Timeline Analog 1: 1860 - > 1971

By John Buck

Timeline Analog 1 (1860-1971) traces the amazing story of editing's evolution. Learn how filmmakers like Méliès, Griffith and Vertov used editing to craft masterpieces and how inventors like Serrurier and Steenbeck built wondrous editing machines. Part 1 of the Timeline Six Series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: May 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925108347

John Buck

John Buck es presidente de GovernanceAlive LLC, una organización internacional de formación y consultoría con sede en Washington, DC, Estados Unidos. La firma también ofrece servicios de mediación y facilitación de reuniones. John ha realizado numerosas formaciones de sociocracia y liderado la implementación de muchos proyectos para una gran variedad de organizaciones, incluyendo proyectos de BOSSA nova. Presta servicio en la dirección de varias organizaciones. Realiza tareas de investigación y desarrollo. Por ejemplo, está trabajado con el laboratorio de software avanzado de Fujitsu para desarrollar Weaver, un software que ayuda a que las reuniones vayan mejor, tanto en persona, online y de forma asíncrona. John Buck tiene una amplia experiencia en gestión con gobiernos y corporaciones, incluida la gestión de grandes proyectos de tecnología de la información. Sus clientes están repartidos por todo el mundo e incluyen fabricantes de plásticos, escuelas, colegios y universidades, centros de atención a largo plazo, grupos de covivienda, ONGs, productores de alimentos y empresas de software. Posee un máster en Sociología Cuantitativa de la Universidad de George Washington.

Book preview

Foreword by Bill Warner

Bill Warner

They say that 'necessity is the mother of invention'. But what creates necessity?

Often, it is intense frustration with something you find really important. For me, I began editing in the early 1980s when consumer VCRs became available. The only editing method available to me was to copy from one tape deck to another. So I did. I had no idea I was using a technology some people loved and other people loathed called linear editing.

Little did I know, but this linear editing was capable of inflicting intense pain on its users. It gave the joy of editing -- the ability make a story come to life right in front of you -- and it coupled this with a devilish characteristic that once you created your edit, you could hardly change it at all without serious consequences of time or quality. It was 1984. As an electrical engineer and product engineer, I at first thought this problem would go away on its own.

Digital technology was here, and many people saw linear editing as the problem that it was. I didn't realize that I had just poked my nose under the tent of a long, long story. The story of how film editing began, how it evolved, and how video editing started and how linear editing evolved. They say ignorance is bliss. And in my case, it was.

Had I known the full story of editing when I began, it might have given me pause. Instead, I was given one of those great moments that spur people on. The joy of edting. The pain of linear editing. And then a third element. I thought a non-linear editor would arrive if I just waited. So I waited. And waited. After three years, I was doing even more editing. Now the pain was eclipsing the joy. That was unbearable.

I had been thinking for three years about how to build a non-linear editor. And now, the father of necessity -- intense frustration -- gave me only one option. We had to build a digital non-linear editor.

I am so indebted to the great team at Avid that built this amazing machine. I knew we wanted to build the best editor we possibly could. But I assure you, I had no idea of the scope of the over 100 year-old story that was about to include this little company from Burlington, Massachusetts.

William (Bill) Warner, January 2018

Warner is the founder of Avid Technology.

Dedication

The Timeline series is dedicated to Mr Adrian Ettlinger.

Adrian was a brilliant engineer, ground breaking inventor, astute observer and a much loved father during his life and career. In retirement he was a friend, advisor and mentor to me. Adrian is without question the father of nonlinear digital editing and his contributions to the editing field have been recognised by industry bodies and editors alike.

Thank you Adrian, rest in peace.

Preface

I set out on this journey after a discussion with Boris Yamnitsky, who had just acquired Media 100 from bankruptcy. I wanted him to succeed despite the gloomy prognosis but I urged him to dump the name of the company and re-brand it.

As a Media 100 editor turned Media 100 post suite owner, I felt that the brand no longer carried the currency that it once did. A new generation of editors cared little for history. Start afresh, Boris, I told him.

He replied, I can't imagine any arguments for changing it.

We exchanged emails debating the merits of product and brand. I wondered if other editing companies had shone so brightly and faded as fast that I could draw a lesson from, then share it with Boris. As a starting point I looked at the editing systems that I had used in my career. Names like Ampex, Sony, Bosch and CMX. Where had they gone?

