Timeline Analog 4. John Buck

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      IT'S NON-LINEAR

      By 1988 it seemed that everyone from computer makers, hardware vendors, broadcasters, magazine publishers and software providers was using the term 'Multimedia' to give sense to an array of promised products that used sound, video and graphics.

      Apple's CEO John Sculley had demonstrated the company's vision of future computing with the Knowledge Navigator in 1987 and while it had excited developers and creatives, the response from business was indifferent or worse.

      Ellen Nold, former Apple employee weighed in.

       Knowledge Navigator is a goal not a product. It is deliberately set far in the future because Apple is bereft - they really don't know what they are going to do next.

      VP Apple Advanced Technologies Marketing Chris Espinosa disagreed:

       There's been a perception that we (Apple) have nothing up our sleeves. We're going to incorporate innovation not only in our new products but into our current products.

      Apple told the press that the in-house Advanced Technology Group (ATG) was researching how to add audio and video tools into future releases of the Mac OS:

       ...create programmer’s tools for full-motion, full-color video.

      Another Apple R&D group, the Multimedia Lab, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco worked on a range of prototypes that were able to mix audio, video, images and text, so-called Multimedia.

      Jim Armstrong explained what multimedia was:

       It's non-linear and non-print. It's a new publishing paradigm.

      Meanwhile the world’s largest personal computer maker, IBM pursued multimedia for the corporate environment with a separate division called the Ultimedia Tools Group. Dave Drabo told the press:

       Our mission is to create a cross-platform standard for multimedia without focusing on one particular operating system.

      IBM reached out to typical multimedia developers and professional editing equipment companies like Montage Group and TouchVision Systems. Despite the growing interest in multimedia, electronic editing was still in the analog domain.

      The US television drama The Wonder Years was a hit with viewers, a ratings winner for the ABC television network and a flagship project for Cinedco, the makers of Ediflex.

      Ediflex systems were now a common sight in Hollywood and as a result one major client decided that it made financial sense to stop renting Ediflex systems and own Cindeco outright. The production company New World Pictures was enjoying success with movies like Soul Man when management team Lawrence (Larry) Kuppin, Harry Sloan and Robert (Bob) Reme decided to buy 51% of Cinedco and have NWP films and television programs cut on Ediflex.

      Away from the change in ownership the Ediflex team needed to overhaul their system. Adrian Ettlinger and Andy Maltz had worked for years to ensure the prototype had evolved into a reliable device, but by the time it began to win awards the system’s technology was past its prime. Drama editor Stuart Bass recalls:

       The Wonder Years (TWY) shot about three or four hours of dailies a day. Two 16mm cameras running all the time meant there was a ton of material but the Ediflex just couldn't handle more than an hour of material at a time. You had to break up acts into two pieces.

       A single 22 minute episode would need at least five loads of 12 tapes. You were suddenly dealing with 60 tapes and at some point you had to put all of those tapes in and out of the VTR decks just to view an episode.

      Cinedco updated the Ediflex hardware and software to compete with devices using newer technology and also began work on another random access system called Cineflex. Change needed to come quickly as Ediflex customers were already exploring alternatives.

      The Wonder Years line producer Jeffrey Silver had been exposed to the Montage Picture Processor on a previous project and decided to try it as a possible replacement for the Ediflex. Stuart Bass continues:

       Of course it worked quicker. We only needed one load for an episode, there wasn’t a long process of creating the script mimic and changes with the producers in the room were faster. The Ediflex just wasn't capable of editing the kinds of rushes volumes that producers were now creating.

      Despite the successful use of Montage in television series there were still issues to consider when cutting movies on the system. Editor Steven Cohen used the Montage on Jerrold Freedman's film, Unholy Matrimony.

       I badly wanted to try a digital system even though most feature people thought they were pretty primitive and restrictive. That was true, of course, but the Montage was seminal in a lot of ways and very smart in many ways but after a period of using, I found it to be very limited and had lots of bugs. I began to take notes about what worked and what didn’t and ended up writing a 20-page essay about how to improve it.