Читать книгу Timeline Analog 4 - John Buck - Страница 19

Greg Cockroft was at Frame Technology developing a business application for NeXT Computer's launch.

I still remember those meetings with Steve Jobs. He was super focused on the UI on all apps and we had a meeting once with Frame where he suggested we would should all get together for a few nights and he would buy pizza and we would work on the UI of FrameMaker together.

As the NeXT job came to a close, Cockroft received a call from Bill Warner.

He needed some help at Avid.

Warner then reached out to another former Apollo engineer. Steve Reber had been determined to get away from the computer industry, however a friend convinced him to do 'practice interviews' in case he wanted to return. As a result he landed a job at Wedge Computer in Waltham, MA.

I joined Wedge to write code as a consulting gig and then moved to the left (West) coast and joined SUN Microsystems as part of a four man team which helped me get my 'juices' back. On a trip back to Boston I checked in on Bill Warner and the guys at Avid to see how they were doing.

Bill just said "I gotta have you, we need to make the NAB conference, you gotta start right now! Forget going back to SUN.

Reber contemplated a return to Massachusetts.

Meanwhile Curt Rawley set up a meeting with Henry McCance, also of Greylock Partners, to discuss his plans for creating new personal computer products. Rawley recalls the seasoned investor’s reaction when he mentioned the name of a potential new project for the Boston firm.

When I mentioned the word ‘Avid’ to Henry, he was very surprised because no one was supposed to know about what Bill Warner was doing. I figured I should probably meet Bill and see what it was he was building.

McCance arranged a meeting that was to change the course of electronic editing. Rawley recalls:

Within ten minutes of meeting Bill and hearing his idea of using computers to create non-linear video editing and in doing so to replace the decades old film editing, he had convinced me that his idea for a product was far superior to what I had in mind! And so I wanted to work with him.

We agreed that if I were able to write a business plan and get some money from a venture capitalist, I would get paid and maybe get some stock. I signed on. And the only thing I knew about video was how to spell it!

His period of ignorance wasn’t to last. Rawley travelled to the Boston Public library.

I remember very clearly walking in there and telling the attendant "I need to become an expert in the field of video editing from a business standpoint". He was a yoda like creature with half glasses who looked up at me as if to say "Oh god another one of you!”. Another dumb person who wants to be made smart. He asked me to wait and he eventually returned with a four-wheel cart filled with books and registers and pamphlets.

Everything you needed to know about video. I spent the next week at the library pouring over this tremendous fountain of knowledge, including a video register which listed all the video post production houses that I could ever want to know about, which actually became Avid's initial database for business prospects.

Despite his deep involvement, Eric Peters was still not able to join Avid formerly. Instead he took every spare moment he had away from Apollo Computer to ‘help them out’. The primary goal for Peters was to create a proprietary video codec that could deliver a usable compressed image to the desktop.

In our research, we found that NASA had used a very good compression algorithm for getting pictures back from Jupiter but it was for black and white only. We knew that pretty soon one of the hardware/chip makers was going to come out with a good compression algorithm so we were biding our time until that happened.

Rawley recalls:

When we started at Avid, we weren't using JPEG compression; we were doing our own sampling of the signal and decimating it to get it through. We decimated in color, we decimated in size and we decimated the number of frames per second and with that decimation you could get the video through the computer.

It was highly pixelated and choppy but it was just good enough for offline editing and to create an edl. Because video represents a huge data rate much much higher than what anyone was doing in those days and nobody was having any success with video.

It was next to impossible to get video and audio into a computer and make them native computer data types. Of course people had some success with audio like SoundBlaster but not video. In those times we were effectively blocked by the computer hardware standards of the time like the AT bus used in the Apollo workstations.

We had many conversations with Apollo and at that time we had heard that Apple was coming out with Nu-Bus, which would be a huge breakthrough, if it were video capable.

In a manner like SMPTE had regulated timecode standards, the standards body CCITT (Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique) had created image standards for sending and receiving facsimiles. It set the technical boundaries for sending analog images to take advantage of digital compression methods. By doing so it allowed users to reduce transmission times.

