It was exclusive by design, if not by intent. It was extremely technical and very expensive. It was a domain that was mostly male, affluent, white and urban. In this world infrastructure was exclusivity, and there was a tight relationship between the engineers that built the machines and the facility personnel that worked them. With close to a quarter of a million dollars worth of gear and software to be installed in a dedicated color grading stage, these systems were found only in a handful of cities around the world-and available to only a handful of editors and producers. The DaVinci Resolve system, for example, was a rarefied affair. In the interim producers had to do the online edit with analog video gear for their final master, and the millions of dollars in old film editing infrastructure still had a reason to exist-as did the high fees to get a project mastered.įor color grading, motion graphics and video effects, million dollar suites still reigned. And for the low, low price of $80,000, it was affordable enough to colonize commercial editing suites, TV stations, colleges and movie studios around the world.īut… it still took about five years for the video compressed of Avid’s AVR codec to be considered broadcast quality. It was right at the threshold of acceptable visual quality to judge an offline edit, but it was good enough. You could digitize footage with a video deck plugged directly into the system. There were other nonlinear editing systems at the time, but they were all incredibly expensive and didn’t offer much more than a few minutes of video storage.Īt the time, Avid Media Composer offered up a collection of off-the-shelf and proprietary hardware and software, a Mac IIcx with two displays and 4GB of storage. In 1989, Avid announced its Media Composer at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas. This is the first part of a two-part Hacking Film series about how-surprise!-its 2018 and you can have free and cheap editing and color-grading software from companies that used to charge a hundred thousand dollars for their products.ĮDITING ON THE CHEAP? Floor at the annual NAB show in Las Vegas (picture not from 1989, unfortunately)
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