Pete Fasciano recalls the environment that Bill Warner created for his Avid presentations:
He wanted to make an editing system for everybody and he was looking at it from a ‘point of innocence’ which is very important when you look back at how quickly and why Avid became a success. Bill also knew that to take such a new idea into the market and to force change in an industry that had resisted change for decades was going to be probably more difficult than building the system.
So when he demonstrated the Avid he showed people two presentations and asked them, “Which do you prefer?”Or put another way he never asked, “Do you think you want to buy an Avid?, he asked Which Avid do you want to buy?”. He assumed that you wanted to change, rather than put them in a position to make a judgement of pass or fail. Very smart, you could say he put them in a limited universe of positive choice.
Despite the surroundings, Bill Kaiser was impressed with the demonstration as Warner recalls:
He was pretty amazed at what he saw. And then curious to know how big we imagined that we could become. We were looking at CMX Systems and comparing ourselves to them and asking ‘how big a company can we make?” ‘As a result we proposed to Bill Kaiser that we could create a $50 million business.
To progress the prototypes Warner needed help, so he called a friend.
COCKROFT, RAWLEY AND REBER
Greg Cockroft was at Frame Technology developing a business application for NeXT Computer's launch.
I still remember those meetings with Steve Jobs. He was super focused on the UI on all apps and we had a meeting once with Frame where he suggested we would should all get together for a few nights and he would buy pizza and we would work on the UI of FrameMaker together.
As the NeXT job came to a close, Cockroft received a call from Bill Warner.
He needed some help at Avid.
Warner then reached out to another former Apollo engineer. Steve Reber had been determined to get away from the computer industry, however a friend convinced him to do 'practice interviews' in case he wanted to return. As a result he landed a job at Wedge Computer in Waltham, MA.
I joined Wedge to write code as a consulting gig and then moved to the left (West) coast and joined SUN Microsystems as part of a four man team which helped me get my 'juices' back. On a trip back to Boston I checked in on Bill Warner and the guys at Avid to see how they were doing.
Bill just said "I gotta have you, we need to make the NAB conference, you gotta start right now! Forget going back to SUN.
Reber contemplated a return to Massachusetts.
Meanwhile Curt Rawley set up a meeting with Henry McCance, also of Greylock Partners, to discuss his plans for creating new personal computer products. Rawley recalls the seasoned investor’s reaction when he mentioned the name of a potential new project for the Boston firm.
When I mentioned the word ‘Avid’ to Henry, he was very surprised because no one was supposed to know about what Bill Warner was doing. I figured I should probably meet Bill and see what it was he was building.
McCance arranged a meeting that was to change the course of electronic editing. Rawley recalls:
Within ten minutes of meeting Bill and hearing his idea of using computers to create non-linear video editing and in doing so to replace the decades old film editing, he had convinced me that his idea for a product was far superior to what I had in mind! And so I wanted to work with him.
We agreed that if I were able to write a business plan and get some money from a venture capitalist, I would get paid and maybe get some stock. I signed on. And the only thing I knew about video was how to spell it!
His period of ignorance wasn’t to last. Rawley travelled to the Boston Public library.
I remember very clearly walking in there and telling the attendant "I need to become an expert in the field of video editing from a business standpoint". He was a yoda like creature with half glasses who looked up at me as if to say "Oh god another one of you!”. Another dumb person who wants to be made smart. He asked me to wait and he eventually returned with a four-wheel cart filled with books and registers and pamphlets.
Everything you needed to know about video. I spent the next week at the library pouring over this tremendous fountain of knowledge, including a video register which listed all the video post production houses that I could ever want to know about, which actually became Avid's initial database for business prospects.
Despite his deep involvement, Eric Peters was still not able to join Avid formerly. Instead he took every spare moment he had away from Apollo Computer to ‘help them out’. The primary goal for Peters was to create a proprietary video codec that could deliver a usable compressed image to the desktop.
In our research, we found that NASA had used a very good compression algorithm for getting pictures back from Jupiter but it was for black and white only. We knew that pretty soon one of the hardware/chip makers was going to come out with a good compression algorithm so we were biding our time until that happened.
Rawley recalls:
When we started at Avid, we weren't using JPEG compression; we were doing our own sampling of the signal and decimating it to get it through. We decimated in color, we decimated in size and we decimated the number of frames per second and with that decimation you could get the video through the computer.
It was highly pixelated and choppy but it was just good enough for offline editing and to create an edl. Because video represents a huge data rate much much higher than what anyone was doing in those days and nobody was having any success with video.
It was next to impossible to get video and audio into a computer and make them native computer data types. Of course people had some success with audio like SoundBlaster but not video. In those times we were effectively blocked by the computer hardware standards of the time like the AT bus used in the Apollo workstations.
We had many conversations with Apollo and at that time we had heard that Apple was coming out with Nu-Bus, which would be a huge breakthrough, if it were video capable.
In a manner like SMPTE had regulated timecode standards, the standards body CCITT (Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique) had created image standards for sending and receiving facsimiles. It set the technical boundaries for sending analog images to take advantage of digital compression methods. By doing so it allowed users to reduce transmission times.
CCITT now turned its focus to other emerging image compression methods and became a partner with ISO (International Organization for Standardization) in a joint endeavour to map out standards for the compression of photographic images.The new group was called JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group).
As Avid experimented with proprietary methods to get video in and out of computers, the new JPEG discussed the possibility of an industry wide video codec standard. Rawley recalls:
When you went to the libraries and looked at the technical journals and read the various references where you were told what computers were capable of, you heart just filled with self doubt as to whether this could be done. With Jeff's programming and Eric's efforts, we created a demonstration piece called "Pluto meets Top Gun" which proved it could be done.
They managed to replicate what it was like to have video inside a computer, it was a series of files, each representing