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Away from the Genie group, Pinnacle's Consumer Video Group led by Ivan Maltz and Keith Thompson worked on the Alibaba editing package. Maltz recalls:

Personal computers weren't quite quick enough and hard drives weren't anywhere near big enough to do consumer nonlinear editing. We looked at the hybrid approach that Avid had done and then made our goal, to take consumer videos from camcorders, be able to edit them in a simple and straightforward manner and then put the piece back onto a VHS tape.

Our first product was to be connected to the parallel port on a PC that would let us capture low resolution 160 x 120 video.

One of the first tasks was to re-purpose Pinnacle’s Alladin real time digital effects technology that had been built for professionals and bring it to a new audience. Richard Lane, a former Abekas hardware engineer, joined as the team’s hardware design manager. Maltz recalls:

We used the in-house ASIC called the Sherman chip, that had been developed by Pinnacle for the Alladin. It let us do simple compositing and titles and some transitions. Then we started looking at the Avid (as a role model) and ended up with something that was a little like the FAST Video Machine in its hybrid approach to a single stream of video with FX.

The Pinnacle team still needed a way to control the camcorders to feed Alibaba.

The answer lay with a company in nearby Santa Clara.