Timeline Analog 3: 1981-1989

By John Buck

Timeline Analog 3 (1981-1989) traces the amazing story of editing's evolution. Read how filmmakers like Spielberg and Hitchcock used editing to craft masterpieces while inventors like Beeson, Rady and Warner built wondrous editing machines for editors. Free updates included.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Apr 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781925108682

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.

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Dedication

The Timeline books are dedicated to Adrian Ettlinger (1925 - 2013)

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.

Foreword by Ralph Guggenheim

You can recognize the pioneers by the arrows in their backs.

- Popular saying.

With this volume, we are midstream in the saga of editing techniques and technology. As you work your way through this carefully researched history (in itself, a timeline), it can be easy to lose sight of the achievements of the people who inhabit these volumes. Hindsight dims the brilliance of their work. What seems intuitive to us today wasn't so clear or obvious when these ideas first sprang from their imaginations.

They navigated a sea of conflicting issues: What the available technology could deliver; What new technology was on the horizon; What customers could afford. And those arrows in their backs? Would customers be willing to adapt and change or would they sabotage new ideas in an attempt to hang onto the status quo? The random walk across decades of products and development in these pages is, in fact, the tale of visionaries who sought a solution to a specific need. They wanted to reduce the effort required to take a story from idea to screen, and unlock creative opportunities for the storytellers, the directors and editors.

In 1979, George Lucas was frustrated that the films he wanted to make were hobbled by antiquated tools that limited his vision. Forty of us were recruited to establish a research division at Lucasfilm (the team doubled by 1986). Our mission - to bring advanced digital techniques to film production.

We were not the only hub of innovation attacking these problems. There were many others - some collaborators, some competitors. We were all invested in achieving that watershed moment. When we started, hardly any films were made with any form of computer assistance. Today, no film is made without digital technology.

The potential for ongoing development and advancement stretches endlessly to a horizon beyond our view. Each technical innovation frees artists and creators to imagine new stories and more immersive experiences. There's a lot to mine in these books. They offer us the opportunity to learn from this past in order to cut a path to newer and better techniques in the future.

Ralph Guggenheim

Project Lead, Lucasfilm's EditDroid (1980-1985)

Preface

In the spring of 1924, a small Germany company Lyta Cinema Works built the first dedicated editing device. A few months later the American made Moviola went on sale in Hollywood and become a huge success but it was sixty five years before a digital equivalent arrived for professionals.

In the intervening years individuals, and teams imagined tools that could join images together in the blink of an eye. They trialled technology, experimented with the impossible, quit secure jobs for the unknown, and ran out of money. All the while, they tried to ship the best editing product possible. For many years their stories went untold.

Hoping to solve an amicable dispute with Boris Yamnitsky, who had just acquired Media 100, I found myself at the local library staring at books that talked about 'how to' edit but not how editing came to be. My casual conversation was now a niggling annoyance.

I turned to the web and found two names listed in submissions to the U.S Patent Office about electronic editing. Adrian Ettlinger and William Warner.

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 again when two key contributors passed away. Art Schneider and Jack Calaway both made huge contributions to editing, yet their efforts had gone largely unheralded. I decided to record the history of editing because it fades.

Timeline zigs and zags from people to places, within companies, across continents. People's lives rarely run from A to B. Former Xerox scientist David Canfield Smith told me:

In any revolution, technological or otherwise, there are interesting characters. In fact, the characters often are the story.

Thanks

The Timeline Analog book series would not have been possible without the help of many people. Everyone has my appreciation and 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.

Thanks to Mark Tuchman for sharing the EditDroid and Guggenheim photographs. Thanks to David K Helmly for Hitchcock and Premiere memories. Sumio Yamamoto and Kyoko Takahashi found materials in Toshiba's vaults. Tarek Atrissi designed the book, and Sharleen Chen created the outstanding cover.

Brett Wayn chimed in 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.

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 (above right) 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 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 turned his Super 8 mm cutting abilities to 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 a job on 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

1983-1989

Timeline: Analog Three is published by Enriched Books Ltd and Tablo. It is the third in a series designed for students of film and television and small screens everywhere. I am updating it regularly with new interviews and images to make it more interesting but at no extra cost to you.