CCITT now turned its focus to other emerging image compression methods and became a partner with ISO (International Organization for Standardization) in a joint endeavour to map out standards for the compression of photographic images.The new group was called JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group).

As Avid experimented with proprietary methods to get video in and out of computers, the new JPEG discussed the possibility of an industry wide video codec standard. Rawley recalls:

When you went to the libraries and looked at the technical journals and read the various references where you were told what computers were capable of, you heart just filled with self doubt as to whether this could be done. With Jeff's programming and Eric's efforts, we created a demonstration piece called "Pluto meets Top Gun" which proved it could be done.

They managed to replicate what it was like to have video inside a computer, it was a series of files, each representing a frame but not really video just a series of still images to create that effect.

Rich Miner was completing his PhD at University of Lowell. Warner asked him to join Avid.

I guess I didn't realise how complex the problem he was solving really was and completing my studies seemed like a better option than joining a two-man start-up. Bill is an amazing guy who never hid anything throughout the development of Avid.He always said that the benefits of discussing problems and sharing information far outweighed the benefits of keeping something close to your chest.

True to Warner’s ethos he sought opinions widely throughout the Boston editing community despite the fact that it meant telling more people about what he was doing. He organised a ‘face-off’ using the Avid ‘Oz’ prototype against traditional tape editing systems at WHDH Channel 7 News.

Warner wanted to find out where the ‘time wasters’ in contemporary editing lay because these were the editing ‘hurdles’ that Avid had to eliminate in order to win over contemporary video editors. Eric Peters recalls:

We would have our system and the Channel 7 guys would have manual editing in between two video decks. And they would win every time, after all they didn’t need to digitise. We went back and changed the interface so that it was possible to digitise within the timeline and not have to open a separate window.

Pete Fasciano knew that while his input had been invaluable, Avid needed a full-time staff editor.

All of the editors at VizWiz went up to Burlington and watched Bill’s demo and they thought it was interesting but these are people who eat timecode for breakfast and this was a very different looking system, they thought it was interesting but didn’t expect it to change the world.

Tom Ohanian was working casually at VizWiz while completing his Masters degree.

I was asked to attend an introductory session at the old machine shop and I went there with four of my fellow editors from VizWiz. After the introductory session, I was the only editor who stayed and came back week after week. It was very clear to me that putting my mark on this revolution was something I was destined to do.

Fasciano continues:

While the other VizWiz editors returned to their linear suites, Tom just got it. He was the obvious person to do this for a number of reasons but one was that he was at a pivotal point in his career. This was going to be the next big thing and he could be there at the start. He was an accomplished editor with an understanding of interface design and writing code and was ‘obsessed’ with the Macintosh.

Ohanian joined the group informally to help build the prototypes for NAB.

Meanwhile at Editing Machines Corporation, Bill Ferster had created functional code for his editing system and was ready to marry it to proprietary hardware. He commissioned Picture Conversion Inc. that had created a variety of video related products.

PCI President Gokalp (Go) Babaoglu was known for his expertise with software, video and contemporary electronics.

Despite the known shortcomings of the digital storage options, EMC chose magneto optical disks to record and play back an editor’s material and the small team was edged closer to a working product for SMPTE. Chuck Rieger recalls:

Developmentally, our main hurdles were mainly related to adapting the SoundSpace design concepts to the video world and recasting the hardware from a freestanding controller board to a PC board in form factor.

There was a clear dividing line between the onboard firmware, which I developed and Bill's overall software platform and user interface, so we simply tried to make intelligent decisions about what functions should best be supported in the firmware vs. PC-based software.

Bill Ferster remembers that progress was as planned.

There were no real aha moments! It just went pretty smoothly. We outsourced everything from the chips in California to a company in Atlanta to build the units.

Bill Warner recalls the EMC and Avid rivalry.

I actually talked to Bill (Ferster) at EMC when I was working on the company, we actually got wind of each other and we would have these phone calls and he would say,

"When are you going to announce?"

I would say, "Well, I can't tell you that,then I'd ask him a question and he would say, "Well, I can't tell you that."

