first nle

[Michael Gissing]

[Tom Wolsky] “it’s about to be open source software.”

That’s interesting news. I didn’t realise they were still in the game.

[Don Walker]

Rafael,
I almost forgot.
I worked for WXIA in Atlanta from ’86 to ’93 and then freelanced with them through ’99.
They are owned by the Gannett Corporation which prints USA Today. For a very short period of time in the late ’80s early 90’s Gannett produced “USA Today” the TV show in a studio on the East Coast. When that went bust, our production manager and Station manager lobbied to get the equipment brought to Atlanta. We ended up with a graphic suite in the basement of the station Quantel Harry, GVG Kadenza, D-1 machine etc. It was mainly the domain of John Burns of “Television by Design” and his brother Jim, who was hired by the station. When it was first installed however Ian Feinberg and I went down and jumped on the Harry and produced a piece for the Georgia State Games, that won us a Regional Emmy.

John and Jim Burns for a long time produced graphic packages for stations all over the country (including CNN) from the edit suites of Gannett Production Services (GPS) in the back of the station on West Peachtree in Atlanta. Very talented brothers.

Sorry to brag….. but you mentioning Quantel brought back memories.

don walker
texarkana, texas

John 3:16

[Jason Porthouse]

For me, it was a Fast Video machine with DPR – a kind of hybrid linear editor with NLE capability. AFAIR it had about an hour of storage, and cost a lot.

Then on to Avid – can’t remember what version, but would have been around ’95 – with a brief flirtation with FCP when it came out. I remember hearing about Key Grip (I worked with lots of Macromedia users at the time, for authoring all sorts of interactive stuff) and being exited, but FCP on the systems we had at the time was bit clunky.

First real use of FCP was version 3, at the same time as freelancing on Avid and Fast Silver. Have done progressively less Avid, and more FCP, since then.

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Tom Wolsky]

We had the Video Machine as well but only in its linear configuration. We could use it to digitize and worked with AE before laying back to tape through the VM. Whatever happened to those guys? They wrote some nice software.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 4 Editing Workshop”

[Herb Sevush]

EMC squared – 1996-1999
Discreet Edit* – 1999-2005
FCP 5? – 2005

The dates might be a little off.

Edit* was my favorite but was murdered by it’s corporate step-father Autodesk.

ECM squared was the Betamax to Avid’s VHS as the first commercial NLEs. PC based it had some amazing features I’ve never seen on any other NLE, but was buggy and underfunded.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Andrew Golden]

Media 100 3.5 on a PowerPC 9600 200mhz machine. Used Media 100 full time until 2005 or so (I keep upgrading to the most recent versions but haven’t edited on it since 2007).

FCP 3.0 but didn’t use full-time until FCP 6.0 in 2007.

Andrew S. Golden
Director of Marketing / Technology Specialist
Video Corporation of America
7 Veronica Avenue
Somerset, NJ 08875
http://www.vca.com

[David Eells]

Montage Picture Processor, 1985 or 1986. It used a bank of modified vhs decks as storage.