May 15th 2012

Are you sure this is the best system there is?

The monthly excerpt from John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline’. Available at iBooks and Amazon

Bill Warner’s love affair with moving images that had started when he was six ensured that the sales videos he created at Apollo Computer were above average. He teamed with Barbara Krieg and Brian Powers to shoot material and then edit on a basic Panasonic controller. Warner recalls:

I couldn’t believe how hard it was. I loved the end result but a 20-minute video took 22 hours of editing and I just couldn’t believe that editors must work this way and I guessed there must be a better professional system that existed somewhere. 

Meanwhile Warner was asked to attend a vendor’s conference for Electronic Data Systems (EDS). The events would explain what Ross Perot’s company required in its new computer purchases, as a result of being recently acquired by General Motors. Bill Kaiser joined Warner at the conference.

This guy got up and was talking about the possibilities of running live video on a dedicated workstation so that for example, if their CEO Ross Perot wanted to address the GM troops, he could. Well we both looked at each other and had the same reaction. When you first see full motion video on a computer, you’re hooked. It was remarkable.

On their return to Chelmsford, both men were keen to explore the possibility of adding video to a future product and engineers investigated practical uses of adding graphics capabilities to GM workstations. Apollo thought it was possible to give front line workers access to Assembly instructions and model blueprints on the shop floor and to add a video component to the material. Bill Warner wanted to make a video tape explaining what the new Apollo product may be capable of for EDS and he also wanted to apply the very same technology to creating the tape itself. 

I started to think about the 3D system we were researching at Apollo and its capabilities. If we could do that at Apollo, I was convinced there must be a computerized video editing system. 

Warner flicked through the Yellow Pages and rang around to find a company in Boston who had online editing suites, and asked for their pricing for computerised editing, and after creating a projected cost, Warner convinced his boss to pay for the GM video to be edited at Video Troupe. After shooting the video, Warner took his collection of ¾” rushes, VHS tapes and slides down to the post facility. He had assumed that computerised meant that the system was Having been involved in the computer industry and having cut some internal videos, Warner thought that he would be able to ‘run the session’ and learn the professional edit system as he worked.

I asked them if I could edit my own project. And they tilted their heads funny and went “mmm”. I didn’t really make too much of that and they walked me down to the edit room and sat me down at the system and said 

“Well ok, P is play R is rewind and space bar is stop”. 

And I went “what do you mean rewind?” 

They replied “Well that rewinds the tape decks” 

I said, “What do you mean tape decks? This is a computerized system right?

They said, “Yes”

I said, “Why do you have tape decks, don’t you have video stored in a digital form? 

And the guy just paused and said, “What are you talking about?” 

I said, “What are you talking about? This is a computerized editor right? 

He said, “This is the top of the line CMX computer editor. It’s the best there is”

So I asked him, “If it’s the best, what’s so great about it?”

And he said proudly “its frame accurate”

And I couldn’t believe it

I said, “My Panasonic back at Apollo is accurate to plus or minus 1 or 2 frames”

He replied, “Yes but this is frame accurate and you can rebuild your program from an edit decision list”

I was dumbfounded and then they asked me 

“When do you need your 20 minute video complete by?

I said “Tomorrow

They were shocked and replied. “You’d better call your people and tell them you there’s no way you can be ready by then, forget it”

And I said, “I’m not forgetting it”

Warner went back to Apollo and worked all night to create an offline edit. The next day he returned to the postproduction house, and created an online master using a CMX system. Still troubled by the previous day’s experience, he asked one more time.

“Are you sure this is the best system there is?”

And they said, “This is it. Get used to it”

I was bewildered. I just thought something like an Avid existed somewhere and I didn’t know about it. 

Then I just figured that any day now someone would do this, a digital editing system. Surely it’s just a matter of minutes and I’ll wait. Meanwhile the rest of 1984 went by, 1985 went by…

Unknown to Warner something was happening. 

The complete behind-the-scenes Avid story is available in John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline 2’. Available at iBooks and Amazon.
More stories here 

Posted at 2:28am.

March 22nd 2012

On Randy’s computer

The monthly excerpt from John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline’. Available at iBooks and Amazon


July 1992

Nick Schlott was porting code to enable Adobe Premiere to run with Microsoft’s Video for Windows (VFW). 

Premiere for Windows was to be based upon VFW and of course that wasn’t released yet, so we were under Microsoft NDA’s and we would travel up there periodically to see what they were up to. They had started after QuickTime and therefore were trailing behind and of course QuickTime was no good to me on the PC, so I wrote my own file format for playing back video. I had to make it work at 1.5mb/s. 

And back then I was young and worked long long hours and I could program as fast as anyone I knew, some was good code, some was not so good but I needed to be quick early on to get my head around the task.  We had to create a huge amount of infrastructure for the Windows version that we took for granted on the Mac, like the Macintosh’s QuickDraw API. That had to be written almost from scratch. 

Schlott hired consultants who had worked on Supermac’s Videospigot to replicate the Mac toolbox.

I wrote as much of that performance-enhancing code (Premiere/Win 1.0) as I could before VFW was complete and then we had to shoe horn the VFW stuff in, once it was available from Microsoft. 

Despite Adobe’s growing size with products like Photoshop, the Premiere team was small. Schlott recalls the differences in programming then, and now. 

Of course there are people within a company like Adobe whose job it is to get the final version of an application like Premiere and ship it and store it and so forth but on a day to day basis, if you were to ask anyone where the latest build of Premiere was? The answer would be “On Randy’s computer”. That simple. Of course it’s different now but back then it was…different. Teams of people on Photoshop and Postscript, and two of us on Premiere. 

One programmer on the Mac, and one on Windows. Every now and then I would come across something in Randy’s code and go ask him how he had done it and it would be a very Mac type of solution he had engineered and I would go away and try to come up with something similar in the Windows world. 

Ubillos’ beta build of Version 2 for the Mac added more special effects, and filters. It had chroma and luminance keying along with the ability to preview a movie by moving the cursor through a time ruler, while controlling the speed of the clip. 

The application could export an uncompressed sequence of still images to Photoshop for professional rotoscoping and EDL and machine support had arrived. 

Under Eric Zocher’s direction it embraced the relatively new concept of plug-in architecture that allowed Adobe, and third parties, to add functionality. With Premiere starting to sell well Adobe decided to add software quality assurance (SQA) staff. 

