-R-B signal generates a pattern that onscreen travels left to right on a steady and infinite parade. The colors are primarily red and green on black (though with one deck I’ve also seen pinkish-white) and morph and move and change of their own will. The component signal is alive.

Like all forms of life, it’s probable that this phenomenon can be explained with numbers and equations and other lifeless things. Spare me.

The component signal’s free will is destroyed by the insertion of a videotape, that plastic despot who takes over with the magnetism of pre-recorded doctrine. Manmade servos and spools and video frames and fields intervene to produce the illusion of our life — faces, dogs, trees, etc. However, once that tape is stopped and ejected, the signal is slowly resurrected, resuming its journey. A natural state regained with the ironic help of human intervention. My relationship to video has become as some sort of reluctant god. One who has begun to sympathize with the electricity that we’ve perverted in our own image.

If the tape is ejected while still rolling, the coup is more violent. The video image halts and falls into a state of steady decay, a sort of electronic entropy. As if a dam broke, and photorealism were swept away as the component river recommences its rightward flow off screen.

Where it leads, I don’t know.

(A Superhero Named) Tony

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Y-R-B

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