LITMIR.BIZ

      Bill Warner explains what Bedell was trying to achieve with the Apollo workstations.

       When Jeff and I started, the immediate plan was to achieve a system that could replicate what a normal CMX online bay could achieve in the first release! I figured we could write and replicate editing and 2D effects like A.D.O. and dissolves and wipes like the Grass Valley switchers and titling like Dubner’s CBG, all in one box. I thought that surely there isn’t that much to re-creating a process that already exists. You could see the whole online video process as it existed then in any CMX suite.

       In other words we didn’t have to imagine what was needed by editors because we could already see the video and audio processes that were required. The difference of course was that, we wanted to take an analog process and make it digital.

      Bedell began work on an alternative user interface based on Pete Fasciano Oz notes. Naturally the VizWiz cofounder was one of their first visitors.

       I drove out to the Burlington factory and Bill’s showed me how they had progressed the initial HyperCard model that was called ‘V Edit’. It had a strong graphical interface that reflected the mechanics and iconography of a film editing suite

      Warner adds:

       I thought that once we had a working editor then we would learn about the film industry and move onto conquering feature films, straight away. One of my first motivations was to have a movie credit for Avid. I imagined seeing our company logo at the end of a major Hollywood feature. I was pretty naive looking back.

      Jeff Bedell recalls:

       I created an updated version of the filmstrip approach UI from Rick Olha's early iteration with Bill. It was essentially a digital version of dragging a filmstrip across a light box, the approach that Quantel had used with some of their product. It showed all of the frames of a scene together visually, but Pete shook his head. He said ‘this won’t work for video editors’. It doesn’t show you the temporal nature of editing, the flow of editing. It’s fine for still frames and rotoscoping but not for video editing.

      Fasciano continues:

       Bill was very interested in what I had written in the Oz document and Jeff had also built a basic ‘straw man’ version of my Oz brief. At this point I was just an invited guest giving them a number of new thoughts as an extension of what they were already doing. I knew it was critical for linear video editors to use time code as their method of communicating with their material.

       Of course the Avid would need to be frame accurate but it also needed a way to have a transition editing interface where one could trim a frame or add a frame with a plus or minus keystroke. So it was about fine tuning an edit.