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Media 100 is making a Come back!
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When the station I was working at was looking at Non-Linear back in the mid 1990’s, we were considering Immix, Avid and Media100.
The three demos we had went like this:
1) The Immix dealer sent an engineer that wasn’t an editor, but I had a great time playing with the Turbo Cube, and appreciated it’s real-timeness and hardware.
2) The Avid demo where I was only allowed to actually touch the box for a few minutes before the demo guys headed back to Tewksbury.
3) The Media100 demo by a computer reseller that didn’t know video. They showed us pretty pictures, but didn’t know anything about editing or video production.I admired the Media100 Data Translations prowess for making the best picture, but I didn’t like the interface. Another part of the company did buy one and I had to troubleshoot it. I wasn’t happy about that. My department bought a Media Composer 1000 with the NuBus ABVB.
I picked the Avid, because in that short time I was able to demo it, it just felt like an editor’s tool. The video quality eventually caught up, just like Moore’s Law tells us, but by then I was on to greener pastures.
I’m happy that Media100 is still around, but to me it was that Vincent card that made great pictures that put it on the map, not the editing interface.
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Okay, now THIS is a thread. LOL
As my business evolved in the 90s, I built it around Media 100, taking out a second mortgage on my house to do so.
And my first job after my life as a Media 100 editor was working for Boris as his Director of Marketing, and the product manager for Boris FX and Boris RED. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had.
So while I’ve been out of the game long enough that I’m not longer qualified to respond to the “come back” part of the thread, I think Jim’s enthusiasm is entirely rightly placed.
And I’m excited in some typically tangential ways to spin some old-guy yarns.
If you’ll indulge me, multiple replies at once….
[Jim Wiseman] “I do believe that Media 100 is older than the COW.”
Yes! The COW was founded in 2001…BUT NOTE….as some of the old-timers will recall, the COW’s immediate predecessor community was The WWUG, short for The Media 100 Worldwide Users Group. It wasn’t the first web-based community for media professionals (the second I think), but it was the one that stuck.
And I’m just remembering as I write this, the WWUG started in JUNE 1995 — 20 years ago this month!!! I think I’ll write some more about this, but here’s a super-speedy summary as close to on-topic as I can make it.
I wasn’t there for year one. I was still using Adobe Premiere, my first NLE, and one reason that I will always feel spiritually attached to Adobe in ways that have exactly zero to do with my life with them today as one of the COW’s strongest supporters from the COW’s first day. I owe my life in this industry to them.
But at least as much as Premiere: After Effects, which I started using in 1993, the year before Adobe bought it. Among my peeps, I was by no means an early adopter. I was a late adopter.
But, After Effects in hand, I did merrily show up to the WWUG in 1996. The WWUG too was my life, and I owe more than my career to the WWUG. I owe what little sanity I’ve maintained, and the most enduring friendship of my life, with Ron Lindeboom, built over many cross-continent conversations well into the wee hours of the morning, about rock and roll long after we exhausted “work” topics, feet up on my desk in the edit suite.
So yes, Media 100 is older than the COW, but the WWUG was right there at the very beginning.
I could even argue that the success of Media 100 was even more predicated on the success of the WWUG than After Effects, and I think I’ll do so at length in an article. The WWUG was there before Media 100’s own website was, iirc.
It is DEFINITELY worth noting that Netscape Navigator had only been released in December 1994. Six months later in those days was a very long time indeed, and the Lindebooms were publicly pilloried for the lunacy of building a community ON THE INTERNET, which was filled with nothing but poser nobodies.
Well, nobodies, yes. Posers, no. Those of us in small towns (mine had 8000 people in it) were deadly serious, because we weren’t playing with house money…except in the sense of the guys like me who literally put our houses on the line.
Needless to say, regardless, internet-based communities, including the WWUG, won in the end.
[Bret Williams] “Adobe After Effects owes much of it’s early success to Media100 editors who had no choice but to use After Effects if they wanted to do anything but a cut, dissolve or a wipe. “
I somewhat disagree. BORIS FX owes its early success to Media 100’s limitations. Media 100 was the second host — the first was Premiere — but Media 100 is the one that set it on firmer footing among the first wave of nonlinear broadcast deliver-ers.
More broadly, I think Media 100 owes its EARLIEST adoption to After Effects.
Don’t forget that Media 100 HARDWARE included the option to use Premiere SOFTWARE, aka Media 100 qx.
But Media 100’s FIRST primary use was not editing at all. Virtually the entire first wave of Media 100 boards were sold for frame-accurate, real-time output of After Effects animations to BetaSP tape. We could then walk over to any TV station with a tape whose picture quality rivaled anything else, at any price….but whose animations vastly exceeded anything else possible at any price.
Avid, Quantel, Discreet, pfeh. All limited to a finite set of effects. After Effects was limited by nothing but your imagination.
If we’re being honest, though, it’s not any NLE or even After Effects that turned desktop video into an actual revolution. It was the Sony UVW 1800 BetaSP deck. THAT’s what affordably (only $10,000!!!) enabled ANYONE to compete with ANYONE.
But no doubt, the heart of it was the combination of Media 100 and After Effects. The running joke was that even the top of the line Media 100 with its own (limited) real time NLE environment still offered its greatest value as a $30,000 real-time, frame-accurate output of After Effects animations to BetaSP tape.
