Del Favero’s statement was somewhat misleading. The engineering teams were trying to iron out any significant bugs in the 600 before an NAB showing, knowing that the 200 would not make the trade show.
CBS editor Howard Smith continued to trial the editing system and give the development team valuable ‘real-world’ feedback. Smith started as an editor at the Hal Roach Studios in 1935 on the "Our Gang" films for Laurel and Hardy. He continued a lengthy feature film editing career, editing films like "Breakfast at Tiffany's" then moved to CBS to cut television shows like "Gunsmoke", "Get Smart" and "Gilligan's Island".
A third-party industrial design company had completed the editing console to house the system. When the first mockup of the console was delivered there was an immediate reaction. Jerry Youngstrom recalls:
Everything about it was wrong. The slope of the desk was wrong, the slope of the monitors to the desk was wrong. It was beautiful to look at but anyone who sat at it hated it! The editors who visited from CBS, the Memorex sales people. Everyone.
Youngstrom and Bargen called Ken Ferrin to help build a new console. Bargen recalls:
Jerry Youngstrom decided that the fastest way to work out the human engineering of the new editing console was to build a full-size mockup. I went over to his house one weekend and helped him build it out of plywood in his garage and on his driveway. It had adjustable tilt and height of the desk surface, monitors, etc. and was designed on the fly.
Youngstrom recalls:
After we finished up, we hauled it the 10 miles back to CMX. Over the next few weeks the very same editors from CBS who had disliked the original console sat at the new plywood monstrosity that now housed a functional CMX 600 prototype system. Using the increments that adjusted the desk and monitors we soon had all the parameters for the industrial designers to make a new console that everyone liked to look at and use.
Bargen continues:
The new editing console won a national industrial design award that year. The names of the controls on the screens and the logic of the operations were based on conversations with film editors and observation of them cutting film. The goal was to make it as easy as possible for a film editor to operate the new system.
By March of 1971, the 600 was functional, an impressive achievement for taking a new concept to working hardware in 10 months.
CMX hired a second programmer, Steve Foreman.
Adams recalls:
Steve proved to be a very competent programmer.He quickly picked up on my design philosophy for the two systems--including no 4 byte instructions <grin>. Steve accompanied me to CBS on a number of trips to get an understanding of how things worked in the field.
Steve Foreman recalls:
My first programming task in March 1971, was on the PDP-11 to devise a table to quickly remove a disk head from the software address calculation.The NTSC disks capacity was 5.4 minutes and PAL was 4.5 minutes video material in black and white. The software was loaded via an ASR-33.This was a very slow process. During my first week at CMX I had to observe the demonstrations from outside the editing suite at CBS and if the process hung, I was to reset the computer. This was a crucial part of the demonstration as the design concept was to have a minimum of buttons, knobs etc on the editing console so the editor would only be concerned with artistic activity.
A CBS camera crew recorded material of a jazz band performing in a studio, then shot a sequence of the 600 editing the performance. Bargen adds:
As (can) be seen in a close-up, the editor was quite nervous...because this was the first time he had worked with the system and because there was a lot of jitter in the light pen control. The demo tape implies that it was finished automatically on tape, based on the editing on the 600. That was the concept, but not the reality. The reason is that the assembler portion of the system, the CMX 200, which was to control the quad tapes, had not yet been built.
With the NAB trade show just weeks away and a demonstration tape prepared CMX began its publicity campaign. Joseph Flaherty and Bill Butler co-authored a discussion paper “Why Use Film?”, while marketing head Martin Fletcher ensured trade journals were briefed about a device that was ‘the most important development in television production since the arrival of videotape itself’.
New York Times journalist, Jack Gould reported:
Computer to save millions in film editing, due soon. A major technological advance in Hollywood’s methods of producing films and videotapes for television and motion pictures is only weeks away with commercial introduction of an electronic computerized system for editing visual material. Savings of millions of dollars are envisioned in the system that can store scenes of a drama photographed in seemingly chaotic disorder.
Upon demand the system produces a finished product in the logical narrative sequence of a director’s choice. The human hand never touches either the tape or film during the editing and the individual in creative control can choose between limitless versions of a given scene, repeatedly trying first one and then another and making deletions or insertions until he is satisfied.
Gould called the CMX a ‘fusion of tape recorders computer banks and magnetic disks’. It was obvious that the new workflow could bypass the time consuming and costly steps of traditional linear tape editing.
The system already has a nick name RAVE; Random Access Video Editor. Two major Hollywood studio heads have shown interest in acquisition of the system and representatives of foreign broadcasting companies have been attending private showings in New York.
In laymen’s terms the heart of the CMX system is ability to collect and file away all the separate takes of a film and make them instantly available for an editor sitting at a console of two screens to put in a coherent order. Operation of the system borders on the eerie.
The console operator can order up what he wishes to see. He presses no buttons nor pulls any switches. Rather he uses a pencil light which direct the system to record play back or edit.
Bill Butler continues:
From the engineering and technology challenge standpoint, it was exciting as hell. It was a great crew that started in January 1970 and 15 months later we presented a working model.
Cal Strobele recalls:
We knew it was new and novel. A smart use of existing technology but it didn’t seem it was earth shaking or industry changing at the time.
But it was.
3. Where is the Moviola?
The biggest week in electronic editing history arrived. CMX Systems debuted its random access video editing (RAVE) system at NAB in Chicago 1971. On March 28th the CMX System/600 was released publicly and with its futuristic console looked to have been taken straight from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Jerry Youngstrom recalls the launch:
Thanks to the hours of work put in by the skilled people at CMX, it was a major change from what had been available. The concept we had turned into a reality was a genuine leap forward from the Moviola.
The 600’s modern lines, state-of-the art monitors and light pen were far from the noisy and cumbersome design of the