Timeline Analog 3 - John Buck Timeline Analog

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than a mouse. The pressure-sensitive pen was another breakthrough as it allowed artists to control, in a natural way, the opacity of the paint applied to their canvas. The paint actually mixed with the colours already on the canvas.

      The Paintbox's real-time graphics were unsurpassed in quality and became crucial to the on-air look of its first customers The Weather Channel, MTV and the BBC. Roger Thornton from Quantel recalls:

       It was not only the broadcasters that took to the Paintbox; postproduction houses too quickly saw its potential and ads such as the Crown Paints 'painting by numbers' and music videos such as director Steve Barron's seminal 'Money for Nothing' for the band Dire Straits, quickly demonstrated its enormous potential.

      The Paintbox gave television producers the ability to create 2-D visuals that had not been accessible away from mainframes and dedicated hardware previously and it hinted at what might be possible with digital editing if the right hardware and software could be built.

      With the rise of affordable chip processing power and the widespread acceptance of personal computers there was a window of opportunity for other companies to take Quantels’ lead and deliver similar capabilities to smaller companies. The two companies that changed broadcast graphics were Dubner and Cubicomp.

      CUBICOMP

      24-year-old Edwin P. Berlin (next page) and Pradeep Mohan established Cubicomp Corporation in Berkeley to create broadcast modelling and animation equipment. Berlin recalls:

       I started Cubicomp because of earlier work I had done with Geoff Gardiner at Grumman Aerospace. In addition to designing fast hardware, we developed efficient algorithms, in that case, for rendering 3D objects composed of textured quadrics bounded by planes.

      We simulated the system in software on a Data General minicomputer and that convinced me that with proper attention to algorithm design, one could do 3D modelling and rendering on a PC, which was unheard of at that time

      Cubicomp had created a way to convert a line drawing of an object into a simulated 3D image for under $20,000 and it soon became the leader in the PC graphics space. Joey Ponthieux recalls:

       Plug and play did not exist and PCs did not come with standard graphics cards that would or could run these graphics applications. There was no NT, no audio, no mice, no Win95, no zip disks and no TNT cards at the local Compusa or Egghead, nothing.

      The CS-5, PictureMaker 3-D and PolyCad10 systems empowered individuals and small companies with capabilities that many found hard to believe as Berlin recalls:

       When we demonstrated the units at SiGGRAPH, people would look under the table and ask, “Is there a VAX under there?”

      Steven Horowitz moved between post-production houses, manufacturers and startups offering advice and building a knowledge base of the emerging editing and graphics industry.

       Cubicomp were the first to make a video animation system on a standard PC, primarily because Ed Berlin is a technical genius. The company set an amazing precedence for a revolutionary tool set with an ease of use not seen before.

      Berlin, Mohan, Jamie Dickson and Steven Crane proved that a small company with brilliant, well-executed ideas could apply digital technology to an analog industry and change it overnight. Cubicomp became an engineering magnet, a mini-Ampex of sorts.

      Michael Olivier had grown up in Berkeley and was dragged into industry.

       I was always experimenting with programming with friends and even back then I was always the guy who understood code and who could see what the user experience should be. I seemed to be able to pull the pieces together in a sensible way

      Olivier attended UC Berkeley but left before graduating to work at 2D games company, Genigraphics.

       It was a very exciting time in the computer industry. They were happy to get people who could program or draw pixels back then! And there really wasn’t any formal training. I became the UI guy there and built their menuing systems and the library that would let other programmers build UIs.

      Olivier didn’t need to leave his home suburb to join Cubicomp

       I was the UI specialist at Cubicomp, back in the days before there were menus so my job was to build the UI and menus for a next generation hierarchical 3d modelling animation package. The early Cubicomp modelling didn’t have sense of connectivity so then we added this hierarchical element that allowed different elements to impact upon others, in essence a skeletal system in modelling which connected all the elements and allowed them to have behavioural relationships.

      ED-80

      Adrian Ettlinger worked away on yet another editing system. He called it the ED80 and like his previous systems it was controlled with a state of the art light pen. The user interface was modelled on an interactive medium as old as Hollywood itself.

      The Script.

      Displayed on a computer screen for the editor would be the production's final script and a text link to camera rushes on the database. Ettlinger completed the first round of coding for the working prototype and sought out opinion to guide him through the next phase.

      Through a mutual friend he arranged for Bill Hogan, the proprietor of post-production facility Ruxton Ltd to fly to Alameda for a demonstration. Hogan had a long and distinguished career in many aspects of film and video and had just been named a co-winner of the Technical Achievement Academy Award for the engineering of the Universal City Studios 24fps color video system.

      The system was used to cut the feature film Norman is that You? as Hogan recalls:

       Obviously I had experienced quite a lot of different methods of electronic editing by this stage and nonlinear was ultimately just the progression of technology applied to a problem. I like technology and I may not be the best at picking all of the trends but I remember thinking that Adrian’s system was definitely a step forward from what we had and not just a ‘me-too’ copy of others.

       The ability to try different edits from the same material and then decide which was better, to me was the fundamental difference with the ED-80. Ultimately you could be more creative and at the same time edit much faster.

      The two men discussed the possibility of working together and marketing a completed ED-80, but it was obvious that there was a great deal of refining over many hours of coding to complete the system. Hogan knew the ideal candidate to assist Ettlinger in the process.

      The young part-time Dubner Computer Systems engineer Andy Maltz was faced with a quandary. His parents had moved from New York to Los Angeles and Maltz knew that he would be spending some time on the West Coast. Then fate stepped in.

      I got a call from Bill Hogan, who ran Ruxton Ltd, but I had no idea who he was in the industry. He told me he had been to the Dubner stand at NAB and had viewed the demonstration reel for the CBG-2. I would discover later that Bill had a real nose for new technology and had quickly decided he wanted to be the first on the West Coast to have a CBG-2, so he watched the entire demo reel that included the credits of the software engineers at the end of the reel.

       He stored away the credit 'Growing States by Andy Maltz' and when he received my resume, he put two and two together. He said, "I see you're coming to California, I'm buying a CBG-2; why don't you come work at Ruxton through summer?"

      Maltz moved to the West coast and into electronic editing.

      MINDSET

      Two former

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