I scanned my local library for a comprehensive book about editing equipment history to find answers but I found none. I dug around more, but only found 'how to' film editing books. There was a dearth of information on electronic editing, especially its origins. My casual conversation was now a niggling annoyance.

Curiosity soon had me searching for the story of Avid and EMC, CMX, Montage, Digital F/X and so on. But of course there wasn't such a book just a few breadcrumbs of information.

I found two key names listed in the U.S Patent Office register. Adrian Ettlinger and William Warner. Maybe they could help. One had created something called the CBS RAVE, and the other, Avid.

They graciously took my phone calls, retold stories of electronic editing's rich history, and connected me with lesser known individuals who had created the tools we use today.

Adrian and Bill not only helped, but they actively encouraged me. Bill made time to talk, linked me to others and poured me coffee in his kitchen. Adrian braved the wet streets of Manhattan to tell me, over lunch at the Chiam, about a remarkable period of innovation.

My part-time quest changed when editor and Timeline contributors Jack Calaway, Larry Seehorn and Art Schneider passed away. Art made major contributions to editing, both film and electronic, yet his efforts like so many others had gone largely unheralded.

Jack and Larry had helped define the electronic platform for editing. To make sense of their work and so much more, I listened to former Xerox scientist David Canfield Smith who told me: In any revolution, technological or otherwise, there are interesting characters. In fact, the characters often are the story.

Ironically, to me at least, the man who had started me on this journey was typical of David's observation. Boris Yamnitsky landed a part time programming job at Data Translation on the Media 100 digital editing system. After a successful launch he left and took a full time job at Pacer Software only to have it sold from underneath him. Yamnitsky was jobless when a friend convinced him to write a DVE program for editing systems, which became the hugely popular Boris FX.

Boris' story could have ended there, however with the fruits of his success, he bought a bankrupt Media 100 and reinvented it for a new audience.

His story is this book's repeating narrative.

A book that zig zags from people to places, within companies, across continents as editing is invented and refined across 100 years.

Imperfection

The Timeline books are not meant to be a definitive history of editing, photography, films and filmmaking. There are topics and people missing. The books are not perfect.

Please don't expect them to be. Much of editing's early history was not recorded or was recorded with bias. I have not mentioned all or certain inventors, contributors, engineers. I have though, tried to address one issue over all others.

If you are sitting in front of a current Macintosh computer running Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro X or Avid Media Composer, and the question comes to mind:

How did we get here?

Where did these tools come from?

I hope Timeline answers those questions.

If you wonder while you are reading:

Where is this going?

The answer is the opposite.

The Mac with Final Cut Pro X in front of you.

Yes it can be frustrating to read. I get it.

By its very nature, and somewhat ironically, the timeline of editing history is non-linear. It zigs and zags. That's because I did not set out to write the story of, for example, Georges Demeny or Randy Ubillos - and place them in neat chapters.

I simply added them, and so many others, to the timeline as they appeared. Random. Hectic.

Oh, and the other elephant in the room.

Despite being an Australian author, versed and schooled in UK English, I have adopted US spellings and grammar for the Timeline series. In general, I have assumed the book style and grammar benchmarks as set by the Chicago Manual of Style.

With a few exceptions.

If a contributor is quoted or interviewed from the UK or Australia or a country that speaks non-American English, I have kept 'their' spelling. Especially if the material is from historical text. Colour may remain Colour, not Colour. And so on.

Yes, if you spot a mistake, my bad.

If it's English vs American English, hang in there.

I invite feedback at all time velocite at gmail dot com

Thanks

This book series would not have been possible without the help of many people. Everyone has my appreciation but a few people deserve an extra shout out.

Candace Machein sent her father's files to make sure Kurt was remembered. Joe Roizen's family did likewise. Tom Werner, Bob Pargee and David Crosthwait shared material that others had trashed while Carter Elliot bundled up pamphlets and drove them to Fedex. Marc Wanamaker shared his amazing Hollywood archive.

Egon Grafen discovered archived KEM material, Heidi Heftburger found the best Svilova images, Ekaterina Gracheva did the same with Russian filmmakers. Bernd Perplies helped with German inventors while Hakan Lindberg shared his images of editing in Sweden, and Christelle Naili sourced the long lost Italian Moritone.

