Diafade Business Communications | 20+ Years Experience


	Diafade was founded by John Sandell in 1978 - on 19 January to be precise - to produce audio visual equipment, and to make AV programmes for clients. Then, AV meant slide/tape dissolve systems, popular at the time with many serious amateur photographers and with companies for training and sales programmes. John was (and is) a professional engineer and serious amateur photographer, and this seemed a natural progression from Defence and Industrial Control systems he'd been working on. Well, sort of!		AV Equipment AV Programmes Newsletters Brochure Design Website Design
	There were three or four dissolve units on the market at the time, all of them 'crossfade' units. What was different about the Diafade 2, as we christened our new baby, was that the brightness of the two lamps could be controlled independently by two sliders... [Diafade Audio Visual: the full story] It wasn't long before we introduced Diafade 4 - a truly unique unit providing independent control of up to four projectors, and the basis of the product range for the next few years. With four projectors on one screen, images could be changed very rapidly to create special effects.
	Diafade 4 made its debut at AV79 - then the audio visual industry's annual exhibition at the Wembley Conference Centre in London - and we were pleased to be there alongside the 'big boys' with their multi-vision systems based on the early personal computers like the Apple II. In response to customer demand we developed special controllers for the Diafade 4, including the 'Magic Box', which enabled all manner of looping and flashing effects to be recorded, and the 'Dolphin' programmer which provided incredibly smooth and repeatable push-button dissolves... [more] By the mid-1980s the slide/tape equipment business was shrinking rapidly. The amateur market was largely saturated; corporate users were moving to video and the early computer graphics. There's still a market today, but it's much smaller and even more specialised, and sadly we're not part of it.

	During the 1980s, in parallel with design and production of AV equipment, we were also producing slide/tape programmes for technical companies such as Oxford Medical Systems, Oxford Automation, Newport Components and RHM Computing. A series of programmes - aimed at school leavers and great fun to make - was produced for a Further Education college. Some of these programmes were one-projector equipment training sequences, intended for distribution to end users. Many were created using 4 projectors and transferred to video for ease of presentation in the field, a highly cost-effective way of making a 'video'. In terms of visual effects they were fairly straightforward and didn't normally need the level of control offered by the Diafade 4 (generally appreciated more by creative amateurs). What all the programmes did need, as well as good photography, was a good script - simplifying complex ideas, comfortable for the professional voice artiste, conveying the message clearly. On more than one occasion, when 'the voice' offered compliments, we knew we had it about right! The clients were happy too. One programme was very different (and perhaps illustrates our continuing willingness to pick up 'awkward' and messy projects). An electrical component manufacturer wanted an exhibition stand programme with movement but no dissolves, which they considered too smooth. There would be background music but no voiceover. Eventually we proposed 10 individual slide projectors arranged in a 5x2 matrix, changing their slides in various sequences across the full screen, and making use of the 1.5 second slide changes to create a variety of visual effects. The small (2' x 2') projection areas ensured a bright image, though the restrictions of the exhibition stand meant using wide-angle (35mm) projection lenses. [Our screen format probably predates the common use of videowalls to achieve big displays]. To complete the package we commissioned 5 minutes of specially composed music to accompany the 800 slide programme, which ran continuously and made its debut at the Salon des Composants in Paris in 1982.

	Always keen to do several types of work at the same time, our script-writing was complemented by technical writing and editing. In those days - most of the 1980s - our 'technical writing' ranged from MIL-STD detailed hardware descriptions to concise but technically lightweight product press releases. We're still writing today, though the work is normally targetted more at brochures and websites... In 1984 we wrote the first of what turned out to be 50 issues, between then and 1992, of Motorola Semiconductor's newsletter 'Semiconductor News'. It was the beginning of our long and happy association with Motorola. Before the end of the 1980s we were laying out each newsletter and producing camera-ready artwork, as well as writing the copy. To be continued...