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a leader in 3-D graphics software (next page) used in films like Terminator 2, the Toronto firm was near bankruptcy.
The company’s board hired Rob Burgess away from Silicon Graphics to become COO. He cut the Alias workforce and closed a division in Europe. In time Burgess made the same tough decisions at a company that held editing's future.
Adobe made a significant business move acquiring the video package ReelTime from SuperMac. Adobe told the press that it expected to ship a revised version of Randy Ubillos' program for $499, at around the same time as Apple released QuickTime.
Unknown to almost everyone, it was doing so without the application's creator. Although it had acquired the ReelTime intellectual property and source code, Adobe was prohibited from offering a job to Ubillos, who recalls:
I was speaking with Tim Myers, who had become the product manager for Premiere. At around this time, I was in the position of interviewing the people who were going to potentially work on the project as part of SuperMac’s commitment to the sale.
I was having a hard time not only reconciling the fact that someone else would be working on this thing but in finding someone who I thought was good enough.
I asked Tim, “Is there maybe a position for me at Adobe?”
He looked at me and asked, “Are you aware of the details of the contract with SuperMac?”
I said, “Yes, of course”.
He said, “OK”. Next minute I was having lunch with Tim and Eric Zocher and we chit chatted a while.
Eric Zocher was Adobe's VP of product engineering and prohibited from offering Ubillos a job to lead the Premiere team but he could accept a request from Ubillos.
Ubillos continues:
And then I asked them, “Is there any opportunity for me at Adobe?”
Ubillos' lunch guests smiled and offered him a job. He was soon readying ReelTime for its metamorphosis into Premiere and to take advantage of the upcoming QuickTime.
QUICKTIME
On December 2, 1991 QuickTime shipped and Apple lined up forty developers to pledge support including SuperMac's Steve Blank who cheekily told the press:
Apple has advanced a digital-video standard on personal computers two years before anybody else expected it, and a day and a half ahead of Microsoft's next press release.
QuickTime 1.0 worked on any color-capable Mac with a 68020 processor. It offered built-in compression that created a 160 by 120 pixels movie running at 5 to 10 frames per second with an eight-bit mono audio track.
Craig Birkmaier looks back at QuickTime.
A lot of industry people just saw QuickTime as being the same as Windows Media Player; it was just a way to play back video. Nothing could be further from the truth; it was architecture for working with digital media.
How could anyone survive without it now? Back then it wasn't obvious, and Apple's management was struggling with how to make money from it.
Digital F/X’s Rob Gruttner recalls the launch.
I remember it launching and being on the cover of MacWeek magazine, “QuickTime ready for prime time” and making a big deal of it and I remember so many people saying, “ I don’t get it, big deal they’re postage sized movies that are difficult to see and low quality but there was another group I spoke to who really understood what this would lead to.
One group thought it was an Apple gimmick, a sideline amusement, and the others, who got it.
Digital Media’s Denise Caruso 'got it' telling MacWeek:
There are a lot of applications for non-full-motion video. You don't need to have Indiana Jones-style, full-motion video to film the inside of a house for a real-estate firm or to send snippets of video across electronic mail.
Jerry Borrell wrote for MacWorld
QuickTime is not just something that will allow nerds and video freaks to have MTV on their Mac. Nope. QuickTime is going to change how the world uses computers.
Steve Blank defined the opportunity for developers:
We see 2 million QuickTime-ready Macs out there without video-input capabilities. We think that once people start seeing QuickTime movies they're going to want to bring in their own video. All those people are potential customers.
Apple's VP of Macintosh Software Architecture Roger Heinen told the press:
We believe that QuickTime will spawn a whole new era in personal computing. In 1984, Apple introduced users to the combination of text, and graphics.
Today we are extending the combination to include video, sound and animation. QuickTime combined with exciting new third-party innovations will provide Macintosh users with powerful new functionality while maintaining the simplicity and consistency users have grown to expect.
Birkmaier concludes:
It wasn't until Jobs returned and realized it was a building block for products that QuickTime really took off.
MEDIA 100 - THE FIRST ATTEMPT
In late December 1991 came news in trade magazines of an unexpected editing product from a hardware vendor in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Macs become video editors with Media 100. Media 100 evangelist Tobin Koch observed:
If you look at video capture boards or multimedia products today, they look fine on an RGB monitor but they look terrible if you output them to a television.
Data Translation went public with plans to ship a digital, non-linear editing system called Media 100. John Molinari’s small breakaway MultiMedia team at Data Translation had built a Mac-based system that it claimed combined full-motion, full-size video, and CD-quality audio.
Media 100's video editing capabilities include random access editing, separate sound editing, video transitions and integration of purely digital data.
The Media 100 bundle used a proprietary NuBus compatible card with JPEG based compression scheme that had been created in-house. Users could input full-motion video at 30 frames per second, edit in digital form and output a completed edit to a professional videotape machine with no loss of quality.
The methodology was a clear point of difference to Avid.
Unlike other digital non-linear editing systems, the quality of the compressed video is high enough to be output directly to tape, virtually eliminating the need for further post-production work in an online editing suite.
At low compression levels, the Media 100 system could store 22 minutes of video on a standard 1.2 GB hard drive, and up to six such drives could be daisy-chained together to provide additional storage. Koch told the press:
…while the initial version of the Media 100 system would only be able to perform simple cuts and fades, Data Translation had plans for an optional video-effects accelerator to expand the Media 100’s abilities. The add-on would provide wipes and dissolves and be available in mid-April (92) for less than $3,000.
The Media 100 system was due at the upcoming NAB but Letraset’s MediaBlender was not.
MEDIA