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The acquisition of ReelTime was long planned by Adobe but it came at a time of considerable uncertainty. Avid was doing well but its future was unknown. EMC was still a small player and Digital F/X continued to struggle. Video F/X programmer Michael Olivier recalls:

There was a point when Steve Horowitz and Richard Snee and I had a kitchen table discussion where we all asked, “Where should this product line go?" and we pretty quickly came to the realization that we should be build a low cost ‘Avid killer’.

At this time Avid was selling systems for $50,000-100,000 and we knew it was possible to make a much cheaper system, so we got approval from the Digital F/X leadership to make our Avid killer product.

We 'fired the gun in the air', and took the code base from our existing Soft F/X product and modified it. Our battle cry was to make NAB 1993.

The new product was called Hitchcock.

Steven Horowitz recalls:

We realized then that the Hitchcock product was probably what they (Digital F/X) should have been working on for the previous three years. But by then the money was running out. I remember an article, which was headlined, “Why Venture capital is so patient with Digital F/X”.

The VC's saw that PC based nonlinear editing or a digital post workstation was a good product to persist with, but for how long?

Steve Horowitz worked on the UI design for Hitchcock and the team spent hours pouring over user feedback.

Chuck Clarke recalls the next steps at Digital F/X.

The other factor at play here was the investment. To keep research and development going in things like Hitchcock we needed to dilute the shareholdings of our employees, so as we got closer to an IPO, and releasing Hitchcock and the PAL version of Composium, our own personal stake in the company was getting less valuable.

That Silicon Valley dream of getting rich from a lot of work was slipping away.

Steve Mayer lent on a former colleague to guide Hitchcock to market. Pioneering computer scientist Allan Alcorn knew Mayer from Atari. Among other achievements Alcorn had built the successful video game ‘Pong’ and worked with start-ups like Catalyst before settling at Apple as an Apple Fellow.

The San Jose Mercury News announced "Elite Executive leaves Apple for small firm".

One of Apple Computer Inc.'s elite corps of Apple Fellows said Friday he will leave the company to take a top post at a small Mountain View high-tech firm. Allan Alcorn, who has worked at Apple for six years, will start Monday as vice president of engineering for Digital F/X, a maker of computerized video editing gear.

Alcorn was instrumental at Apple in developing technologies to integrate video with the company's Macintosh computer line.

Alcorn recalls the plan

The Composium was a technical tour de force but was very expensive and had a limited market. The Video F/X had the most potential was and was a most interesting product at the time to me but we needed to get rid of the hardware and use our software to control one of the third party cards that digitized video on the fly and stored it on the disk.

That product was Hitchcock.