This update continues new material from Apple's Gene Carter, Pixar's Malcolm Blanchard and David Fung from the Apple Macintosh II team. There are also revisions, corrections and spell checks.

The book will take you about 4 hours to read. Thanks again to Mark Tuschman for letting me use his photograph of Ralph Guggenheim at no cost.

I have made recorded contact with all known copyright owners. Email me if you wish to make corrections or spot something that's incorrect or inaccurate.

The right of John Buck to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly. Besides it's uncool to copy.

(c) Copyright John Buck 2019

Timeline

"I think there should always be a reason for making a cut. If a scene plays well in one camera set up and there is no reason to cut,

then I don't cut."

- Stanley Kubrick

14. Friendly's Diner

NOVEMBER 1981

The space shuttle Columbia, piloted by astronauts Joe Engle and Richard Truly, became the first re-useable space vehicle in November 1981.

At around the same time, editing systems engineer Eloy Chairez received a call from Dave Orr, manager of Fernseh's editing division.

He asked if I would be interested in an Application Engineer position in Salt Lake City. This position was for the Editing and Machine Control products group and I would be working directly with Dave. Needless to say, I needed a job and nothing was off the table. I flew to SLC, met with Bill Butler, Dietmar Ziegar and him. I took the job and my Mach One journey continued. Dave and I spearheaded a new facelift on the Mach One and at NAB 1982 we introduced the Mach One Series II system!

The Series II introduced Slow-Motion editing to the Mach One. There was also dual channel audio control, programmable slow motion, updated edit list formatting and cluster event programming.

I remember we pulled an 'all nighter" the day before the show opened. We were walking out as they opened the doors for the crowds on day one! We went to the hotel, showered and changed into our suits and returned to the show.

Another announcement came from CEO Bill Butler:

At my recommendation, Bosch bought out Bell and Howell's interest and the company was renamed Robert Bosch Corporation, Fernseh Division.

Chairez adds:

We started the 1982 NAB show with name tags that had Bell & Howell/Bosch but ended the show with name tags with Bosch Fernseh.

Butler had been brough to Fernseh to streamline the US operations.

Fernseh (US) did make several important contributions to the overall Fernseh operation. First was the shorter development time, which allowed an early market entry. Several products were developed and manufactured by Salt Lake for international sales.

Second we implemented Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II), known today as the Demming method, which had been adopted by Japanese auto exporters in the late '60s. This gave us huge improvements in cost, on-time delivery and quality. The Salt Lake operation was one of the early US adapters of Demming, made possible by our close continuing association with the Bell & Howell manufacturing chief.

Butler recalls the next move:

Jim had come up with a design for a new system to improve on the Mach One. It incorporated a lot of the unique features such as the Active EDL and full Look-Ahead Search capability. He went to Bosch with the design.

Despite its introduction into PAL broadcast markets and Adams' new design, Mach One didn't fit with Fernseh's plans. Butler moved Chairez to Los Angles to work in Fernseh's outside sales with companies like Chyron then made a tough decision on the man who had created the editing system.

We decided to end new development of the Mach One. I had known Jim as a key member of my engineering team at CMX Systems a decade earlier so I wished him well and released all rights of the Mach One intellectual property to him.

Jim Adams joined with development partners Joe Swiderski & Mike Shetter and sought out a new backer for their next generation editing system. Bill Butler left Fernseh in 1982 yet still had a major role to play in editing's history.

COMPEDITOR

Sun-1 was the first generation of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems (Stanford University Network) launched in May 1982. John Seamons, who co-designed the Sun-1 ethernet interface, now worked in the Lucasfilm Computer Division nearby Ralph Guggenheim's team:

When John arrived at Lucasfilm, he evangelized the SUN product line and we became one of their first customers.

The power of the UNIX based computers allowed the editing group to experiment with features that had been deemed impossible with the PERQ powered 'Dodo'. The new Sun driven device became known as the Compeditor.

Meanwhile another Lucasfilm programmer had written a software tool that became critical to the editing group. Malcolm Blanchard had created a program that was able to bring together all of the disparate information, that related to film and video clips at Lucasfilm, into an accessible and ordered format. Built from the ground up the 'SiBYL' program could track a motion picture film's progress from camera rushes through special effects and all post production stages.