Pauline Duclaud-Lacoste ensured her great great grandfather Georges Melies was honored, while Bob Phillips shared his own photos of Jack Mullin and Bing Crosby. Sumio Yamamoto and Kyoko Takahashi found materials in Toshiba's vaults. Tarek Atrissi designed the book, and Sharleen Chen created the outstanding cover.

My research was aided immensely by David Gleeson's amazing online resource www.americanradiohistory.com

Brett Wayn chimed in with measured advice. Gene Simon, John Delmont, and Barry Guisinger added humor to their notes just when I needed it. Loran Kary, Glenn Reid, Nick Schlott and Ralf Berger patiently explained the challenges of writing software code. Steven Cohen reminded me, Editors are people, editing systems are the tools, don't mix that up.

Phil Hodgetts gave good advice, John Maizels opened doors, Ron Barker pushed me to try harder and Chet Schuler insisted on getting it right. Bruce Rady, Bernie Laramie and Bill Hogan remembered when others forgot. The ladies at the Jerzy Toeplitz Library inside the AFTRS in Sydney found dozens of books, manuscripts, articles and trade magazines to check facts.

The team at Stanford University had everything set for my short visit. Al Alcorn, Steve Wozniak and Steve Mayer replied when their inboxes must be full every day.

The people who invented desktop video Eric Peters, Jeff Bedell, Tyler Peppel, Carl Calabria, Ivan Maltz and Randy Ubillos answered all of my questions, many that they had heard before, with a smile. They never let me doubt my plan.

I have to tip my hat to the text editors, Bob Glover and Gary Buck.They volunteered to read this book over and over and diligently worked through the raw manuscript, corrected it and made great improvements.

Ash Davies and Alex Eckermann from Tablo.io continue to make Timeline an amazing electronic and paper book series.

And there are people who have helped me, without knowing about the book.

Lyn Grubisa (nee Penniment) drilled into me and my Grade 5 classmates - Do it Once, Do it Right.

Dave Pretty taught me more about filmmaking, and business at Marketforce in a month, than a college course had in a year. Max Pepper explained the value of a flatbed as we cut dozens of lemonade and burger commercials. Ross McDonald rescued me from an unemployment office and gave me a job. Drew Gibson taught me the BVE ropes.

My long time friend Dan Flanagan pushed me to apply for a job in broadcast news. It was advice that changed my life. I owe John Rudd a lifetime of thanks for hiring me at TVW7, and giving me the freedom to experiment.

Fellow editors Ray Furness, Nick Glover and Ray Neale guided me in the craft of editing, even when I pretended to know everything.

Peter Abbott and Tim Worner encouraged me to hone my editing skills while Steve Christiansen, Jacqua Page, Dave Galloway and Michael Horrocks believed in me, and my editing company. Laura Gohery helped me turn it into a success.

Bill Orr, Pete Hammar and Ralph Guggenheim were endlessly helpful before the idea of a book even existed, and continued with insight throughout its writing. Ralph's enthusiasm is infectious, Pete's advice forthright.

Despite the fact that Thelma Schoonmaker is one of the most awarded and talented editors ever, she answered my questions as if she were unknown and idle. Ted Horton and Vincent Zimbardi supported me with editing challenges through my transition from editor to editor/author.

Andrew Morris starred in my 8mm movies, listened to my plans, gave me work and remained an unwavering friend throughout.

Donna, Manny, Tillster, Miranda, Elena, Mario, the Colettes and Wild Matt encouraged and humored me.

Bill Warner changed editing forever. Without Bill there would be no Avid. There would be no book called 'Timeline'. He encouraged me at every turn, welcomed me to his home, selflessly assisted my research, lent me documents and tapes, drove me around Boston, twisted former colleagues' arms to talk, and opened up his heart to the project.

Without reservation. Bill has faced challenges that would humble most, and never gave up. He is an inspiration.

The Bucks, Waddells and Kuehs have been hugely supportive of Timeline.

Mum and Dad gave me the freedom to dream.

Tan gave me patience and understanding.

About the Author

John Buck has been an editor since he needed a way to cut his Super 8 mm camera rushes. Using a splicer and cement he cut together parodies of TV shows for screening in a home cinema and eventually graduated to local filmmaker festivals.

