LITMIR.BIZ

      Fasciano drive out to Avid in the evenings after working at VizWiz in traditional editing suites, ring the buzzer and then sit with Warner and Bedell to help refine the Oz system.

       Jeff is a brilliant software engineer, to this day and he took my ideas for Oz and built it very quickly but he also taught me a lot about the work behind GUI design. I was also learning a lot about marketing and product development from Bill because he really understood that.

       So it wasn’t just about me as a postproduction guy telling them what to do, I wasn’t just a so called expert in the editing domain, I was participating in the process of building this startup and trying to anticipate what needed to be done to make it successful so I was learning just as much as they were.

      Bedell filled notebooks with ideas. Ideas he didn’t have time to create.

       We got to most of them, by about 1995!

      Fasciano concludes:

       To his credit Bill realised that they should pursue the Oz model by making two versions of the same product and not as two distinct and separate systems that they built from scratch. The Oz and V Edit systems became two different presentations for investors and editors but Jeff didn’t have to go back and build them independently.

       The fundamental difference between the Oz system and the V Edit system was that Oz was focused on transitions while V was a clip editing system. While my concept was basically built on the CMX timecode paradigm where an editor is creating transitions with numbers, Bill’s system was a visual representation of a film editing bench with bins, film rolls and trims and so forth.

       As it turned out, the brilliance of the first Avid/1 and every Avid system that followed was that they integrated for the first time, the two editing methods, that of film and tape, into one system. It was both a clip editor and a transition editor.

      THE MOLINARIS

      Not far from Avid’s factory office, Data Translation (DT) was already a specialist in data acquisition for customers who required accurate, real-time measurement of analog signals. It sold over a hundred different products that were primarily used inside IBM PS/2 machines for the science and industrial markets.

      Tony Molinari recalls:

       One was the Data Acquisition Group which was basically creating modules that translated analog signals to digital whether it was thermocouples or any form of analog data and the other division was the Imaging Group, which was more for things like machine vision, medical imaging and scientific imaging.

      Data Translation was becoming increasingly successful because it adapted general hardware technology that it built in house into niche products for specific industries. Engineer Ned Kroeker recalls:

       By this stage our Imaging Group had developed everything from 8bit boards with low resolution right through to higher resolution boards, as well as line scanning products.

      DT encouraged third party software companies like Automatix Inc. in nearby Billerica to write programs for its hardware. Once complete it bundled the PC add-in boards with the third party apps and marketed the complete product to specific groups.

      The young product manager charged with marketing the new DT card with Automatix’s Image Analyst program was John Molinari, son of the company's founder. In time, Molinari became the champion of video editors everywhere but for the moment his audience was meteorologists, scientists, industrial engineers and researchers.

      While DT had previously discounted the abilities of Apple’s computers to house its products, several technology shifts occurred to change its position.

      First came the release of the Macintosh II with NuBus technology that made Apple's computers were better placed to handle the demands of video throughput.

      Ned Kroeker recalls:

       I had been involved, on the periphery with NuBus at MIT and the commercial release of NuBus had provided personal computers with a much higher bandwidth capability, a much more efficient bus mastering capability than the PC. So we started looking at what we could build with that.