Читать книгу Timeline Analog 5 - John Buck - Страница 23

In a market filled with small software companies, Macromind and Paracomp decided in March 1992 that they may be more profitable as a larger concern.

No sooner had they merged, than MacroMind-Paracomp linked up with a third company, Authorware to become Macromedia. While managers told the press that there were ‘no planned payoffs’ the merger of previous rivals created overlapping projects, and products.

Nick Schlott was part of the Authorware team building a new product, codenamed Skylab when it was cancelled.

All the people I’d worked with on that project left the company one by one. I was offered work on another project, and hated it; it was just grinding work on this big project. I started to look around for a new job and I rang a former colleague who was now at Adobe.

Schlott landed a job at Adobe Systems.

When I started with Adobe at Shoreline, it really was THE place to work as a programmer, and the environment we worked in was fantastic. The Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere groups were all in one big set of cubicles with perimeter offices.

There was much good energy there because you could see what everyone was working on. I guess my job description then, as it is now, was to hit code with a hammer until it works.

My mantra was a lot like Randy, you have a creative urge to make something and you don't give up until you get there. Randy would work down the hall from me and he "was" Premiere.

One guy by himself! In some ways he was writing code, and creating things so quickly he didn’t really have time to stop and teach someone or bring them up to speed.

Schlott’s first task was to create a graphics title package that ran within the Premiere application.

I wrote most of it in about five weeks time and was really proud of it. For a titler these days it’s very primitive; in those days it was awesome.

Ubillos focused on what had eluded him in Version One.

I wanted to get the capture capability built in and get the app to a true 29.97 fps rather than the 30fps that Version One was limited to. Handling ‘real’ NTSC was a big goal.

Loran Kary had worked with Ubillos at SuperMac.

He joined the Version 2.0 team to ‘beef it up.'

Kary was an industry expert on the videotape machine control capabilities, an area that the new entrant was so sorely lacking. He was asked to develop an EDL export function, and frame accurate machine control interfaces for capturing video and audio.

Kary recalls:

While I was developing edit decision list (EDL) exporting for Adobe Premiere, there was no way on the Macintosh to copy EDL files directly from or to an RT-11 format floppy disk. As a result, I wrote a Macintosh utility application that could be used to format, read, and write to RT-11 formatted disks.

With EDL Access, an editor could copy an EDL file to or from a RT-11 formatted disk using a third party floppy disk drive.

I'm sure if you look in Premiere now, they're probably still using my timecode libraries! But it was great to work with Randy, he is a genius, a star programmer and Adobe were committed to Premiere.

SuperMac sold more than 18,000 VideoSpigots video boards to owners of Adobe Premiere and reported its strongest financial quarter. tidBits' Jon Pugh trialed the $499 Spigot board that came in a PDS version for the LC or a NuBus version for the Mac II family.

The board itself is simple to install with only a simple RCA jack on the back which can be connected to your VCR's dubbing output through standard cables. If you are going to do audio input you will need a sound digitizer, such as the MacRecorder or the audio input that comes with most new Macs.

The VideoSpigot comes with an application called ScreenPlay, which must be used to control the board and capture the video. As of this time, SuperMac is testing their "vdig" QuickTime extension, which will allow any standard QuickTime-compatible application to record video off the VideoSpigot, but that isn't available yet, so we are stuck with ScreenPlay.

The decision to concentrate on hardware and sell ReelTime was proving to be correct. Tim Myers recalls the explosive sales growth:

We had great sales when bundled with SuperMac’s VideoSpigot and all sorts of people were buying a video-editing package for the first time. It was a really interesting side story because this was really the first digital editing package that anyone could afford and we were watching it unfold from Mountain View.

We discovered that we had a Premiere user, Dr Allen Shelton who was an ophthalmologist in Los Angeles, who would record all of his surgeries and then edit them for clients.

We had lawyers editing video for courtroom presentations; schoolteachers in classrooms, advertising people making animatics and rip-o-matics, all sorts of people. Of course, we aspired to being more like Avid because that would shore up the product in the long term but in the early days we were used by early adopters using Premiere for offline editing and novices who wanted to experiment.

Premiere’s success was the catalyst for action by the leading makers of PC add-in cards.

Quebec based Matrox Electronic Systems crammed five boards into a PC running Windows and bundled it with the Personal Producer application to create an A/B roll editing device called Matrox Studio for $15,000. Janet Matey announced that the new system had:

...practically everything you need to create and edit videos.

Fairbanks based editor Brad Swenson recalls:

One day an ad appeared in one of the trade mags for the Matrox Studio. It was the PC answer to the Toaster, plus the a/b edit controller, built in TBC’s and well everything, short of a second VTR, that was needed to do A/B roll post.

WOW, yet the price of 15k, a big drop over 200k, was still a high price for a small shop. How I drooled over the ads…oh to dissolve between two live sources, oh to have a DVE.

Pinnacle saw an opportunity to make a complete system. Co-founder Ajay Chopra looked at the options.

We were the absolute leaders in real time special effects in the On-line video editing market, but then along came digital nonlinear editing. We could see that it would impact the traditional editing bays and we felt that we already had this core real time technology, which is what the market wanted and liked, but perhaps we should look at creating our own digital editor and wrap it around our real time product.

We had been in the market long enough to understand both editing and effects. And to set the scene, the traditional editing set-up was changing with Avid and EMC arriving but in those days editing was also much more simplistic than it is now. Simple A/B editing without multilayering and compositing.

We believed that it was feasible to add our own editing application to a hardware card because you could argue that the special effects of that era were harder to do and we had already done that.

Instead of building a package from scratch, Pinnacle decided to buy an existing player. It courted the clear number two in the editing market, Bill Ferster’s Editing Machines Corporation (EMC) in Washington.

While Avid used a Mac platform, EMC had opted for the platform that Pinnacle knew intimately, the PC.

Chopra planned to mesh EMC's software with its hardware and grow Pinnacle into a video equipment market with many products. Talks failed to progress and were then abandoned.