Blanchard recalls:

The architecture of the asset management system I built for ILM consisted of a general-purpose database management system, a schema that described the data ILM needed managed and a user interface to interact with it. All of which I wrote from scratch. Sibyl was the DBMS. It was similar in function as today's Oracle and Sybase systems, though those systems are much more scalable and robust than Sibyl ever dreamed of.

The ability to cross relate video clone time codes and link them to original film key numbers and edge numbers was critical to a future editing system. Guggenheim recalls:

Malcolm and I had been officemates in the early days of the Lucasfilm Computer Division and we remained close friends. I was very aware of his work on SiBYL. When he was about to wrap up his work on the ILM version of this database software, I enlisted him to come over and work with us and integrate it into the editing system

Such a tool could potentially solve Ralph Guggenheim's biggest headache, the ability to playback video clips with the same flexibility of film editing systems. He hoped that a re-purposed SiBYL could organize clips into 'bins' and then from there an editor could select more specific frames to be played in a 'sequence' or 'schedule'.

Blanchard adds:

SiBYL stayed the same. The work for Editdroid was to write a new scheme and user interface. The Compeditor /Editdroid scheme was similar to ILM's in that it described film clips. There was some additional information to allow accessing a clip on the electronic media and we needed to add the ability to describe the edit list. All that was pretty straight forward. The hardest part was designing and implementing the user interface.

The ILM interface was text based. Compeditor had a graphical interface and this was the first time I had worked with one. The possibilities were enormous and there weren't any precedents to copy. I think I spent about a year, maybe two, working on the project. The vast majority of that time was working on the UI.

While the new UNIX based systems at Lucasfilm were better than the ageing Perqs, they created another problem to solve. Clark Higgins recalls:

You hit a button to stop or start the videodisc player and it would take a half second to respond. I knew this was going to be an issue with film editors and even video editors who were able to get instant feedback from their decks with the Sony BVE or Convergence systems. You need to get a tactile response to jogging and moving through frames and the UNIX operating system couldn't deliver that.

George Lucas had allocated $10m in funding for the Computer Division but despite its ground breaking research, the team was far from creating commercial products. Bob Greber and Roger Faxon looked to hire a manager who could bring a business sense to the various research projects.Robert (Bob) Doris recalls:

I was back working at BCG when I received a call from a headhunter who said she represented a company in need of a division general manager. They wanted someone with a business and legal background. That person was to look at technologies that the company had developed in-house and work with existing staff to turn that work first into commercially viable products and then license it to third parties.

That sounded interesting but ... they didn't want to hire anybody with too much experience because that would be too expensive. Of course I didn't know who the client was during the initial part of the conversation but the headhunter let me know eventually that it was a major film company.

To be honest I was a little incredulous because it didn't seem to make sense. Here was a major film company looking to revolutionize film and sound editing technologies as well as re-invent computer graphics. I had enough experience in computers and technology from university and my own computer start up to know what was being done at that time in the film and computer industries. And that was relatively primitive.

I had also visited several Hollywood based post-production companies for a BCG consultancy job, so I had a basic understanding of that area too. What the headhunter was describing didn't sound realistic, or achievable and I didn't want to join something that was potentially short lived. But my incredulity really came from the question Which film company would want to invent a set of new film tools that would turn the industry on its head?

I said to her You have to tell me who the client is

And the headhunter replied Lucasfilm

And I said As in Star Wars Lucas- film?

And she said Yes

I was annoyed that I didn't guess it before being told. It had to be Lucasfilm. No mainstream studio would do this, make such changes to post-production. To make a complete transition to digital with effects and integrate sound so wholly. That's when I asked Can I come and see these projects we have been discussing?

Doris made the trek to San Raphael and met Greber and project heads Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull.

I saw the stuff that Andy Moorer, Ralph Guggenheim and Alvy Ray Smith had created and was amazed. It was far ahead of anything anywhere in the world. From what I had seen during the BCG consultancy work in Hollywood, I could see how in a broad sense that these new tools could be adapted in the post production world.

I went from incredulous to very excited. And there was a little hint from the senior management, but never a commitment, that would consider spinning it out as a separate company at some point. And