Bill Warner changed editing forever. Without Bill there would be no Avid. There would be no book called ‘Timeline’. He encouraged me at every turn, welcomed me to his home, selflessly assisted my research, lent me documents and tapes, drove me around Boston, twisted former colleagues’ arms to talk, and opened up his heart to the project.
Without reservation.
Bill has faced challenges that would humble most, and never gave up. He is an inspiration.
The Bucks, Waddells and Kuehs have been hugely supportive of Timeline.
Mum and Dad gave me the freedom to dream.
Tan gave me patience and understanding.
This edition
In this edition Timeline: Analog Six (May 18), I have added more material plus revisions, corrections, slight additions and spell checks.
There's a few new shout-outs namely Ash and Alex from Tablo.io plus David Gleason at American Radio History.
Despite being an Australian author, versed and schooled in UK English, I have adopted US spellings and grammar for the Timeline series.
Last but not least, I have added Ivan Maltz's foreword. What an amazing contribution to editing that he and his teams made.
The right of John Buck to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Besides it’s uncool to copy. I have made recorded contact with all known copyright owners. Email me if you wish to make corrections.
© Copyright John Buck 2019
Timeline 6
The hardest thing about editing and the most challenging is, "Why isn't this working?" And then "How do you fix it?"
Dede Allen, editor
35: Very frustrating
In 1996 Nintendo released their newest gaming system the Nintendo 64 and Time Magazine named it Machine of the Year.
At that year's NAB it was obvious that the sense of wonder created by EMC and Avid’s digital editing products some seven years earlier had begun to fade. It seemed all companies now made nonlinear systems. Jim Bennet wrote:
There were over 150 non-linear editing systems shown at NAB. The choices were mind-boggling and attendees were trying to wade through all the format and systems choices. In mixing this with the expanded Internet and Multimedia exhibits, most people were having difficulty figuring everything out. PC based Windows systems seemed to be in predominance, with a fair representation of Mac and SGI systems
D-Vision Systems debuted ‘3 new families’ of editing tools.
As a company with its roots in the film equipment division of Bell and Howell, it made sense that the FilmCUT product line (FilmCUT, FilmCUT-XE, and FilmCUT-XED) was film-centric and allowed for 24 fps digitising and editing.
FilmCUT is an upgradable set of film-style editing tools for film professionals. The tools are designed to be hassle-free, thus allowing film editors to become more creative.
In contrast D-Vision also launched the OnLINE, OnLINE-XE and OnLINE-XED products for video editors.
OnLINE used the standard D-Vision interface on an open-systems architecture, which allowed buyers to team it with a wide variety of video and audio hardware technologies. Clyde Tressler and Robert Lamm for SMPTE New England described their test:
We tried an experiment to see whether this was truly the case, this time with a D-Vision Online XED sytem with a SMPTE-259 serial digital input (so digital/analog conversions wouldn't contaminate the experiment). Using a D1 deck and special test tape provided by Wilson Chao of Cambridge Television Productions, as well as Mr. Chao's well-trained eye, we made a 200KB/frame recording and asked Mr. Chao to see if he could tell the recording from the original. He couldn't see any difference.
To round a comprehensive product matrix were products designed to compete with Avid for the top end of the market. The Postsuite family (Postsuite, PostSuite-XE, and Postsuite-XED) was a series of Pentium workstations using the company’s OnLINE software.
KEYGRIP
In the five years since its debut QuickTime engineers had experimented with software only compression, color-space standards, expanded timecode support, as well as advanced audio and video syncing capabilities. The team had refined the API to deliver real-time video performance by accessing the power of Apple’s multiprocessing hardware. Apple announced at NAB:
Video editors can now blast through frames with the speed and results which until now, were only associated with proprietary systems.
Among the first to welcome the changes was Macromedia's VP of Video products, Randy Ubillos:
The demands of video professionals consistently outpace the curve that drives traditional computing technology. By enhancing QuickTime specifically for the video professional, Apple is delivering an outstanding enabling technology that allows Macromedia to build truly professional video solutions.
Tim Myers and Ubillos were in a unique position with Apple.
Randy and I had a great relationship with the QuickTime guys at Apple that had developed over many years. We were able to push them hard to make sure QuickTime could be a professional editing platform and not just something that let consumers cut and paste video together.
ImMIX
Scitex Digital Video (SDV) didn’t need Apple or QuickTime as it demonstrated its product line from a huge NAB booth rising two stories high and spanning more than 9,000 square feet.
At the top of the ImMIX Sphere family of nonlinear workstations was the $70,000 StrataSphere developed by former GVG staffers. It had real-time, full-motion alpha keying; a DveousFX effects package; and 50 layers of non-destructive compositing.
SDV’s boss Randy Hood told the press:
We challenge this year's NAB attendees to compare the Sphere ‘Think-Do-Done’ philosophy to any other editing architecture on the market. For true real-time functionality, only the Sphere family delivers two streams of full resolution real-time video, not a preview and InstantFX, zero rendering of all effects and transitions. Sphere is where people turn when they need to finish great video.
Alongside the StrataSphere was the more video centric DigiSphere with the same ergonomic control panel and much loved audio fader but restricted to a single real time video channel. There had been significant issues to overcome to deliver as chief engineer Dick Jackson recalls:
Hard disks had got bigger and faster in the time that we started development of the (original) Sphere, to when we were acquired. As a result the need for compression was less and less and once you get in the 5:1 to 4:1 to 3:1 and you just can't tell anymore. And that had been our (initial) major point of difference with the competition that was using early JPEG and MPEG.
At 20:1 there was a striking difference between our Wavelet codec and their codecs but once Avid and others improved, we were stuck. We were tied to chip