Quote Originally Posted by odd one View Post
Lots of fancy software out there nowadays to make sure the "models" are correct, but problems still happened now and then. We were fortunate that most things were done in house, lenses and metals. Every thing IR, nothing visible. Even having it all in house, errors could set things back weeks if not months. Mostly govt. contracts, they do not like delays.
The lens met up with the spec perfectly, just that the studio "brains" gave the wrong focal length to the lens guy. The mechanical engineer had documented it all just fine, there was no direct communication between us engineers and parts vendors. Everything had to go through the studio. High security, lots of $$$ if the camera came out on schedule. Miss NAB and you have a year before the next one and by then the industry has changed again.

Had the same sort of issue working on a new high end color laser printer. We got the prototype built but headquarters wouldn't give us the encryption key to talk to the existing hardware. I was working in the Advanced R&D office in the USA, but that was the bad part... key doesn't leave Asia.