Michael Wohl graduated from San Francisco State University, and went to work at Film and Video Service.

Because I had taught myself basic computer skills, I became the company’s computer expert as well. I wasn’t an engineer or anything, and I didn’t do programming but I understood enough. It’s hard to believe now but back then there were so few people who understood computers and video.

A work colleague at nearby One Pass Video told Wohl that Adobe was looking for SQA engineers to work on Adobe Premiere Version 2. He landed the job at Adobe with the ambition to advance his fledgling filmmaking career.

All the time I just thought of it as a job. Early on, it was just something to do and I was making more money than the previous job, but I was stuck in an office, which I wasn’t crazy about.

After Wohl started with the Premiere group he asked them to create a working editing suite at Adobe to test trial features, and workflows on real projects. 

I asked them to build into the schedule a period of time to run the software on real world projects with the internal Adobe edit suite to see if it was really working. 

Wohl realised that he had some skills the others lacked:

Almost no one on the design team had any experience actually editing video. None of them! It was just weird.  It was very impressive how far they had come without any real perspective on what it takes to edit something or what this person who is editing, needs. 

Right then I had to credit Randy with being a genius, and using his talents and just pushing on.

The SQA team created a list of feature requests that Wohl meshed with his own experiences as an editor to better define what was needed in the professional environment. The comments document was well received by Ubillos, and Tim Myers but stalled with Adobe division management. Wohl concludes:

Their position was. “Well all these features and ideas are going to cost time and money. And we’re selling plenty of copies now. Why would we do this?” 

So they just nixed it.


The complete behind-the-scenes Adobe Premiere story is available in John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline 2’. Available at iBooks and Amazon.
More stories here 

Posted at 10:52pm.

February 16th 2012

Tape editing isn’t dead!

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The monthly excerpt from John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline’. Available at iBooks and Amazon

*****

Pinnacle Systems was emulating the early days of Silicon Valley pioneer, Ampex. 

It had experienced tremendous growth, then nearly closed, after which it created an outstanding new product. Finally it had become overly reliant on one customer. Sales of its Alladin technology to Avid accounted for more than 40% of sales. 

Company co-founder Ajay Chopra recalls:

Of course Pinnacle was very successful due to the Alladin deal with Avid but it was something problematical. A significant percentage of our revenue was coming from one client. How do you expand your portfolio without starting to compete in the professional market against your OEM partners? You have this great core technology at the heart of your company, where else can you sell it?

VP of New Business Development, Bill Loesch had an idea. Research available to the market from Sony, estimated that 60% of America’s 25 million camcorder households owned personal computers. 

Loesch wanted Pinnacle to create an editing product for under $500, as CEO Mark Sanders recalls:

Bill nagged and nagged and nagged me about it. To which I would reply that ‘the consumer market is too different, we don’t have the distribution channels, we don’t have volume manufacturing or knowledge of that market, it would be a big stretch. Bill just smiled and told me ‘We can do it’. He convinced me.

Pinnacle founder Ajay Chopra recalls:

We looked at the low-end consumer market since our OEM customers such as Avid and Media 100s weren’t in this market. It seemed obvious that there was a real opportunity there.

Loesch concludes:

I saw things very differently to Mark but one of his strengths is not to dismiss ideas he doesn’t agree with. I remember saying to him, “tape based editing is dead, its history, we should make something new”, and he got so mad and yelled at me “What the hell are you talking about? Tape editing isn’t dead!” In the end we were both right, tape based editing was going to be around for a while but the writing was definitely on the wall.

Sanders gave Loesch the green light to create a Consumer Products division with its first product to be a non-professional video-editing package, code named Alibaba. 

Over at Digital GraphiX Inc, Ivan Maltz was keen for a change. Bill Loesch recalls:

We had looked at buying the Deko group and of course Ivan Maltz was the lead engineer there so we got to know each other. We exchanged ideas with Ivan and Keith Thomson and persuaded them to leave the east coast and Deko to come to Pinnacle. It was the right time for them and for us.

Maltz recalls:

Over several discussions Bill showed us the business plan for Alibaba, I think I still have it in a box somewhere at home! It was a very exciting idea and on the strength of it we left New Jersey for California to help start a new group. I was always been on the edge of video and editing and always around it from my days at Dubner and then Grass Valley with the ImMIX guys but now I was going to be very much part of it. 

We got to Pinnacle, and we had a clean sheet of paper! 

We looked around at what was available and there weren’t many consumer products. There was MGI’s VideoWave and a few others and although I had no background in editing and didn’t know what an AVI file was, I knew about video and I knew graphics and I knew how to make applications.

Bill Loesch recalls:

As soon as they arrived we started writing a consumer non-linear editor. I think it’s fair to say that Mark (Sanders) hedged his bets here. He figured that if the consumer play failed, Keith and Ivan were two top-notch professional video engineers who could fit into our professional organization.

Ivan Maltz worked on the systems software, and Keith Thomson the user interface. Maltz continues:

We actually set ourselves the goal of getting an ‘Editor’s Choice’ review with PC Magazine but that was going to be difficult because at the time they didn’t even have a video editing category!

Loesch is candid in his assessment.

There were a lot of people on the board who thought Mark Sanders was crazy. 

The complete Pinnacle story is available in John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline 2’. Available at iBooks and Amazon.
More stories here 

Posted at 5:37am.

January 6th 2012

The beginning of QuickTime

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The monthly excerpt from John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline’. Available at iBooks and Amazon.

In June 1989 Adobe Systems’ director of business development, Fred Mitchell organized an offsite meeting with key managers John Kunze and David Pratt. To grow beyond its initial products, Adobe needed to create or acquire key software applications. They singled out image editing, page layout, and digital video editing as the tools that were going to be critical components in Adobe’s future. Pratt would later tell Pamela Pfiffner:

… as a result we began to listen to people pitching their products.

Adobe needed to counter the success of SuperMac’s PixelPaint and Letraset’s Design Studio applications, and after listening to the Knoll Brothers it bought Photoshop. Tim Myers recalls:

Adobe then began working on writing the program code, and creating plugins for it. 

Myers had landed at Adobe after completing an Arts and Communications major. 

