It Began with Broadcasting
The story begins in Atlanta, in 1968. Price started out there as a broadcasting engineer and was involved in filming and photography as well as production. "At that time production work was often done with TV equipment," he says. "So I learned a lot. Broadcast technology was used for news and commercials. The more involved in production I got, the more interested I became."

In 1970 he and a partner raised the money to purchase a Philips PCP 90 video camera. This was the first battery-operated portable color TV camera. During that first year there were only six of them in the world. "Looking back now, I would have to say this marked the beginning of two themes in my professional life: portability and color."

The duo quickly established a successful business, contracting their services to NBC and ABC shooting news footage. Using video, instead of 16 mm film, gave Price and his partner a distinct advantage. At the time film still had to be physically delivered to the news station by 3:00 pm in order to be ready for the 6 o'clock news. Aside from developing and editing it, there was the matter of converting the film with a telecine machine into a video signal for broadcasting. Not only was Price able to deliver material which could be used immediately, he could even provide a live feed. That capability took him to some pretty interesting places, including the Munich Olympics and the My Lai massacre trial of Lieutenant Calley at Fort Benning.

The pair evolved into a micro production unit. "We were doing single camera production, and we shot video as if we were shooting film. We did editing by hand, actually splicing the videotape. That was my introduction to postproduction work."

In the early 70's reproducing color accurately for television presented challenges. Finished film prints, such as commercials, were copied and sent around to the broadcasters where they were converted with telecine machines. "The same shots looked totally different on different TV stations," laughs Price. This is why scene-to-scene color-correction for telecine machines was necessary. In fact, this is the origin of video postproduction."