Appendix 1

A Letter from the Author
I edited my fi rst fi lm in 1974 on rewinds and a viewer. I also had a mag reader that could interlock
three tracks of sound. My focus shifted to sound editing and mixing, but for the next ten years I
continued editing on fi lm using Steenbeck, Movieolla, and Kem fl atbed editors. The vast majority
of my editing was done on the ubiquitous Movieolla upright, rewinds, and several good fi lm bins. I
still bear the physical scars from runaway reels and inattentive use of my cherished Revis splicers.
To this day, I thrill when entering an old editing room that still has the smell of a “real” editing room,
that wondrous mix of acetate, acetone, and stale coffee.
But time marches on. In the eighties, I was back editing picture and sound, only now on nonlinear
Sony video systems. Mine was a glorious system: linear time code, A-B playback with digital effects
switcher, with GPI trigger and interlock to an eight-track audio system. But just when I thought it
couldn’t get any better, along came Avid.
I learned nonlinear editing on the Avid Media Composer Express. It was a bare bones, stripped-down
system with composite video input from a U-Matic, three-quarter-inch video deck. The price, not
including the video recorder, was $35,000. Keep in mind that this was at a time when you could buy
a small house for $50,000.
But it was awesome. It could do anything the nonlinear system could do. Plus, I could make any
complicated effect or edit, change anything whenever I wanted to, and I could do all of it with the
click of a mouse. The interface was easy to understand and the learning curve rather fl at.
It had some serious limitations, though. It still only had eight audio tracks. It was expandable to
more, but this was part of an expensive upgrade. It only had 20 Gig of video storage, so I was always
out of space. It could only use Avid media drives, so I couldn’t simply plug in a couple of extra
drives. And everything from Avid was wickedly expensive.
The best part was I didn’t pay for it. While I always thought of any editing system I was using as
mine, I had never owned any editing system. I could design the layout and suggest what equipment
I wanted to use, but my employer always bought it; I simply used it.
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