I had been really involved in my University’s television department and its in-house studio. I was helping integrate computers and video equipment like the early PC’s, a Macintosh and Amiga and third party products like Truevision’s boards to get them to do basic titling and graphics and some editing. John Knoll had come from a film background, ILM, and I was very interested with the idea of an intersection of Photoshop with video. 

In the years ahead, Myers would guide Adobe’s first video editing product. 

While Adobe and Macromedia were making plans for Macintosh video products, Apple seemed unfocused. It had relied on Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw to deliver graphics that set it apart from other personal computer operating systems but had since lost its lead to Wintel. 

Apple had then released Atkinson’s HyperCard at the 1987 MacWorld expo, where it was billed as a hypermedia system that allowed users, with little programming knowledge, to create custom applications in minutes. HyperCard combined database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. Schools used it to create interactive learning materials, while industrials like Renault used it to build inventory databases. Atkinson himself was surprised as to what HyperCard was being used for:

It’s as if you gave somebody a crescent wrench and asked him what he was going to use it for. Well it turns out it’s a lot of things, including a hammer. 

Some enterprising individuals like Hans Peter Brøndmo at MIT, were applying HyperCard to video. The young student had developed Video Iconification for Structural and Associative Linking (VISUAL) that when used in conjunction with a mix of multimedia hardware allowed the Institute to create a virtual tour of the campus with full motion video icons in a HyperCard stack. As Apple’s technology evolved, Brøndmo would use it to create a desktop editing system, but for now the Cupertino company was unwilling to take risks. While a few key players within Apple believed that that the company should look beyond HyperCard for its next operating system update, System 7, there was little support for a new method of delivering media elements like video and audio. Duncan Kennedy recalls:

For about three to five years there was a major effort within Apple to develop hardware based video projects. There were projects trying to leverage HyperCard, but no one was really doing software based video. 

Atkinson, himself one of the Macintosh original team, had only created HyperCard after plan to build a handheld tablet computer with a full page display, called Magic Slate, was shunned. 

Needless to say, Magic Slate wasn’t the kind of thing that Apple could make in a couple of years. And back then Apple wasn’t into long-term research.

Another Apple scientist, Stephen (Steve) Perlman, had been working on a hardware solution to desktop video for some time, and he went public at SIGGRAPH with a dedicated hardware box called QuickScan that was powered by a custom, high-density chip. QuickScan was able to deliver symmetrical decompression of full-color video in real time, and could display the results on a standard Mac II screen. Perlman showed viewers computer windows that contained 24-bit color video running in real time, at 30 frames per second while he moved the windows around the screen. 

What we were showing was the Mac handling multiple video windows with live, full National Television System Committee (NTSC) bandwidth video. We showed the ability to deal with dynamic objects in much the same way the system deals with static objects. 

The demonstration amazed all who saw it, as Perlman later told journalist Jim Carlton:

It knocked people’s socks off. 

Eric Hoffert recalls QuickScan:

It was a very sexy demonstration. QuickScan was a display engine that drove a black box capable of showing multiple windows of live video and compositing.

Perlman had previously designed a parallel-processing graphics system at Atari, and then a massively parallel 3D animation chip at Coleco before joining Apple. He had achieved QuickScan by finding a new way to manipulate graphics.

Rather than adding a lot of horsepower to do the graphics acceleration, we’ve figured out a new way of looking at graphics so that motion doesn’t have to cost you processor cycles.

Perlman then showed how he could take a Mac-generated animation called “Pencil Text”, and compress it down from 1.6 Gbytes to 3 Mbytes. Such technological feats hinted at what was needed to make digital video editing a possibility, but despite industry wide acclaim, senior Apple management support for QuickScan was weak. 

Apple Products President Jean-Louis Gassee was abrupt, but fair with his forecast.

The biggest technical hurdle is the development of “symmetrical, layered, real-time video compression and decompression. That’s a combination of mathematics and silicon that the industry hasn’t licked yet.

Eric Hoffert adds:

The prevailing wisdom was to handle video with MPEG, processed by a chipset on the motherboard, but I knew we could achieve some form of video without hardware. Over the summer we decided to figure it out and make it work.

Hoffert worked with senior research scientist Gavin Miller, and summer intern Lee Migdholl.

We tested and tried a whole bunch of compression algorithms to see which ones we could make work in software only. One that caught our eye was our own development of ColorCell++, and we reengineered it, and optimised it to take a block of imagery and break it down into two primary colors, and create a set of interpolated colors to create a four-color block with high image quality for image compression. 

We called it Road Pizza, and it evolved from there into an advanced software image and video compression technique.

Apple scientist Peter Hoddie recalls:

Road Pizza is a name for animals compressed on a road when they are run over, and Road Pizza tried to compress images and video (not animals) - but of course the quality was always supposed to be lovely and indeed was not to appear as road kill (unless presumably the compression ratio was really high..)    

Hoffert continues:

Road Pizza was a relatively fast and easy way to do real time video compression so we tested it on various sizes of video files and settled on 80x60 pixels, what would later be called ‘postage stamp’ video.

The Ampex Corporation of Redwood City may not have invented video recording or electronic editing but it was the company that had prospered most from the adoption of video over film. 

Despite massive profits from a wide spectrum of clients, it had baulked at progressing its editing products beyond a method to encourage sales of its 2” machines. 

Ampex was so entrenched in preserving videotape as the medium of its success, that management passed on acquiring Montage Corporation outright, decided against collaborating with Apple Computer or buying Hewlett-Packard. It had mothballed the digital editing system Pterodactyl, and was yet to ship the Falcon digital effects device and the paint system code-named Tatanka. However it could not ignore the arrival of Avid and EMC. Ampex needed to offer random access products to stay relevant, and to halt the sales advances into its core markets. 

Having ignored the opportunity to leverage its own expertise in digital video with Pterodactyl it didn’t have the time to start development from scratch so it decided to buy Bill Warner’s company. 

Ampex Editing division VP, Bob Slutske recalls:

They sent Fred Azad, Ampex’s Director of Engineering, and I over to Boston to buy Avid Technology. I had met Bill Warner on several occasions at trade shows and I knew he was going to make a success of that business but I also knew that it was going to be a very short conversation about Ampex acquiring his company. 

In August, Apple CEO John Sculley went on stage to deliver the Boston 1989 Macworld Expo keynote, and told the audience that, “the winds of technology are at our back.”