After being fired from his first full-time job as a junior advertising agency producer, John (left in photo) struggled to explain his skill set to the employment official. His father advised him to get a job that people can understand what it is that you do. The manager of a production company saw potential, and offered him a role as an editor on the midnight shift. John used his 8 mm abilities on 3/4, 1 and 2" tape.

He edited everything from commercials to auctions. High fashion to sheep teeth.With a skill that people could understand he left Taimac, and began editing in earnest at local television station TVW-7.

With a 6pm deadline, an accommodating boss and a talented senior editor to guide him, Buck became an editor. He took those skills across the country to the international TV show Beyond 2000 where he helped create award winning programs.

Eventually it was time to branch out on his own, but he was unable to afford the Avid that was so mesmerizing at a trade demo. Backed once again by his parents, he took a chance and bought a Media 100 digital nonlinear editing system. One unit became two, and three and four.

A one man band became a thriving business.

This edition

1850-1969

In this edition Timeline: Analog One (CoVid), I have added revisions, corrections, slight additions, new photos, a comprehensive grammar check and further spell fixes.

This update continues new material and interviews including Stewart Hegeman's Par Vision home record of 1963. I found a copy of A Discussion on Videotape Recording (and editing) from a 1958 IEEE forum. More on David Paul Gregg, Keith O. Johnson and Gauss.

My thanks to Gayle in the Library at the Wisconsin Historical Society for her research on the Houstons.

Since the last update, we have lost three pioneers.

Donald Eldridge worked at Boeing, before taking his magnetic recording expertise to Ampex. In time he was a cofounder of Memorex (created the CMX600/200) and then cofounded International Video Corporation before retiring early to devote himself to philanthropy. Mr Eldridge passed on December 26, 2016,

William Herbert Orr, 81, of Huntsville, Alabama was a key contributor to electronic editing by virtue of buying CMX Systems and building it into a vibrant independent company with an 80% share of editing system sales worldwide. Sadly Bill passed away August 22, 2016.

The genius Harvey Dubner, who co-created the Ticketron booking system in the 70s, and then a series of ground breaking character generator devices, passed away October 23, 2019.

I offer my condolences to the families and former colleagues.

We will miss them.

1. No Editing

In 1850 there were no cinemas.

No movie cameras. No rushes.

No editing. No editors.

Instead, audiences who sought out entertainment sat in front of a device that projected one image onto a wall, that then dissolved into another. With growing popularity, inventors made personal viewers which allowed their customers to crank a small handle on a wooden box and stare through a slot to see a sequence of flickering still images.

Typical were Philadelphians looking through Coleman Sellers' Kinematoscope. After recording images of his children working in his factory, Sellers mounted the photos on blades of a spinning paddle which, when spun, mimicked the motion of real life.

Machinery that used a lens and light source to show pictures, paintings, prints, or eventually photographs, from transparent glass plates had been around since the 1500s but these new 'magic lanterns' proved popular, in part because they symbolized a growing belief in technology.

Sir John Herschel

Innovation was a measure of national stature.

During the late-nineteenth century devices like the electric furnace, the steam turbine, the automobile, wireless telegraphy, and the aircraft were invented. Historians call it the 'golden age of invention'.

Author Peter Kobel notes:

Something was certainly in the air. The turn of the century was a period of tremendous technological development, firing imaginations with visions of speed.

The English philosopher, Alfred Whitehead wrote:

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the method of invention.

HERSCHEL

Sir John Herschel, the son of respected British astronomer William Herschel, epitomized Whitehead's observation.

Kshitij Nagar described Herschel as:

...the scientific superstar of the 19th century.

Herschel was a chemist and botanist when he started in an emerging field that the Scientific American (1862) called:

Of all the arts, the one that seems miraculous is photography.

Writer Helmut Gernsheim concluded:

Photography owes Herschel many valuable contributions...

Even though the science, art, and practice of photography was invented cumulatively, Herschel is arguably the 'Father of Photography'. In rapid succession, he discovered that sodium thiosulphate stabilized a developed photograph and he then made the earliest extant photograph to glass. He even took time to clarify the words used by his peers to describe their work in patents and academic papers.

Herschel coined the term photography as a more precise description and was the first to use the terms negative, positive and snapshot.

Among many ideas that he set forward was a device that could project a program of sequential images. Moving Pictures.

What I have to propose may appear a dream, but it has at least the merit of being possible, and perhaps a realisable one...by an adequate sacrifice of time, trouble, mechanism and outlay.

