Timeline Analog 4. John BuckЧитать онлайн книгу.
letter changed many lives.
The electronic editing landscape was changing. EditDroid had closed and its great rival, the Montage Group was on the cusp of disappearing. The small engineering group in Littleton had moved on from updating the Montage with better monitors and replay decks to creating a laser disc based system. Bill Zettler recalls:
We looked to interface Laserdisc machines in place of the VCRs. Replacing the old analog videotape machines and all of their mechanical parts with laserdiscs for off-line editing, while vastly simpler from an engineering standpoint, suffered from the enormous expense of having to master the laserdiscs in the first place.
Adding that to the problem that laserdiscs didn't inherently have the capacity. Still, even though digital video storage (80mb drives) was in its infancy it was obvious that the days of doing offline editing using consumer videotape components were numbered.
It was obvious to Zettler and a growing number of people involved in video editing that the key to the next step in electronic editing was tied to a video compression method that delivered images from hard drives.
Roger Siminoff an industry veteran at Digital F/X, Radius and Silicon Graphics adds:
Think for a moment about the companies that made media transfer and storage systems and how critical they were to the workflow of the time. Take for example like Bernouli, SyQuest, ZIP and JAZ (just to name a few). These were great technologies in their day. But as the technology accelerated, it sequentially hastened each of their demises.
Bernouli was around for 10-12 years, SyQuest for 8-10 years, ZIP for 5-6 years, JAZ for 4-5 years. But they all paled to what could be stored on a CD and then what could be stored on a DVD. And, rest assured, there will be a XXD, YYD and ZZD some day and we'll laugh at how CDs and DVD were failed technologies of the past.
IT'S NON-LINEAR
By 1988 it seemed that everyone from computer makers, hardware vendors, broadcasters, magazine publishers and software providers was using the term 'Multimedia' to give sense to an array of promised products that used sound, video and graphics.
Apple's CEO John Sculley had demonstrated the company's vision of future computing with the Knowledge Navigator in 1987 and while it had excited developers and creatives, the response from business was indifferent or worse.
Ellen Nold, former Apple employee weighed in.
Knowledge Navigator is a goal not a product. It is deliberately set far in the future because Apple is bereft - they really don't know what they are going to do next.
VP Apple Advanced Technologies Marketing Chris Espinosa disagreed:
There's been a perception that we (Apple) have nothing up our sleeves. We're going to incorporate innovation not only in our new products but into our current products.
Apple told the press that the in-house Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was researching how to add audio and video tools into future releases of the Mac OS:
...create programmer’s tools for full-motion, full-color video.
Another Apple R&D group, the Multimedia Lab, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco worked on a range of prototypes that were able to mix audio, video, images and text, so-called Multimedia.
Jim Armstrong explained what multimedia was:
It's non-linear and non-print. It's a new publishing paradigm.
Meanwhile the world’s largest personal computer maker, IBM pursued multimedia for the corporate environment with a separate division called the Ultimedia Tools Group. Dave Drabo told the press:
Our mission is to create a cross-platform standard for multimedia without focusing on one particular operating system.
IBM reached out to typical multimedia developers and professional editing equipment companies like Montage Group and TouchVision Systems. Despite the growing interest in multimedia, electronic editing was still in the analog domain.
The US television drama The Wonder Years was a hit with viewers, a ratings winner for the ABC television network and a flagship project for Cinedco, the makers of Ediflex.
Ediflex systems were now a common sight in Hollywood and as a result one major client decided that it made financial sense to stop renting Ediflex systems and own Cindeco outright. The production company New World Pictures was enjoying success with movies like Soul Man when management team Lawrence (Larry) Kuppin, Harry Sloan and Robert (Bob) Reme decided to buy 51% of Cinedco and have NWP films and television programs cut on Ediflex.
Away from the change in ownership the Ediflex team needed to overhaul their system. Adrian Ettlinger and Andy Maltz had worked for years to ensure the prototype had evolved into a reliable device, but by the time it began to win awards the system’s technology was past its prime. Drama editor Stuart Bass recalls:
The Wonder Years (TWY) shot about three or four hours of dailies a day. Two 16mm cameras running all the time meant there was a ton of material but the Ediflex just couldn't handle more than an hour of material at a time. You had to break up acts into two pieces.
A single 22 minute episode would need at least five loads of 12 tapes. You were suddenly dealing with 60 tapes and at some point you had to put all of those tapes in and out of the VTR decks just to view an episode.
Cinedco updated the Ediflex hardware and software to compete with devices using newer technology and also began work on another random access system called Cineflex. Change needed to come quickly as Ediflex customers were already exploring alternatives.
The Wonder Years line producer Jeffrey Silver had been exposed to the Montage Picture Processor on a previous project and decided to try it as a possible replacement for the Ediflex. Stuart Bass continues:
Of course it worked quicker. We only needed one load for an episode, there wasn’t a long process of creating the script mimic and changes with the producers in the room were faster. The Ediflex just wasn't capable of editing the kinds of rushes volumes that producers were now creating.
Despite the successful use of Montage in television series there were still issues to consider when cutting movies on the system. Editor Steven Cohen used the Montage on Jerrold Freedman's film, Unholy Matrimony.
I badly wanted to try a digital system even though most feature people thought they were pretty primitive and restrictive. That was true, of course, but the Montage was seminal in a lot of ways and very smart in many ways but after a period of using, I found it to be very limited and had lots of bugs. I began to take notes about what worked and what didn’t and ended up writing a 20-page essay about how to improve it.
Grass Valley Group’s general manager Dan Wright had ambitious plans for his company’s foray into digital editing had progressed. GVG engineers had built and tested the IPS-100 device (above) which was labelled as an ‘integrated production system’ that had a switcher, audio mixer, edit controller, sync generator and character generator all in one unit. The company told the press that:
IPS-100 will sell for $60000 to $65000 complete when it becomes available next year. The edit system included in the IPS will feature a new hardware architecture
As the IPS shipped, GVG’s parent company Tektronix ran into financial trouble and it made changes.