He took out a Sony 8mm camcorder, taped shots of the audience and edited them into a presentation. Sculley used the MediaMaker software package created by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Interactive Television Unit in collaboration with Apple’s own Multimedia Laboratory. MediaMaker was able to control a variety of input sources from tape decks to laser disc players and acquire clips through third party video boards. Digitised video and audio clips or graphics were stored in ‘Collections’ and displayed in scrollable windows as individual picture icons (picons). The icons could display timecode and duration information, and be used to graphically assemble a presentation onto what was called ‘the track’ using simple point-and-click instructions from a mouse. 

Apple also demonstrated the Mac based professional editing systems, Larry Seehorn’s Midas 1 and the Avid/1 Media Composer in its Apple TV exhibit. Expo attendees Michael Williams and Michael Olivier saw the demonstrations of digital video on the Macintosh. Williams recalls: 

I saw a demo of the Avid and it blew my mind. It was easy to see that the days of A/B Roll editing on systems like Paltex, CMX and Mach One were numbered.

Olivier adds:

I was between jobs and went to the Boston MacWorld show and was bowled over by the Avid demo! I talked with people in the booth and got invited back to their office in Burlington to interview, where I met Joe Rice, their lead UI designer. I didn’t take a job with Avid, but for years later I would hound Joe to come out to California, and at least once I called him in the wintertime when it was nice in California to try to lure him out :) 

Olivier would soon be employed, creating a nonlinear editing system but not at Avid.

Away from the main keynote, Steve Perlman repeated a demonstration of the QuickScan hardware box that he had run at SIGGRAPH, and at an Apple University meeting. Although the feat had been achieved using custom silicon, popular columnist Stewart Alsop was intrigued to know where Apple was headed with the technology.

Indeed what Perlman demonstrated, if the chip can be manufactured for reasonable cost and implemented in a mainstream computer design, will ultimately outclass what IBM has announced with…Digital Video Interactive (DVI). 

Unknown to all, including many within Apple itself, the Warhol team were already working on a software approach to digital video. The Warhol team of Perlman, Eric Hoffert, Peter Hoddie, Lee Migdholl and Gavin Miller tested their Road Pizza software video codec on an image sequence that had been created by MIT’s Labs. Hoffert recalls:

When I saw that sequence running on a standard Mac I just thought Wow! This is going to change the world! Pretty soon after we showed it to senior Apple management, and they were very impressed.

The complete QuickTime story is available in John Buck’s book, ‘Timeline 2’. Available at iBooks and Amazon.
More stories here 

Posted at 8:55pm.

December 2nd 2011

How Avid came to Apple.

This is the monthly excerpt from John Buck’s book, Timeline. The ebook is sold at Amazon and Apple iBooks

———————

The annual SIGGRAPH convention was a melting pot of the latest in graphics and animation. Digital F/X had already demonstrated its DF/X 200 Digital Production System at the 1988 NAB conference, and with several months of refinement it debuted a shipping product from its booth. CEO Steve Mayer described it as:

…a video post-production system aimed at editors who wanted to enhance their material using special effects, paint and video typography tools included with the system’s software…to take all the pictures you’ve gotten from the field and put them together with all the special effects to tell a story in an interesting way.

Digital F/X collaboration with Apple stopped with Steve Jobs’ departure but Mayer was succinct with the press:

We’re not tied to a particular platform. From a purely practical standpoint when we started working on the system, there wasn’t an open Mac. 

General manager Chuck Clarke recalls the engineering that was required to deliver professional video on Windows.

Of course we were using the latest 386 chips because they could handle multitasking, that’s why we had chosen them but the O/S wasn’t as capable so we had to write a custom version of DOS. The API layer, which we called Virtual Video Interface (VVI), separated the hardware from DOS and Windows. When you switched from say the real time effects mode to the paint system you were switching state from the Effects DOS to the Paint DOS to the title DOS all with Windows on top. 

We figured Microsoft would fix this, eventually.

Apple CEO John Sculley visited Digital F/X, and within weeks Apple had joined Adobe, Intel, Kleiner-Perkins, and others as an investor. Mayer told the press:

I think it reflects Apple’s commitment and shows its interest in multimedia. We have a common interest in how computers and video work together.

Even with its renewed interest in desktop video, Apple’s first professional editing tool would not come from Digital F/X. It would come from a tiny start-up just yards away. A company that was not even using Apple hardware. The Avid team set up a prototype system inside the 1988 SIGGRAPH booth of their former employer Apollo Computer. Bill Warner recalls:

It didn’t really edit or do much, it was used to playback a series of images to create a ‘single’ image across multiple video monitors.

Eric Peters recalls:

It was designed to kind of mislead people a bit. It was back in the days when building and using video walls was a big deal so we showed them a way to use a computer and run a small program to take multiple streams of video, digitise them and put them together as a video wall within the computer. Otherwise you had to build a video wall itself with a couple of dozen colour monitors and a controller that would split up the image and do all the processing before you could program it, and that was an expensive proposition for many companies. 

Apple product manager Tyler Peppel was also at SIGGRAPH. 

I went along to the Avid demonstration, and spoke with Bill Warner. The functionality of their device was very limited but very exciting and running on an Apollo workstation. I told Bill, ‘You have the right application but the wrong hardware’. He asked me ‘What do you mean?’. I told him that I worked for Apple and that Avid was made for the Mac but I could sense that Bill thought the Mac was a toy. 

The chance encounter was foremost in Tyler Peppel’s mind when he returned to Apple in California. He wanted to convince Bill Warner that the Macintosh was more than capable of handling video, and he decided that there was only one way to do it. 

Also demonstrating at SIGGRAPH was AT&T’s Bell Laboratories. Eric Hoffert, Michael Potmesil and the Holmdel team displayed a modular parallel architecture graphics supercomputer called the Pixel Machine, that used a SUN workstation to create 3D graphics and ray-traced images. Eric Hoffert recalls:

In one of our tests we loaded up the frame buffer with a series of full frame video images, and then played them back at 10-15 frames per second. When I saw that happen, a spark went off in my mind, imagine if I could do this on a personal computer. 

WhileHoffert’s previous personal computer had been an Apple II he had since bought a Macintosh.

