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.
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.
