Timeline Analog 3. John Buck

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СКАЧАТЬ interviewed with Ron and Chet and they described what they were doing, my only reservation was the use of these consumer video machines. Talking to Ed Moxon convinced me that success was possible. Without his being on the team, even with the enthusiasm I felt for the concept, I wouldn't have left Polaroid.

      Chet Schuler’s friend and former Incoterm engineer, Bill Westland became the chief software engineer.

       I had worked on various uninteresting projects after leaving Incoterm, until I received a call from Jean Tariot. He asked if I would be interested in going to work for an exciting new startup company he was helping to get financed. A few days later, I met Ron Barker and Chet Schuler for the first time at the Red Coach Grill in Wayland Massachusetts and then we went over to Ron's house in Weston so they could "sell" me their plan. I didn't know anything about the film or video industries, but it took less than an hour for me to know that this was something special and that it would be a great opportunity for me.

      The staff list at Video Composition Corporation on Domino Drive in West Concord, Massachusetts grew when Margaret Marsden, Ray Marchant, Michael Tindell, Michael (Mike) Lowe and Chuck Urian joined the group.

       Ron and Chet approached me to consult with Montage. They wanted someone with my background (broadcast & cable) to specify potential “end-users”. I also helped with some of the design flaws that would prevent intuitive use of the system by the film/tape editors around the world.

      Tindell was coming straight from an MIT Computer Science and Engineering degree. Schuler adds:

       Bill Westland headed up the software development for us because his experience was in real time programming, controlling machines and not just databases. We knew we needed someone who could work on tasks other than writing great code and manipulating data. Mike Tindell worked in 'C' and he would hear you saying 'we should try this as a function in the system' and then he would just disappear and type as fast as he could and then come back after five minutes ask, "How does that look?” He was an amazing programmer; great instinct and just knew it inside out.

      Schuler remembers that the group had a deadline but he wasn’t about to be hurried into a mistake.

       A lot of people don’t realise that you can save yourselves a lot of time if you're not in too much of a hurry. We spent more than a month after we got the money, not working, just planning what we were going to do. We laid out our plans for what we wanted to accomplish in general terms and our criteria for achieving our goals.

       We were treading on pretty new ground and because of that we wanted everyone on the team to know where we were going. Since we needed to do both hardware & software development concurrently, it was necessary to have a very close knit group with each member contributing to and constantly aware of the progress of all of the parallel paths of development.

       That isn't easy because if one isn't done, the other can't be tested and so on.

       Together we mapped a general outline for the overall design of each aspect of the project. Because most of our specific hardware requirements and software requirements had no precedent, we often had to choose between somewhat untested and untried alternatives, ahead of the actual product design decisions.

      Bill Westland recalls an early glitch:

       When we first started calling computer equipment vendors for information, Ron prohibited us from using the full name of the company because he was afraid people would find out what we were building and he wanted absolute secrecy. So, instead of saying Video Composition Corporation we told people our company name was VC Corporation.

       One of the vendors I spoke with was uncomfortable with that name, because he was a veteran of the Vietnam War and for him VC was a dirty word.

      Ron Barker recalls:

       The new name Montage came after the funding from an employee suggestion box. Mike Lowe was the originator of the name Montage. I drew up the logo by cutting off the lower portions of the letters. The newly christened Montage team had a collection of equipment befitting a start-up. A Masscomp computer, Schuler’s S100 with a 20 MB hard drive, a dual 8” floppy drive, a 5 ¼” floppy drive, a video frame grabber, a couple of Betamax decks and a real time relay control board. Ken Kiesel recalls the state of the company: We had desks and telephones, one computer, no parts bins, test equipment, or even supplier catalogues.

      Despite their humble beginnings, Schuler recalls the confidence of the group.

       The key idea was the concept of not just using pictures to represent timecode locations but manipulating the edit in such a fashion that it wasn't even something you would think twice about as the editor. How we would place them and move them around would make or break the device.

       This was a very early application of cut and paste editing that it so familiar today, picking up a picture and dropping it down again like a virtual video script. We needed to work out a way to get it done, what we needed to do, in spite of the technology. Hanging over our heads was that we needed to use existing technologies. I already had a digitizer, so we used that early on.

       We could control it from the Z80 processor and the digitizer would ingest the video and audio and timecode so that it could be used by the systems but it ingested only in a temporary fashion.

       In other words, unlike today's systems where memory and processors are cheap and capacious, we didn't digitize and keep everything. Instead we opted for a method where we just digitized the frames around where the person was editing and when the editor had completed the editing and saved the edit decisions, they moved on and digitised a bunch of new scenes

      For stage one of development, the team split into two informal groups. Westland and his colleagues set up a newly acquired VAX computer and began the task of writing and testing code for the editing system while Ken Kiesel focused on a full size mock-up of the intended system so Ron Barker could get feedback from prospective clients. Schuler recalls:

       The (overall engineering) strategy that we settled on to help us avoid investing too much time in dead end ideas was to have Ken Kiesel run ahead of the actual product design team by creating the working simulator. It was a mixture of readily available standard computer and hardware along with his ingenuity in how to test alternative approaches.

       It was more important especially in the early days to see how it played to the user and whether we could accomplish what we wanted with the way images were done.

       It didn't need to be right, just enough to test and see if worked or if we needed to change our approach. Ken worked on a lot of things ahead of time that weren't quite ready to be incorporated into the final product and didn't have to be, just so we could test out our concepts - so they made sense. It saved us going down any blind alleys for weeks on end because we could quickly assess the value of our ideas.

       It was a small team but if I had more people, it would have taken twice as long!

      Kiesel recalls:

       My first assignment was to built a simulator for the system and have it capable within 3 months of performing simple cuts and splices of material from a pair of laser disk players, including the user interface with scroll wheels and buttons and 14 monitors showing picture labels. I immediately realized СКАЧАТЬ