Buying that Mac was a hugely disruptive event in my life, in a positive way. It changed my life. Here I was working in the labs on highly complex 3D graphics I was hungry to work out a way to bring those kinds of capabilities to my Mac. I didn’t consider a hardware approach; I wanted to work on software based digital video because I thought it could be a huge development for personal computing in the future. 

_________

Tyler Peppel spoke with his Apple Computer colleague Michael Tchao:

Michael and I decided to immediately send our most powerful computer at the time, the Mac IIx, to Bill Warner’s office in Burlington so that it was there when he returned from the SIGGRAPH show. We were so excited that we sent them to Avid, at no charge.

The Avid team returned to Boston from SIGGRAPH, and found a large delivery waiting for them. Curt Rawley recalls what happened on that fateful day:

We came to work that day, and here were two Apple Mac IIx’s that had been FedEx’d to our office. We thought, “what do we do with these things?” Surely they can’t do video, they must be slower than the Apollo workstations that we knew so well. 

Despite their reservations they set up the two Mac IIx computers as Eric Peters recalls:

The Macintosh computers we received weren’t even released product yet; they didn’t even have cases. They were brand new, pre-release machines, and each one had two monitors. We had never seen a computer with two monitors before!  Then within a day or so we got a knock on the door from a fellow named George Maydwell who told us he was Apple’s representative to help us port our code to the Mac OS. 

We were just blown away by all of that.

While it would ultimately prove beneficial to both companies, Apple’s generosity caused major problems for the tiny startup Avid. It not only needed more software engineers to progress the existing editing device on the Apollo workstation, it was now faced with the possibility that it had to simultaneously begin coding the whole application for the Apple OS. 

After twelve months as a Boston based teacher Joe Rice decided he wasn’t ‘cut out’ for the education system, and started looking for a new job. In his search Rice spoke with former MIT colleague Claude von Roesgen. 

Claude was a professional videographer, and filmmaker who had studied with the legendary filmmaker Richard Leacock, and was also a close friend of Bill Warner. Then Bill was trying to get as many people as he could to come and have a look at his work at Avid and to give him feedback, especially professionals. While Claude was talking with Bill, he mentioned that I was looking for a job and within 24 hours Bill had called me and I was over at Avid watching a demo. 

Very quickly after that demonstration, I made the decision to work for him. 

I didn’t come into Avid selling myself, as a UI designer per se, no way was I an expert in UI design. In my previous jobs at Lexidata and Lifeline Systems, I had started to do user interface design but not officially. I would work on something and they would look at it and say that’s got a really nice UI’. 

Back then it wasn’t even really a consideration to look for someone who was good at UI design.

Rice accepted Warner’s job offer.

Years later von Roesgen confided his thoughts on the original Avid demonstration to Rice.

He said he had remembered shaking his head at the demo and thinking ‘this will never work!’. Claude was more than a videographer; he has a great technical knowledge of television production and a degree in Electrical engineering. He didn’t think it was possible technically to make it work and he thought Bill was aiming too high and that he should aim lower and drop the real time playback of video.

Rice was unaware of von Roesgen’s concerns when he started at Avid. He was charged with building a new UI based on editors’ feedback from the NAB outing. Bill Warner recalls:  

Joe has this great ability to look at things and say, ‘We have to make this into something that is consistent and clean and simple and makes sense. His attitude was let’s give the users the basics first and slowly build it up later, let’s not try too much too soon and confuse things. We’ll just muck it up. 

The early success of Avid is very much because of that approach; it was attractive because people weren’t afraid of it. They looked at it and said, “Oh I could do that”.

Tom Ohanian worked with Joe Rice to replicate beta bugs, and finesse Avid’s editing tools.  

There were early things like creating what would become known as a three point edit. Then we spent days talking about the notion of inclusive or exclusive frame counts. When an editor was parked on a frame and wanted to add a 30 frame transition did he or she type in plus 30 or plus 29? All of those fundamental decisions on where say functions were placed on the keyboard were critical. 

The trim mode functionality, how you enter numbers, the way you subtract had to work in concert with the editor’s own workflow. You could probably argue in hindsight that the Avid, particularly in the early days, was more video centric than film centric in its model. We had to get it right at the beginning and I guess the product’s longevity proves that we did well.

Bill Warner recalls the ever-evolving Avid:

We had this amazing team with Eric, who for example as Chief Engineer, still understood how important sync was but knew how hard it was to achieve. Tom who would be tireless in working with users and the in-house team always saying, “It has to do this because this is what an editor does” and Joe with his vision.

Joe Rice continues:

One of the reasons I had taken the job with Avid was that I had looked at other companies and other projects around the Boston area when I was searching for a new job and Avid stood out. I thought that not only is this an exciting idea and interesting in an interesting field but clearly someone is going to do it this way. 

There was no question for me that video was going to be edited in this way, in my mind. I couldn’t imagine that people were still going to be using tapes ten years from then. I realised that if not this company, then it would be some other company. In other words what Bill was proposing was NOT a crazy idea, not one where you would wonder as you worked on it, will people even want this if we make it? This was an idea that professional people clearly wanted.

Pete Fasciano adds:

By this time Bill had reduced all the research and NAB debriefing notes to a final form, and it looked remarkably like what we had when we started out at the start of 1988. Avid/1 would be a transition editor with a simplified timeline, and there would be three options when it came to showing picture icons. One was the option for a timeline with no pictures, a timeline with an image for the first and last frames of a clip or a timeline with all the frames of a clip. Overall the UI could be modified for personal preferences and was starting to feel pretty mature.

Curt Rawley recalls Warner persuaded his staff to forgo carpet for a few more weeks of funding.

I remember having many conversations with Bill Warner about how much we could do with how little money. After all it was his vision, his idea. Bill is the best product manager I have ever met, period. He totally believes in what he is doing and could see a way to make this product dream become a reality. There is no one who is more convincing, more persuasive or with more energy than Bill Warner. If there is such a person, I haven’t met them.

However Warner’s enthusiasm came at a confessed cost.

I was just adding more and more complexity to the product and therefore to the code. Whilst Jeff was happy to keep writing code and Eric was always keen for a technical challenge, we were headed for trouble because no-one was saying, “No”.

Warner was also aware of the editing market’s changing mood and expectations, so he called editor Alan Miller at Rebo Studios in New York during their morning commutes.

