At January's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, brand-new HDTV sets were everywhere, fed by a continuous stream of high-deÞnition television programming from the three big names in high deÞnition: CBS, PBS, and ... Rebo Studio. With its 125 hours of long-form HD programming, Rebo Studio – a 12-person production house in Manhattan founded by Barry Rebo – is ostensibly the biggest producer of HD programming in the US, from commercials and music videos to Wild Life Adventures for Turner Original Programming and the documentary A Passage to Vietnam.
Rebo and his loyal cadre of HD enthusiasts have been producing HDTV programming since 1986, at a time when most Americans hadn't even heard of NTSC, the current broadcast standard. But Rebo has been ahead of the curve his entire video career, accumulating what he calls "a healthy record of firsts," starting with dropping out of Stanford University's graduate film school and flying to Japan to buy the first-ever portable color video equipment. He launched Rebo Associates in 1975, dedicated to "film-style" video storytelling.
Like many a video storyteller, Rebo had the bug to tell stories in celluloid. So, in 1986, when he saw the astonishing imagery of an HDTV program transferred to 35-mm film, he thought it so "revolutionary" that he plunked down US$1.5 million for the first Sony HD camera and editing packages sold in the US.
"I've never wavered from my belief that high-definition TV will be a big part of the imaging industry," says Rebo. "I just didn't foresee the politics and dramatic changes in technology."
Those technopolitical debates stalled HDTV for nearly 10 years – from 1987 to 1996 – but Rebo kept the faith through those difficult, often lean times. In fact, it was a productive period at Rebo Studio. His technical gurus Barry Minnerly and Abby Levine created ReStore, which enables any Macintosh imaging software to run in HD, while his studio kept churning out HDTV programs, some of which – like Fool's Fire, a puppet fantasy-drama by Julie Taymor made for the late PBS showcase "American Playhouse" – garnered critical acclaim.
With the FCC mandate for TV networks to broadcast HDTV starting this year, Rebo at last can stop pushing that rock up the hill and look forward to getting down to the business of producing HDTV programming and equipment.
"Everybody's always saying I'm a pioneer," he remarks. "Our new slogan is 'Once a pioneer, today the expert.'"
