Category: <span>Editor’s Wake</span>

Editor’s Wake- Sony RM-450
Published March 10, 2015 by

Editor’s Wake- Sony RM-450

Much like the physician who secretly hopes for someone to say “Is there a doctor in the house?”, or a pilot who longs to hear “Can anybody fly this plane?”- I await the day when I’m sitting in  a post house and someone comes running down the hall screaming “Can anyone do a split edit on an RM 450?” I see it now: I’d slowly rise from my chair, flex my shuttle wrist, spin my jog finger, and turn to them and say “Yes…Yes I can.”

Despite the fact that I should probably have a better fantasy life than that, there are an awful lot of utterly obsolete skill sets that you acquire after 20 years in post production. Using an edit controller is one of them, and the Sony RM-450 was by far the one most widely used.

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Editor’s Wake – Fast Video Machine
Published June 11, 2012 by

Editor’s Wake – Fast Video Machine

The year was 1994 when Fast Multimedia AG (Munich Germany) announced the Fast Video Machine. The Fast Video Machine was a hybrid editor, which is a product category that’s now all but disappeared to the filmmaking world.

Linear Editing was the standard, two or more video tape recorders (VTR’s) connected to a device that allowed you to record video linearly in real time from deck to deck. The new wave, of course, was Non-Linear Editing, which was the full digitization of your video assets which allowed you to cut entirely within the computer. For 1994 though, Non-Linear Editing was impossibly out of reach for most editors, besides the quality of the digitized video was not all that great, and you needed to go back to tape for the online edit. Hybrid-Editing was a crazy marriage of linear deck control, and the select digitization of certain parts of video (such as transitions), which allowed you to use the actual video tape signal for high quality, and married it with the digital transitions for flexibility. It actually worked remarkably well.

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Editor’s Wake – IMC Incite
Published April 26, 2011 by

Editor’s Wake – IMC Incite

I may have been the only person out there that used IMC’s Incite software. It was a very well featured and relatively stable platform that ran on Windows, and the Matrox Digisuite. However it never really seemed to gain much traction in the marketplace and it was abandoned like many other packages when both Apple and Avid moved into the lower-end video market. IMC as a company still exists today, and looks to provide software and services for broadcasters and news organizations.

Back in the day (around 2001), IMC Incite was a supremely featured system, according to their marketing materials, these were the top 10 Reasons to Chose Incite over it’s competitors:

 

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Editor’s Wake- discreet edit*
Published April 20, 2011 by

Editor’s Wake- discreet edit*

Once upon a time in Canada, there was a company called Discreet Logic. They were a bold people, who developed high-end visual effects software on SGI computers called flame*, inferno*, and smoke*,for major Hollywood releases and broadcasters. They also liked to write things in only lower case and add asterisks* after* words* for* no* apparent* reason*. Looking to branch out into the industrial and lower end video markets they brought out a new NLE in the late 90’s, designed to work on PC’s and Windows NT, and they called it: edit*.

edit* quickly gained a rabid following in its market. It ran on PC workstations with a Matrox Digisuite, or Pinnacle Targa 2000 card, for a ridiculously low price of only around $10,000. The simplicity and workflow that discreet brought to the NLE interface won many converts, including myself, and for the time it was the by far the best bang-for-the-buck editor out there. You got to have a small, capable real-time, dual stream, uncompressed video system, with the cachet of the discreet name, that felt like running your video on the “big iron” systems. As someone who was trained in flame* and smoke* back in the SGI days, this was the big clincher. Combined with discreet’s combustion* motion graphics app, you could have your own mini-flame* for a fraction of the price. It was an unstoppable combination, that died a quick and pointless death.

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