Bill was always keen to find out more from editors, and Rebo had established a technology arm called Rebo Research where two very smart engineers, Barry Minnerly and Abby Levine had created ReStore. It enabled any Macintosh imaging software to run in HD and they told me that, in their opinion, the Avid team needed to get off Apollo and onto a Mac.  And I told Bill the very same thing.

Around this time Eric Peters became ill, and was ordered home for a week’s bed rest. Just as Ken Kiesel had created the cueing algorithm for Montage while away from the distractions of an office environment, Peters made a surprising discovery without his colleagues. 

I had one of the Macintosh IIx’s delivered to my house, and put by my bed while I was in a feverish stupor. When I measured the I/O throughput at the start of the week it was 50 k/bytes per second and by the end of the week I had it up to 1.2 megabytes per second, which was a totally unheard of bandwidth in those days. When it comes to nonlinear editing and Apple and Avid, it was quite fortunate that I became sick that week! You never know what might have happened had I not! 

The Macintosh computers were far more capable than the Apollo workstations. Bill Warner recalls:

The large disk read and write speeds, the key to putting up video on the screen, on the Mac were 1200K bytes per second compared to about 200K on the Apollo! 45 frames per second for the Mac (128x96 pixel “frames) versus 9 frames per second for the Apollo. These two data points were absolutely astounding. The 1200K was the theoretical performance of the disk itself. And that was through the file system (if you did it right.) The 45 frames per second meant that the holy grail of 30 frames per second was possible.

Warner was elated with Peters’ discovery but it meant a major decision for the fledgling company:

Because Tyler had sent us the Macs, Jeff and Joe were already porting the editing code for the Apollo over to Apple but for the time being we kept development going on both platforms. Suddenly we had six months to go to launch, and we had to make a decision. 

The biggest decision of our professional lives.

The full story is at Amazon and iBooks.

(below is an excerpt about Final Cut Pro and iMovie)

Posted at 10:37pm.

October 27th 2011

Steve Jobs, Final Cut and iMovie

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The monthly excerpt from John Buck’s book - Timeline - available at Amazon or Apple.


There are no ifs, buts or maybes 

Having delivered a keynote to the Mac faithful in January 1998, Steve Jobs presented the National Association of Broadcasters conference keynote address in Las Vegas.

We’re dying to work with you guys. We can bring some architecture to this Tower of Babel that’s happening today,

Jobs wanted to win back support for the Mac in the professional video market and pointed to QuickTime’s support for the GIF, JPEG, TIFF file formats, and video output standards like FireWire as proof. 

QuickTime architect Peter Hoddie came on stage and introduced several applications based on QuickTime 3.0, and then handed the stage over to Randy Ubillos for what seemed to be Final Cut’s last appearance. 

Ubillos recalls his chat with Jobs after the successful demonstration.

We spoke backstage about the possibility of Final Cut going to Apple and I’m glad I did, because it ended up being very good for everyone on the project. I mean initially most people within my group thought Why Apple? But I thought, this may just work.

In the days after Randy Ubillos’ Final Cut demonstration at the 1998 NAB, Macromedia’s stock climbed as analysts speculated on the company’s future. Computergram magazine signalled the first of many rumblings about Final Cut’s future.

Macromedia Inc hasn’t been saying very much about its next generation Final Cut digital video editing, compositing and effects tool since Compaq Computer first previewed it at NAB. But the hype machine is now beginning to build up for the tool, which is due to be launched during the first half of this year on Windows 95, Windows NT and Macintoshes. Rumours suggest that Apple Computer now very much focused on the digital content creation market, is very interested in the tool, which uses its QuickTime 3.0 technology, even to the extent that it was considering buying the tool outright. 

Final Cut’s product manager, Tim Myers recalls:

We were pretty unsure about whether a move to Apple at that time was going to be a good thing or a bad thing. It certainly wasn’t in its second wave of success, far from it and it was very questionable whether they were going to be able to pull it off. And a lot of us were thinking if Apple is struggling just selling computers right now why would they want to support and sell an editing product?

Project manager Will Stein had moved to Macromedia from Apple, and now it seemed he was headed back there.

I will be the first to admit that I was not crazy about the idea of going back. The Apple I left (under Gil Amelio) felt like it was going down fast. Apple under Steve (Jobs) felt like it had a chance, but the company had been severely damaged.

Over the ensuing weeks, Isaac Babbs and Andrew Baum spoke with Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller ( a former staffer at Macromedia) about the acquisition of the Final Cut intellectual property. It seemed that a one off payment from Apple would secure the Macromedia software assets, however for the project to be a success somebody needed to convince the Final Cut team to stay together, and continue coding and building the product. Andrew Baum recalls:

We agreed pretty quickly that we were going to make a deal on the software. Steve then asked to have all the engineers and other people involved with the project over to Apple to talk with him. 

Will Stein recalls:

I remember getting a call from Rob Burgess at home on a Saturday morning. Rob told me the deal with Apple looked like it would go through, but that getting a critical mass of the development team on board was going to be part of the package. Since some of our senior engineers were predominately Windows developers, we anticipated this being a tough sell. 

Baum continues:

Of course you have to remember that Apple itself at that stage was not in great shape, this was pre-iMac. But Steve talked us through some of his plans especially his ideas around FireWire, which involved the unreleased laptop code named Pismo. It would have FireWire on the motherboard and be released as the PowerBook G3.

A sale to Apple would allow Macromedia to recoup the $10m that it had spent creating Final Cut. Isaac Babbs recalls the deal:

There are no ifs, buts or maybes. Because Macromedia was now totally focused on the Web, it would sell Final Cut or shut it down. But the deal did seem to happen magically. Steve Jobs had decided he wanted to make sure people could edit video on a Mac and he wanted them using QuickTime. Serendipitously we had one of the best editing products in development and it was QuickTime based. 

Because Randy Ubillos had become good friends with Apple’s QuickTime leader Peter Hoddie, and Director of Engineering Tim Schaff over a number of years, Jobs probably knew more about it than anyone outside of Macromedia. 

Baum is clear in his recollections of the sale.

If Apple hadn’t decided to buy Final Cut then, it would not exist today, it was that fine a line. 

Babbs adds:

Steve was smart enough to see the value in Final Cut, and he executed the desktop video-editing paradigm to perfection. It was a brilliant move by him.

