To the rescue: Electrical engineering students reenergize Newsfilm Library

By Chris Horn

Did you hear the one about the film librarian who bumped into an electrical engineer in a coffee shop?

Wait, it's not a joke. Greg Wilsbacher, director of Carolina's Newsfilm Library, had a major electrical problem and remembered that Antonello Monti, a regular at the Immaculate Consumption on South Main Street, was a University electrical engineering professor.

Turns out the Newsfilm Library's circa-1970 film editing/viewing machine had overheated and died, and prospects for getting the machine fixed were bleak.

"These old machines are great for our purposes of viewing 16mm film--it's safer than running the film through an upright projection unit--but this particular model was notorious for the power board overheating, and that's what happened to ours," Wilsbacher said. "You can't replace the boards with certified parts; all you can do is buy a similar used machine and hope it will last a while longer."

The only certified technician in the country who works on the German-engineered Steenbeck film machines lives in Burbank; bringing him here would cost thousands of dollars.

Monti thought the film machine could be fixed without the expert, and he assigned two graduate students to the task.

"They had to figure out a way to replace the old-fashioned, bulky diodes with modern components, and they had to fit the new parts in the old compartment," said Monti, who joined the College of Engineering and Computing faculty in 2000. "So it was an interesting challenge for the students."

The students, Andrea Benigni and Ugo Ghisla, re-engineered the film editing machine's power supply, tweaked its heat-dissipating capacity, and installed the new circuitry when the printed circuit board they designed arrived from a California factory.

"The students were excited when we went to the film library studio and plugged in the machine and saw it work," Monti said, adding that the students, from Italy, hope to return to Carolina for doctoral degrees.

"That's what I like about this University," Monti said. "We have a whole range of disciplines that can interact with one another. If there was no engineering college here, that machine might still be broken, and my students wouldn't have had the opportunity to put their engineering skills to work on a fun project like this."

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