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      Editor Steve Cohen worked with director Martha Coolidge.

       Martha was eager to try new editing tools and we used the newest Montage to cut “Crazy in Love” for her. This was a hybrid of their standard tape-based system together with an “18th drive,” which was a PC with seven SCSI disks attached. We were one of only two shows to ever use it, a Rube Goldberg machine if there ever was one.

       The drives were full-height and held a whopping 600 megabytes, an enormous amount in those days. They weren’t even in cases, and they had to be switched every time we changed acts. You’d work all day on the 18th drive and then, to make sure you were okay, you’d check your work with tape, which we trusted more.

       Montage learned a lot on that show, including the fact that sync drifted on the hard drives.

      Despite the teething problems Cohen opted to cut his next project, an HBO film called Life on the High Wire (later renamed Teamster Boss) on a prototype Montage IIH system.

      It had dropped videotape and SCSI hard disks as its replay source for magneto-optical drives striped together for increased bandwidth.

       Day after day, I worked with the Montage guys, but they couldn’t get the optical system to work. After roughly a week, with film coming in every day and sitting uncut, it seemed like we were going to be forced to fall back on an old Montage II with tape.

      Cohen had worked closely with Montage but had also stayed in touch with Eric Peters and Bill Warner. He recalls:

       I was wondering whether they (Avid) felt they were ready for the motion picture industry. People like Leon Silverman had told them that they would only get one chance in Hollywood, and they were determined to avoid a slip-up.

       Most of my peers thought that hard disk-based systems were going to be just as kludgy and limited as the tape-based systems that had preceded them. It was clear that we were entering a new era, and I badly wanted to see it work.

       One key stumbling block was the fact that we had to deliver a cut film negative. There would be a lot riding on this experiment, for me and for Avid, and HBO was very nervous about it, and so was I. But at the last minute, I decided to take a big chance and go with the Media Composer.

       I felt bad about it because I liked Seth Haberman (Montage) and his engineers, but at this point I was way behind and I had to do something.

       ‘Teamster Boss’ was a seminal show in many ways. The Avid worked better than I’d hoped, and far better than any tape-based system, there really was no comparison. But it was still a bumpy ride in some ways. Once, when we were really struggling, Avid sent Steve Reber to work with us, and he rewrote some of the code on the editing system itself.

       I learned that editors and software engineers have a lot in common. We’re passionate, our work is both technical and creative, we work in relative obscurity, and the best work we do can’t always be explained. At an important level, it’s instinctual.

      With picture lock off achieved, Cohen cut the Teamster Boss negative using Avid’s MediaMatch software.

       By that time I’d had experience cutting and conforming 24-frame shows with other 30-frame software and I knew this couldn’t last, especially for feature films. The key problem was the cheating that had to be done to make 24-frame negative sync with 30-frame picture and sound.

       The software could adjust any picture cut by one frame in either direction, and you had to make sure that a one-frame adjustment wouldn’t hurt you. I was so worried about this on “Unholy Matrimony” that I spent an entire day looking at every single cheated cut, comparing the original and adjusted versions, and just about went crazy in the process!

       To deal with its limited bandwidth, the Avid also digitized only the first field of every video frame, so if you went through your material a frame at a time you’d see every fourth frame repeat itself.

       This made it hard to decide where to cut and it made the video stutter when it played. I found it interesting that this drove some people crazy while others got used to it and hardly noticed.

       The cheated cuts were bad in television, but in features the problem was much worse, because we had to conform not just negative but positive print in order to screen the show for ourselves, and preview it for an audience. And we had to be able to preview and screen repeatedly as the show evolved, cutting and mixing, and conforming over and over again.

       With a 30-frame system all those cheated frames moved around from one version to the next.

       To keep the conformed film up to date and in sync you had to change dozens of cuts by a single frame, even in material that hadn’t been touched. This presented an impossible task for the picture assistants and the sound team.

       But the Avid people had an answer for this. 24-frame capabilities had been quietly built into the code from the beginning, and Eric was very eager to implement it.

      Michael Phillips was working to solve the 24 frames per second impasse and asked Cohen to test it.