Final Cut would be perfect to drive sales of larger and more expensive Macs, but Jobs had new consumer Macs in development that would use Firewire I/O for the first time. He knew that the technology would make for a paradigm shift in desktop editing so he decided to ship a video editing application with the new computers. 

Jobs approached Adobe Systems, and asked them to create a consumer version of Premiere that Apple could bundle with the unreleased Mac code-named Kihei. With Apple’s future still uncertain, and Premiere sales growing on the Wintel platform, Adobe said no.

As a result Jobs decided to build the app with an in-house team, and he turned to Sina  Tamaddon. With the acquisition of NeXT Software, Tamaddon had joined Apple as the head of Worldwide Service and Support, then the Newton Group before Jobs asked him to lead a new division called Applications. 

Another NeXT alum Glenn Reid had moved away from contract work to be VP of Engineering at Artifex Software. He returned to the office one day to find a surprise.

There was literally a message on my answering machine from Sina Tamaddon’s assistant at Apple, and when I called her back she wouldn’t say what it was about. I didn’t really want to go work at Apple. I said, ‘tell Sina that if he wants to hire me, forget it, because I’m happy with what I’m doing’. Sina at the time had a business card that stated his role simply as, ‘Office of the CEO’. He was indeed Steve’s right arm in creating what became the Applications Division, which is now many hundreds or thousands strong.

Reid decided to take the meeting. 

————————————————

Steve Jobs held a news conference to make a watershed announcement. He announced the first iMac.

I am incredibly thrilled to tell you that Apple is getting back into the consumer market. 

Jobs proudly unveiled the iMac, an all-in-one device made of translucent plastic that looked very different from any other personal computer that had shipped. 

Apple has created a worthy successor to the original Macintosh as a fully integrated computer. No separate monitor, no rat’s nest of power cords and no external drives necessary. 

The new machine drew equal amounts of praise and criticism for Apple’s decision to embrace the emerging USB interface, drop all use of floppy disks, and not include a Firewire port. While Apple had no plans to add disk access, it was quietly preparing a FireWire enabled iMac. 

Elsewhere at Apple company lawyers had completed the due diligence process on the Macromedia Final Cut deal, and cleared up all issues concerning the use of picture icons (picons) in the editing interface for a potential breach of the Montage patents owned by the Haberman family. 

It was time to go public. 

On May 11, 1998 MacWEEK reported that Apple had bought the Final Cut code.

The hand-off includes the technologies in Final Cut, the long-awaited QuickTime 3.0-based video editing package from Macromedia. However, sources cautioned, Apple has not yet determined whether it will ship Final Cut in its current form.

Spokesman Russell Brady told the press that Apple had acquired:

…technology and engineering resources from Macromedia, that will broaden Apple’s effort to make QuickTime the cross-platform digital media and digital video standard. 

MacWEEK believed that Apple had convinced the thirty plus staff from Macromedia’s audiovisual division to continue coding and building Final Cut at Cupertino.

Sources said Randy Ubillos, lead developer on Final Cut and the original author of Adobe Premiere, has moved over to Apple.

The Final Cut team continued to work from the Macromedia offices for a short period before transferring to Cupertino. Steve Jobs held a welcoming for them in the executive offices at Apple on June 1st 1998. Will Stein recalls:

Steve had the entire development group meet him in the boardroom at Apple to discuss the acquisition. It was a great meeting, and most of us left feeling more optimistic about Apple as a company, and Apple as a good fit for Final Cut.

Michael Wohl remembers:

Steve said, “We’re going to give you a $50m advertising budget. What do you think of that?” And I thought, well there’s probably only 15,000 users out there so that’s $3 grand per person!

While Apple was keen to embrace digital video, Macromedia was happy to be out of the game. It had transitioned to new applications like Flash and Dreamweaver, that now accounted for 20 percent of the company’s sales. CEO Burgess had picked the move to a soft platform ahead of his peers. Despite the acquisition Isaac Babbs remained at Macromedia.

It was a great time, and I guess I was the custodian of Final Cut for 17 months. My job was done, there wasn’t a role for me at Apple, and I was dedicated to Macromedia and perfectly happy to move onto other things.

Although Andrew Baum had worked to oversee finance for Macromedia’s Audiovisual division, his broad understanding of Final Cut, and its sales potential was a sought after skill for Apple. He recalls:

When we first went over (to Apple) DV wasn’t even really in the cross hairs of the team. It was to get a shipping product out the door. 

Baum would go from guiding Final Cut into Apple’s hands, to a position where he oversaw worldwide marketing activities including advertising, collateral, event participation and promotions, web site content, and press activities. 

Of course once we were at Apple that changed, and I ended up working on some of the DV development under the threat of being immediately fired should anyone find out exactly what it was I was doing. I couldn’t work with anyone outside the group. 

No one else at Apple. 

Period.

Tim Myers, the Macromedia Video Products Product manager recalls the move.

When we started, Apple were still looking like a fifty fifty chance of being around for very long.

Then came another unexpected decision from a former ally in desktop publishing, Adobe. The Final Cut group had barely settled into their new office when Apple management met to consider a request by Adobe to shut down the project. With the Macromedia transaction completed and now public, it was only a matter of days before the makers of Premiere, made their displeasure of a rival editing software package on the Mac known to Apple. 

Despite the rebuff on making a consumer version of Premiere for the upcoming FireWire iMac, Steve Jobs was in a tough position. Sales of Macs were driven in part by the sales of Adobe software products, and should the dilemma escalate, Apple could lose a critical supply partner and re-ignite fears of bankruptcy. In order to placate one of the largest makers of Mac software, Apple presented a business case to Adobe that argued Final Cut was drastically different to Premiere, and ultimately beneficial for the desktop market overall. 

Eventually Adobe Systems backed away from its threats to Apple’s newly acquired Final Cut. 

When an employment agent acting for Apple approached Mike Mages, he saw an opportunity to leave. 

Once the opportunity to go to Apple came up I leapt at it. I was familiar with the KeyGrip work and had read the one line corporate announcement about the acquisition of a team from Macromedia so I knew what I was getting into. I also knew Tim Myers from his brief stint at KUB and had met Randy Ubillos on a few occasions. Apple was in a big resurgence and I wanted to be part of that.

