Timeline Analog 6. John Buck

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      In 1996 Nintendo released their newest gaming system the Nintendo 64 and Time Magazine named it Machine of the Year.

      At that year's NAB it was obvious that the sense of wonder created by EMC and Avid’s digital editing products some seven years earlier had begun to fade. It seemed all companies now made nonlinear systems. Jim Bennet wrote:

       There were over 150 non-linear editing systems shown at NAB. The choices were mind-boggling and attendees were trying to wade through all the format and systems choices. In mixing this with the expanded Internet and Multimedia exhibits, most people were having difficulty figuring everything out. PC based Windows systems seemed to be in predominance, with a fair representation of Mac and SGI systems

      D-Vision Systems debuted ‘3 new families’ of editing tools.

      As a company with its roots in the film equipment division of Bell and Howell, it made sense that the FilmCUT product line (FilmCUT, FilmCUT-XE, and FilmCUT-XED) was film-centric and allowed for 24 fps digitising and editing.

       FilmCUT is an upgradable set of film-style editing tools for film professionals. The tools are designed to be hassle-free, thus allowing film editors to become more creative.

      In contrast D-Vision also launched the OnLINE, OnLINE-XE and OnLINE-XED products for video editors.

      OnLINE used the standard D-Vision interface on an open-systems architecture, which allowed buyers to team it with a wide variety of video and audio hardware technologies. Clyde Tressler and Robert Lamm for SMPTE New England described their test:

       We tried an experiment to see whether this was truly the case, this time with a D-Vision Online XED sytem with a SMPTE-259 serial digital input (so digital/analog conversions wouldn't contaminate the experiment). Using a D1 deck and special test tape provided by Wilson Chao of Cambridge Television Productions, as well as Mr. Chao's well-trained eye, we made a 200KB/frame recording and asked Mr. Chao to see if he could tell the recording from the original. He couldn't see any difference.

      To round a comprehensive product matrix were products designed to compete with Avid for the top end of the market. The Postsuite family (Postsuite, PostSuite-XE, and Postsuite-XED) was a series of Pentium workstations using the company’s OnLINE software.

      KEYGRIP

      In the five years since its debut QuickTime engineers had experimented with software only compression, color-space standards, expanded timecode support, as well as advanced audio and video syncing capabilities. The team had refined the API to deliver real-time video performance by accessing the power of Apple’s multiprocessing hardware. Apple announced at NAB:

       Video editors can now blast through frames with the speed and results which until now, were only associated with proprietary systems.

      Among the first to welcome the changes was Macromedia's VP of Video products, Randy Ubillos:

       The demands of video professionals consistently outpace the curve that drives traditional computing technology. By enhancing QuickTime specifically for the video professional, Apple is delivering an outstanding enabling technology that allows Macromedia to build truly professional video solutions.

      Tim Myers and Ubillos were in a unique position with Apple.

       Randy and I had a great relationship with the QuickTime guys at Apple that had developed over many years. We were able to push them hard to make sure QuickTime could be a professional editing platform and not just something that let consumers cut and paste video together.