Why Punches and Streamers?
Back in the old days of film music, a clever but work-intensive method for synchronizing music to picture was invented. The music editor would find certain key musical points in a cue, and use a system of visual cues called streamers and punches to show the conductor when those points occurred. Streamers were made by marking a long diagonal line across a copy of the film with a grease pencil (or scratching off the emulsion), ending at the frame that was to be synchronized; this gave the appearance of an almost-vertical line streaming across the screen when the film was played back. Punches were achieved by punching a hole in the center of a frame, and a flutter punch effect was possible by punching every other frame. Eventually the Iron Age dawned, bringing with it the advent of analog video technology. This provided for a new way of displaying streamers and punches, using specialized hardware triggered by MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) data from a sequencer. This was a tr