Free to pursue the evolution of the product Randy Ubillos and the team set themselves a goal of launching at the January 1999 Macworld conference in San Francisco. They hired a consultant to re-work the user interface, while maintaining the back-end KeyGrip code. Andrew Baum explains:

We started to evolve the use of DV, we scrapped the PC version and re-designed the UI dramatically - and for the better. We fine-tuned the use of QuickTime and the Mac O/S. Of course when Steve Jobs says something has to be done by a certain time, it gets done. 

————————

You can’t afford to miss a beat 

With Pinnacle’s success on the PC home video was once again being touted as a ‘killer app’, this time by the New York Times. Drew McManus, a product manager for Adobe told the newspaper:

This is a market that’s going to be big, as big as digital editing of photographs has become.

At around the same time, Steve Jobs stood before a white board with a plan for a new and revolutionary video editing product. With him in the Apple meeting room were Sina Tamaddon and Glenn Reid who had both worked with Jobs at NeXT. Reid recalls the brief:

The nearest example of what management wanted was Avid Cinema, though it was a bit too simplistic and at the time it (Cinema) didn’t work with DV. In fact, when I began work, QuickTime didn’t support DV yet either. It was an emerging standard.

Reid recalls:

I was reluctant at first, but it was the perfect project for a guy who likes to build software. Secret, interesting, very few people involved, and nurtured straight from the top. 

The new product would launch with the release of the upcoming DV capable iMacs, and be called iMovie. Reid adds:

iMovie was, as far as I know, the first ground-up application written at Apple in over ten years. It’s common for big companies to try to develop new products and fail, because it’s difficult even in the best of worlds, and large companies seldom are the best of worlds. However Steve Jobs manages to create a true start-up environment within Apple by removing almost all vestiges of process other than what’s truly needed. 

He understands building products, of all kinds, better than anyone I’ve ever known.

I’ve never had such fun building a piece of software, nor worked with as many great people. At most companies a small, secret project is greeted with scorn and scepticism. At Apple it’s understood that it is likely the ‘Next Big Thing’ and everybody helps, without asking questions.

It’s amazing. 

Reid reached out for help to a recently unemployed Priscilla Shih with whom he had worked at Fractal.

In a fairly vague email, Glenn asked whether I would be interested in working on a secret project at Apple. The secrecy surrounding the project piqued my interest, so I met with Glenn to see what he was up to. Glenn mentioned that he was recruited to implement an easy-to-use video-editing program geared towards the “average Joe”. At the time, although there were many paint programs (some sophisticated, some rudimentary) available to consumers, video-editing programs were mainly aimed at professionals, even though consumers had access to affordable, decent video cameras for years. I was excited at the prospect of working with Glenn again, and working on software that would make video editing accessible to the masses. At the same time, I was also very excited to have the opportunity to work on a project Steve Jobs was directly involved with. 

Reid adds:

My marching orders were to derive the editing package from the KeyGrip/Final Cut source base. 

Shih remembers the first weeks on the iMovie project:

When I first started at Apple, I was tasked with learning as much as I could about Final Cut, since at the time; the plan was to extract the “simple-to-use consumer video editing program” from the Final Cut code base. As I followed the tutorial and studied the code, I was soon overwhelmed by the complexity of Final Cut Pro’s user interface, and the technical video editing terms. Like Glenn, I had zero experience editing videos. I never ever owned or operated a video camera before. 

At first I thought that the team’s lack of video experience was a detriment to the project, but I have come to realize that it actually benefitted the project. It enabled the team to put ourselves in the shoes of our intended audience, and make video editing intuitive (and fun).

After working on the project for a couple of weeks, Reid was told not to check any source code into the KeyGrip/Final Cut ‘source tree’ as he recalls:

I decided to just start from scratch. At this point KeyGrip was built with Apple’s MPW software environment, which I found painful and outdated, so I fired up CodeWarrior, a great product by any measure, and hit Command-N for “New Project”. It was that simple, I literally started from nothing.

Timeline 2 - John Buck

Below are full details on both volumes of Timeline

Posted at 11:02am.

August 13th 2011

Welcome to Timeline

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Hello, thanks for visiting the online site for my book, “Timeline - A history of editing”.

I have released Timeline as two distinct Volumes. Number#1 covers the years 1898 -> 1988, while #2 looks at 1988 ->2000.

Timeline contains exclusive interviews with all of the key players including Randy Ubillos, Bill Warner, Adrian Ettlinger, Ralph Guggenheim, John Molinari, Bruce Rady, Dave Bargen, Ivan Maltz, Bill Ferster, Glenn Reid, Ron Barker, Chet Schuler, Paul Bamborough and the QuickTime team.

It gives an insight into the development of CMX, Montage, Final Cut Pro,  Avid, EMC, Media 100, EditDroid, Lightworks, D-Vision, iMovie, in:sync, Premiere, Ediflex, ImMIX, Link, and many other systems for the first time. 

The books are text only versions. I am looking to release a ‘print on demand’ paper version with text, images and graphics at NAB 2012.

Unfortunately the only way to distribute a document securely, is to use the copyright protection technology at the four main ebook sites, and they do not allow me to offer a “pay what you like model”. I hope the cost of a few coffees or one beer is not too much.

You can buy Volume One for Kindle here

You can buy Volume Two for Kindle here

You can buy Volume One for Apple iBooks here.

You can buy Volume Two for Apple iBooks here

B&N Volume One for Nook here.

B&N Volume Two for Nook here

Sony offer the book for their Sony Reader device here

If you don’t have a hardware device like the Kindle, Nook or iPad, no problem.

You can download an Amazon reader for your PC, Mac, iPad or iPhone here. You can also use Amazon’s new web based reader here.

Barnes and Noble have a desktop reader here. 

Here is a sample of the Timeline book layout created by the team at Atrissi Design in the Netherlands. It has ‘dummy text’ inserted in place of the real thing but you should get a sense of the design and feel of the print on demand version of Timeline, due at NAB in 2012

As well as reading the book you can join an online forum. The founders of Avid, D-Vision, EMC, Media 100 and many others have joined the Timeline Group at LinkedIn.

Feel free to join them. I would be interested to hear your feedback on the book via email enrichedbooks at gmail dot com. 

John

Timeline 2 - John Buck

Posted at 10:18am.