Viddler

In this video, I'm working with Rick Olha, who was writing some very early demo software for Avid, which was only a few weeks old.

This basic demo concept served us very well. By having some different still images, but each with a line at a different angle, we could show "editing" by playing a varying sequence of 360 images. Each "source" was the same image repeated 60 times, but with a line changing at 6 degrees per frame, so as you played it, the line would move.

(Later, once we had a way to digitize, we would capture 60 frames of video for each strip and subsample them to 128x96. Then this demo began to show actual motion editing. I'm not sure we have any videos of it at that point, though.)

The trick was to create an editing interface where you could see "video" being edited. Our first interface was very film-strip oriented.

(Note that in later demos we got the line to move CLOCKWISE, which felt much better!)

Feedback from editors later convinced us to focus on a Souce Monitor, Record Monitor design that was more like existing video and film editing.

For any people who've used Apple's new iMovie '08, you'll see that they use this filmstrip approach. Its funny to see how many of the ideas in this early demo in 1987 are also in the iMovie product from just this year. (And, interestingly, iMovie 08 totally confounds people used to traditional non-linear editors.)

-- Bill Warner, November 2008