LITMIR.BIZ

      In the spring of 1924, a small Germany company Lyta Cinema Works built the first dedicated editing device. A few months later the American made Moviola went on sale in Hollywood and become a huge success but it was sixty five years before a digital equivalent arrived for professionals.

      In the intervening years individuals, and teams imagined tools that could join images together in the blink of an eye.

      They trialled technology, experimented with the impossible, quit secure jobs for the unknown, and ran out of money. All the while, they tried to ship the best editing product possible. For many years their stories went untold.

      Hoping to solve an amicable dispute with Boris Yamnitsky, who had just acquired Media 100, I found myself at the local library staring at books that talked about 'how to' edit but not how editing came to be.

      My casual conversation was now a niggling annoyance. I turned to the web and found two names listed in submissions to the U.S Patent Office about electronic editing.

      Adrian Ettlinger and William Warner.

      One had created the CBS RAVE and the other, Avid. They graciously took my phone calls, retold stories of electronic editing’s rich history, and connected me with lesser known individuals who had created the tools we use today.

      Adrian and Bill helped then actively encouraged me.

      Bill made time to talk, linked me to others and poured me coffee in his kitchen. Adrian braved the wet streets of Manhattan to tell me, over lunch at the Chiam, about a remarkable period of innovation.

      My part-time quest changed again when two key contributors passed away.

      Art Schneider and Jack Calaway both made huge contributions to editing, yet their efforts had gone largely unheralded.

      I decided to record the history of editing because it fades. Timeline zigs and zags from people to places, within companies, across continents.

      People's lives rarely run from A to B.

      Former Xerox scientist David Canfield Smith told me:

      “In any revolution, technological or otherwise, there are interesting characters. In fact, the characters often are the story”.

      This edition

      Timeline: Analog Two April 2018 is the second in a series.

      I am updating the digital version regularly with new interviews and images to make it more interesting but at no extra cost to you.

      This update has revisions, corrections, slight additions and further spell checks. Despite being an Australian author, versed and schooled in UK English, I have adopted US spellings and grammar for the non-quoted sections of the series.

      The book will take you about 4 hours to read.

      William Herbert Orr, 81, of Huntsville, Alabama was a key contributor to electronic editing by virtue of buying CMX Systems and building it into a vibrant independent company with an 80% share of editing system sales worldwide. Sadly Bill passed away August 22, 2016. I offer my condolences to his family and former colleagues. We all miss him.

      I have made recorded contact with all known copyright owners. Email me - velocite at live dot com - if you see material that's incorrect or inaccurate.

      Timeline 2

       "Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quiet different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming.”

      Sergei Eisenstein

      1. The race for CMX

      In January 1970 a Pan American World Airways flight (above) from New York to London became the Boeing 747’s first commercial flight. So began the Seventies.

      Eric Peters was the first person from his home town of North Vassalboro to attend an Ivy League school. Peters wanted to complete two degrees at Cornell University, in engineering and computer sciences, but Cornell didn’t teach the latter. Peters recalls his advisor’s reaction

       He said, ‘I guess we will have to put something together for that because we don't have a computer sciences program right now.' Cornell was very flexible and accommodating and created one.

      Peters graduated with both degrees and started as a software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the Small Systems Engineering Group. DEC, or Digital as it was often called, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1950s to the 1990s. It eventually became second only to IBM.

       It was an intensely creative and challenging and open working environment, I guess somewhat like Google is today, DEC was back then. My relatives asked me where I worked and I would say, ‘Digital’ and they would say, ‘Oh you make watches!’ It was the only thing they knew that was digital, a digital watch.

      While it became famous for the VAX line of computers, Digital's financial success was built on the PDP (Programmed Data Processors) minicomputers. It created the PDP-1 in 1959 and then iterated faster more capable versions through the next decade.

       I worked on a number of real time operating systems projects and was part of the four-man team that created RT-11, the real time (RT) operating system for DEC’s PDP-11 microcomputers. I gained a very good background in real time programming which turned out to be very important for editing!

       Which is certainly real time to the extreme because there aren't many applications that are that hard as playing real time media.

      Eric Peters was a key contributor to Avid in future but with the release of the PDP-11/20 in January 1970, he had helped create the platform for the world's

Скачать книгу