Rich Miner was completing his PhD at University of Lowell. Warner asked him to join Avid.
I guess I didn't realise how complex the problem he was solving really was and completing my studies seemed like a better option than joining a two-man start-up. Bill is an amazing guy who never hid anything throughout the development of Avid.He always said that the benefits of discussing problems and sharing information far outweighed the benefits of keeping something close to your chest.
True to Warner’s ethos he sought opinions widely throughout the Boston editing community despite the fact that it meant telling more people about what he was doing. He organised a ‘face-off’ using the Avid ‘Oz’ prototype against traditional tape editing systems at WHDH Channel 7 News.
Warner wanted to find out where the ‘time wasters’ in contemporary editing lay because these were the editing ‘hurdles’ that Avid had to eliminate in order to win over contemporary video editors. Eric Peters recalls:
We would have our system and the Channel 7 guys would have manual editing in between two video decks. And they would win every time, after all they didn’t need to digitise. We went back and changed the interface so that it was possible to digitise within the timeline and not have to open a separate window.
Pete Fasciano knew that while his input had been invaluable, Avid needed a full-time staff editor.
All of the editors at VizWiz went up to Burlington and watched Bill’s demo and they thought it was interesting but these are people who eat timecode for breakfast and this was a very different looking system, they thought it was interesting but didn’t expect it to change the world.
Tom Ohanian was working casually at VizWiz while completing his Masters degree.
I was asked to attend an introductory session at the old machine shop and I went there with four of my fellow editors from VizWiz. After the introductory session, I was the only editor who stayed and came back week after week. It was very clear to me that putting my mark on this revolution was something I was destined to do.
Fasciano continues:
While the other VizWiz editors returned to their linear suites, Tom just got it. He was the obvious person to do this for a number of reasons but one was that he was at a pivotal point in his career. This was going to be the next big thing and he could be there at the start. He was an accomplished editor with an understanding of interface design and writing code and was ‘obsessed’ with the Macintosh.
Ohanian joined the group informally to help build the prototypes for NAB.
Meanwhile at Editing Machines Corporation, Bill Ferster had created functional code for his editing system and was ready to marry it to proprietary hardware. He commissioned Picture Conversion Inc. that had created a variety of video related products.
PCI President Gokalp (Go) Babaoglu was known for his expertise with software, video and contemporary electronics.
Despite the known shortcomings of the digital storage options, EMC chose magneto optical disks to record and play back an editor’s material and the small team was edged closer to a working product for SMPTE. Chuck Rieger recalls:
Developmentally, our main hurdles were mainly related to adapting the SoundSpace design concepts to the video world and recasting the hardware from a freestanding controller board to a PC board in form factor.
There was a clear dividing line between the onboard firmware, which I developed and Bill's overall software platform and user interface, so we simply tried to make intelligent decisions about what functions should best be supported in the firmware vs. PC-based software.
Bill Ferster remembers that progress was as planned.
There were no real aha moments! It just went pretty smoothly. We outsourced everything from the chips in California to a company in Atlanta to build the units.
Bill Warner recalls the EMC and Avid rivalry.
I actually talked to Bill (Ferster) at EMC when I was working on the company, we actually got wind of each other and we would have these phone calls and he would say,
"When are you going to announce?"
I would say, "Well, I can't tell you that,then I'd ask him a question and he would say, "Well, I can't tell you that."
But what we would do is that we would share things that we could share. So we had conversations, all the way along.
Steve Reber left Apollo Computer to get a break from the computer industry. Then he got a call.
Bill Warner had heard I was no longer at Apollo and we got together and he showed me what they were planning for Avid. I just told him "I am burnt out from Apollo and I am of no use to you on this project”. He wanted to hire me right then and there but I turned him down.
After agreeing to stay in touch with the Avid team, Reber moved further from software coding. When his condominium association couldn’t get the building’s pool cleaned, Reber volunteered.
The other people on the board asked me what I knew about pool cleaning and servicing. I told them I knew nothing but to give me a week and I would know a whole lot more!
Technology consultant Craig Birkmaier examined the convergence of video and computer technologies for a growing list of clients. He received a call from Curt Rawley at Avid Technology.
There was all this noise going on around the industry, at that time, about the various and different compression algorithms and nobody had anything that worked all that well. They were coming up with all kinds of names to describe different quality levels.The Avid guys were starting to experiment with video compression and had some stuff running but they didn't know what the other guys were up to and they asked me to find out!
Birkmaier went from being a technology consultant to a technology broker when he called Bruce Rady to see if the TouchVision chief was interested in sharing information about his plans for digital editing.
He said. Sure, why not? Maybe I'll learn something. And it was then that he and Bill Warner and Bill Ferster realized that they weren't really competing with one another, they were competing with CMX and Grass Valley and the other old style edit system manufacturers.
It was going to be hard enough for these new companies to climb this hill and be accepted and get the nonlinear thing to take off without fighting amongst themselves.
Eric Peters recalls the mantra that Bill Warner instilled in everyone at Avid.
You have more to lose by being secretive than you have to gain by being open. We never lost sight of that. And the fact that if we continually added value to our product, it didn’t matter what other features were offered by competitors.
Avid’s team experimented independently with compression schemes that degraded video images just enough to fit them on relatively small hard drives but not too much as to make them impossible to use for editing.
Meanwhile Bill Warner diligently scanned through U.S. business directories in search of potential customers and created a list of post-production, editorial and production companies across America.
He drafted an introduction to the Avid’s demonstration at NAB in early 1988 and mailed out hundreds of 'targeted' letters in late March. It read in part:
Avid Technology is developing a new kind of video editing system and you’re invited to visit our suite at the NAB show in Las Vegas to see a working prototype...The product is still in the early stages of development so we are in an excellent position to incorporate your ideas.
The