But what we would do is that we would share things that we could share. So we had conversations, all the way along.

Steve Reber left Apollo Computer to get a break from the computer industry. Then he got a call.

Bill Warner had heard I was no longer at Apollo and we got together and he showed me what they were planning for Avid. I just told him "I am burnt out from Apollo and I am of no use to you on this project”. He wanted to hire me right then and there but I turned him down.

After agreeing to stay in touch with the Avid team, Reber moved further from software coding. When his condominium association couldn’t get the building’s pool cleaned, Reber volunteered.

The other people on the board asked me what I knew about pool cleaning and servicing. I told them I knew nothing but to give me a week and I would know a whole lot more!

Technology consultant Craig Birkmaier examined the convergence of video and computer technologies for a growing list of clients. He received a call from Curt Rawley at Avid Technology.

There was all this noise going on around the industry, at that time, about the various and different compression algorithms and nobody had anything that worked all that well. They were coming up with all kinds of names to describe different quality levels.The Avid guys were starting to experiment with video compression and had some stuff running but they didn't know what the other guys were up to and they asked me to find out!

Birkmaier went from being a technology consultant to a technology broker when he called Bruce Rady to see if the TouchVision chief was interested in sharing information about his plans for digital editing.

He said. Sure, why not? Maybe I'll learn something. And it was then that he and Bill Warner and Bill Ferster realized that they weren't really competing with one another, they were competing with CMX and Grass Valley and the other old style edit system manufacturers.

It was going to be hard enough for these new companies to climb this hill and be accepted and get the nonlinear thing to take off without fighting amongst themselves.

Eric Peters recalls the mantra that Bill Warner instilled in everyone at Avid.

You have more to lose by being secretive than you have to gain by being open. We never lost sight of that. And the fact that if we continually added value to our product, it didn’t matter what other features were offered by competitors.

Avid’s team experimented independently with compression schemes that degraded video images just enough to fit them on relatively small hard drives but not too much as to make them impossible to use for editing.

Meanwhile Bill Warner diligently scanned through U.S. business directories in search of potential customers and created a list of post-production, editorial and production companies across America.

He drafted an introduction to the Avid’s demonstration at NAB in early 1988 and mailed out hundreds of 'targeted' letters in late March. It read in part:

Avid Technology is developing a new kind of video editing system and you’re invited to visit our suite at the NAB show in Las Vegas to see a working prototype...The product is still in the early stages of development so we are in an excellent position to incorporate your ideas.

The letter changed many lives.

The electronic editing landscape was changing. EditDroid had closed and its great rival, the Montage Group was on the cusp of disappearing. The small engineering group in Littleton had moved on from updating the Montage with better monitors and replay decks to creating a laser disc based system. Bill Zettler recalls:

We looked to interface Laserdisc machines in place of the VCRs. Replacing the old analog videotape machines and all of their mechanical parts with laserdiscs for off-line editing, while vastly simpler from an engineering standpoint, suffered from the enormous expense of having to master the laserdiscs in the first place.

Adding that to the problem that laserdiscs didn't inherently have the capacity. Still, even though digital video storage (80mb drives) was in its infancy it was obvious that the days of doing offline editing using consumer videotape components were numbered.

It was obvious to Zettler and a growing number of people involved in video editing that the key to the next step in electronic editing was tied to a video compression method that delivered images from hard drives.

Roger Siminoff an industry veteran at Digital F/X, Radius and Silicon Graphics adds:

Think for a moment about the companies that made media transfer and storage systems and how critical they were to the workflow of the time. Take for example like Bernouli, SyQuest, ZIP and JAZ (just to name a few). These were great technologies in their day. But as the technology accelerated, it sequentially hastened each of their demises.

Bernouli was around for 10-12 years, SyQuest for 8-10 years, ZIP for 5-6 years, JAZ for 4-5 years. But they all paled to what could be stored on a CD and then what could be stored on a DVD. And, rest assured, there will be a XXD, YYD and ZZD some day and we'll laugh at how CDs and DVD were failed technologies of the past.