He believed there were two major steps to make.

1st..what photography has already realised, or we may be sure it will realise within some very limited lapse of time...and, 2ndly, that a mechanism is possible by which a prepared plate be presented, focussed, impressed, displaced, numbered, secured in the dark, and replaced by another within two or three tenths of a second.

Such an apparatus needed speed and flexibility, and the technology of nineteenth-century photography was neither. It was too rigid and too slow to rapidly expose a series of images. Let alone project them to an audience.

A key inventor in later years, Charles Francis Jenkins, recalls how many steps were actually needed:

The motion picture is not a sort of Minerva-birth of inventive genius but like all notable achievements in mechanisms has had a long line of predecessors, for the difficult problem of recording and reproducing motion did not yield without much preliminary fumbling.

Jenkins was right.

Frederick Scott Archer

The first to fumble was a sculptor.

ARCHER

Frederick Scott Archer wanted a better photographic method than the existing calotype system, which used paper coated with silver iodide, to record images. A typical single photographic exposure took forty minutes and produced a fuzzy image.

After two years of experimenting, Archer debuted a new way to create a photo negative using the substance, collodion and wrote in a submission to The Chemist in 1851.

My endeavour, therefore, has been to overcome these difficulties, and I find them from numerous trials that Collodion, when well prepared, is admirably adapted for photographic purposes as a substitute for paper.

Collodion consists of nitrocellulose (a flammable compound also called guncotton) dissolved in ethyl alcohol and then mixed with ether. It is transparent, membranous, and tough. Working in a dark room, Archer poured a collodion emulsion on to a glass plate and rocked it around to form a light-sensitive layer.

In this method, the plate had to be exposed and developed within 20 minutes and kept moist throughout, or the collodion dried and produced a poor image. Archer's method became known as the 'wet plate process'.

It presents a perfectly transparent and even surface when poured on glass, and being in some measure tough and elastic, will, when damp, bear handling in several stages of the process.

Archer's invention was the first practical, and reproducible photographic process. Author Sean MacKenna:

Archer...understood the significance of collodion as a photographic binder and was the first to put together a workable method and publish it.

Maj. Gen. Mortimer D. Leggett by Matthew Brady, wet collodion negative

The process was much faster than the incumbent methods, delivering images in seconds rather than minutes. However, it was the quality of wet plate negative (above) that made them popular.

Archer's invention became the dominant photo process for thirty years and was used by thousands of photographers across the world (Cooley photo below), but without a patent or financial backing, he died penniless.

PARKES

Another Englishman, Alexander Parkes set out to create a substance that could be used to replace 'India rubber' in hundreds of retail products. He experimented with nitrocellulose and created a plastic-like material that he called Parkesine.

...my object is to employ collodion or its compounds for manufacturing purposes generally.

He also saw another use for Parkesine:

...substituting for the sheets of glass a sheet of collodion of sufficient thickness to support the prepared film, a thick layer of collodion may be first formed on the glass and on this layer the film of prepared collodion may be produced and the picture taken thereon and suitably varnish or protected...

Section of a light battery in Jacksonville, Florida by Samuel A. Cooley

Parkes started a company to produce Parkesine but poor pricing and product quality saw it bankrupt within two years. His works manager Daniel Spill continued research and patented a more stable version that he named Xylonite.

Spill believed that if the product was 'whiter' it could be used as a replacement for ivory to make chess pieces and hair combs. Spill also saw a connection to photography and told the London Photographic Society that Xylonite could be:

...a flexible and structureless substitute for the glass negative supports...

Far from London, an Ohio chemistry professor, Hamilton Smith, discovered that he could pour collodion onto surfaces other than glass, and found decent results using tin. The process was colloquially called 'tintype'.

Alma Davenport in The History of Photography: An Overview :

A tintype could be coated, shot, developed and into the hands of the customer in less than six minutes.

Photography moved further ahead. If rigid and fragile glass plates were replaced, by tintypes or Xylonite, Herschel's motion picture camera could be realized.

The Belgian engineer Henry Desire Du Mont had experimented with photographic devices for several years before he filed a patent for a camera that could move glass plates in quick succession in order to expose them for a photo sequence. It appears he never built a working moving pictures camera, but others soon did.

John Hyatt

HYATT

Around the same time, American John Hyatt saw a newspaper advertisement for the billiard