Digital Film Editing Visionary: Bill Warner, The Man Who Created AVID - Part V

Bill Warner: So, at that occasion, everyone loves the machines, they say they will get them.

Bill Kaiser, sittin' on the bed in the hotel space, he says, "We're gonna invest." So, Greylock invested $500,000, which even then was modest, yet it was Bill's very first complete investment as a venture capitalist. And they invested $500,000 in August of 1988.

That identical month, we go to the Siggraph show. Apollo Laptop, our close friends, stated, "Can you bring some cool demos?" And I mentioned, "Effectively, we're not prepared however. You know; we do not require to announce." They mentioned, "Just bring some cool demos!"

And so we had; my view was, the Avid 1 Media Composer should really get started by duplicating all the things in the on line suite. For the reason that just after all, all of that is identified, so that is a affordable thing to do: Let's duplicate every thing in the 1st release. That is what I told the engineers I wanted to do. I was young and naive. I imply, I was certainly convinced that that was a piece of cake.

So, I hired an engineer to do DVE, you know: digital video effects.

Larry Jordan: Ideal.

Bill Warner: So, we had this demo of DVE; video. Real video. By now we had lots of video. We had all types of real video: squeezing in, various channels. We had issues with, like, 32 channels of DVE, you know.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Bill Warner: It wasn't higher resolution, however it was a mindblower.

So, we believed, what the heck? You know; that is not our item. Why never we show it? So we show it in the Apollo booth. All Correct?

And what occurs? These 2 guys from Apple show up. And they are, like, "You've to be on the Mac."

Larry Jordan: Oh, good.

Bill Warner: And I stated, "No." And they mentioned, "No, no. You actually should really be on the Mac. This wants to be on the Mac." And I was like, "Come on. We're on an Apollo workstation right here. This is the beefy stuff."

And they mentioned, "Appear. We'll send you a machine. You just test it." And I believed, I am busy, you know. And they mentioned, "We'll just send you a machine."

OK. So, we come back from the Siggraph show and we cannot obtain in the door to our creating Simply because there is a box of Apple machines sitting the way of the door.

Larry Jordan: Good.

Bill Warner: So, you know, becoming a hardware engineer, you cannot; you have gotta open the box. And so I open the box and I contact this guy Michael Tchao at Apple and I say, "We never even know what to do with these points. What do we do with it?" And he says, "OK. I will hook you up with a application engineer who knows how to do this."

So we hired; we obtain this guy, George Madewell, and we say, "OK, George, we've gotta test how speedy this thing is."

So, we had the point of what was named the most important memory bit blit speed. Which was, if you've a thing in memory more than right here, how rapid could you blit it even to a smaller piece of the screen, and how various frames per second could we do that? All Ideal?

The Apollo we had gotten up to nine frames per second. That wasn't terrific, however at least you had motion. And we figured we could optimize it, and I was pondering we could purchase to 15, Proper?

Larry Jordan: Yeah.

Bill Warner: So we obtain George to make this test on the Mac and he does the test and the answer is: 45.

Larry Jordan: Wow!

Bill Warner: I am like, "45? Did you do the test Suitable? Are you kidding?" And he'd performed the test Proper. OK. So, 45.

So then, the subsequent most important query; that is the blitting from key memory to screen. The subsequent thing is, you've to feed most important memory from the disk. All Appropriate? We had been being about 200 kilobytes per second off of the disk on the Apollo.

We're pondering, "OK, we're going to will have to create some new drivers if it is not speedy sufficient." The theoretical efficiency of the disks that had been in these machines was 1200 k bytes per second.

Eric Peters, who was a chief technologist, then wrote a test on the Mac to test the overall performance by means of the file program to see what that quantity was, For the reason that that was yet another most important quantity.

Larry Jordan: Positive.

Bill Warner: So he calls me up and I stated, "What is the quantity?" And he mentioned, "It is 1200." I mentioned, "No, that is the theoretical quantity, Eric. What is the True quantity of throughput that you tested?" He mentioned, "It really is 1200."

Larry Jordan: Wow. Why have been you able to achieve this on the Mac versus...

Bill Warner: Somebody from Apple please inform me, Since I've do not observed all the things perform at the complete functionality of an underlying method. Yet that did it. All Proper? They should really have optimized for significant transfers or anything, however it ran at the complete speed of the underlying disk. In truth, I've don't noticed the underlying stuff ever run at the speeds that they say it will. However it did.

So now we have 1200 on the speed and we had 45 on the frame price. And that meant we had to make a selection, and speedy, Mainly because we had NAB 1989 coming up, which was going to be our announcement.

This was by now the fall of 1988. We had just taken our venture capital revenue.

We did some a lot more testing and I lastly gathered the folks and I mentioned, "Hey, when we; we've got to make a choice right now. And when we stroll out this door, there's no turning back. We should choose currently that we're going to switch to the Mac and all the things on the Apollo is gonna quit. They are all going to be sent back. You do not necessarily know that significantly about the Mac, however as well negative. All Suitable? It really is, the minute we stroll out this door it is all Apple."

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Bill Warner: And we sat there and we had our beers and I stated, "Are you prepared to do it?" And they stated, "We're prepared." And we stated, "OK, that is it."

We walked out. We referred to as Apple. We stated, "We're in." And we mentioned, "Send as multiple Macs as you can." They gathered old junk from the engineering labs Since these items have been truly hard to obtain and they had been $5,000 every single. And they got us stuff that worked. You know: situations.

Larry Jordan: Astounding.

Bill Warner: And we switched. And the funny thing is so substantially that we compete now with Apple. Yet so a great deal of Apple is in our blood. And from them on, you know, we constructed on the Mac. And it wasn't seriously till, you know, eight years later that there was even any hint of other platforms.

Lawrence Jordan, A.C.E. is a pioneer in the field of developing dynamic media applying a wide variety of digital tools. In 1991 he worked on the initially extended-format project in Hollywood to be edited digitally utilizing the Avid Media Composer. Following consulting with Macromedia and Apple on Final Reduce Pro, in 1999 he developed 2-pop - The Final Reduce Pro & DV Details Web site. He now runs JODADA, a digital media method and consulting firm and publishes Hollywood Reinvented The Network for Digital Filmmakers, and one of the initial web sites to webcast HD video as its most important content material. He is nowadays writing a new book, " Internet Video Mojo [http://webvideomojo.com]." You can attain him at: lj (at) jodada.com.