It wasn’t until after the dust settled from a very nearly fatally botched transition to Power PC in 1997 that Media 100 could really, truly elevate itself as the unchallenged heavyweight champion of the Mac-based desktop REVOLUTION.
(Mac partisans, including myself, largely missed the equivalent revolution happening on Windows, but that’s a story for another thread.)
(The spectacular, nuclear-grade self-immolation of Media 100’s botched transition from 2.6.2 – 3.0, and the Gaudi board soon after, is part of what made me roll my eyes a bit when people squawked about FCPX. Yes, I felt your pain…but back in MY DAY, WE KNEW PAIN. LOL Old guys suck. LOL We really do.)
(Also of note: Media 100’s 1998 bidding war with Apple for Macromedia Final Cut, well beyond the scope of even this tangent.
Ironically, Media 100’s rumored plan –which could be verified or shot down by any number of you who might have been in the know; I was just a schlub customer — was to use it as the front end for a WINDOWS-based system, since no Mac system had the real-time juice to really make Final Cut fly in REAL real time.
Indeed, the demos of Macromedia Final Cut at NAB 1998 were on Windows for that very reason. I still have my Windows disk for Final Cut, as well as my Macromedia Final Cut t-shirt, linked elsewhere here in the COW.
Also of note: the purpose of Final Cut wasn’t to compete with Avid or Media 100. It was to create a consumer-grade application for the new iMac when Adobe declined to sell Premiere to Apple for this purpose. John Buck wrote about this at length in part 2 of his marvelous book Timelines. So I think of the later accusations of FCPX as iMovie Pro as boldly ironic.)
BTW, one adopter of Media 100 for virtually the sole purpose of outputting real-time frame accurate After Effects animations to BetaSP tape: one Ronald T. Lindeboom, and the business he ran with his wife Kathlyn, who was the one who founded the COW.)
(No matter what he has tried to tell me over the years, I insist that the “T” stands for “Tiberius.”)
Regardless of which was chicken and egg — and do note that an early code name for After Effects was “Egg,” and the egg always comes first, always — there is certainly no doubt that the roots of After Effects and Media 100 (both hardware and software) are inextricably entwined.
Also yet another way in which Adobe made all the difference in my early business.
[Scott Thomas] “to me it was that Vincent card that made great pictures that put it on the map, not the editing interface.”
Agreed, obviously. That and real-time frame-accurate output. I can’t overstate the importance of that. If you couldn’t deliver air-ready Beta SP, followed by DigiBeta, you weren’t in the game.
Avid was equally obviously playing a different game until Media 100 forced their hand with Media Composer Express around the turn of the century…but yeah, the image quality from Vincent was unlike anything else when it was introduced.
[Jeremy Garchow] “Media100i where the i stood for Internet”
And I was the first one to write about it!
Actually, the second, but I was the first to get it right. LOL A couple of hours after the first guy whiffed.
What happened is that M100 had briefed…somebody, I forget who…who was given the official pre-release screen caps and all that….and he simply fell short of the mark.
So I did what any viciously ambitious a-hole would have done in my position. Read his article, make my best guesses, swipe the screenshots (which were clearly provided by Media 100 and were therefore fair game), and write the article he should have written. LOL Mine’s still online — barely — thanks to the Wayback Machine.
Part 1 was Media 100 i: Delivering The Future, Ahead of Schedule.
Including the fact that the “i” was standalone. Not “Media 100i,” but Media 100 i.” A gross miscalculation on their part, and a sign the company’s days were numbered. LOL Kidding…but still, c’mon. Media 100i, dammit.
Part 2 is after I got to actually speak to someone at Media 100. LOL I had wanted to get Part 1 up ASAP, so the LAST thing I had time for was to get the thing vetted. Thankfully, I discovered I’d been mostly on the right track.
That article was a 2-parter itself, but the Wayback Machine has alas only preserved part 1 of Part 2. Media 100 i, Hands On
I stand by my evaluation that Media 100 i was far ahead of its time. Too far. With no real way to serve online video — years before YouTube — and no real way for most people to view it, many of the “i” features were useless. If they’d been directed to DVD, they’d have stuck the landing (things like interactive keyframes and chapter marks on the timeline), but there was no reason to bet on that just yet…
….and in fact, it turns out that the web has largely beaten DVD, yes? With no meaningful interactivity in video streams. It wasn’t until Blu-ray with the pop-up menus that actual interactivity was a thing, long after Media 100 i had passed away.
[Walter Soyka] “I have to confess I don’t understand the current positioning of Media 100. What niche in the market do you think they hope to occupy?”
I think Jim is right. Guys like him. The heart of the niche they’re aiming for is former Media 100 guys, and I think its sweet spot is guys like Jim, who are also using other NLEs such as FCPX.
Note that Boris himself is a former Media 100 guy. He came into this industry to build Media 100’s effects engine.
(He wanted to become a rocket scientist in his native Russia, but he told me he soon realized “there was no such thing as a Jewish rocket scientist in Russia.” He found his fortunes working across Europe before landing at Boston University to teach graduate-level mathematics. Part of why he prefers that his engineers hold PhDs. He wants guys who would have passed the classes he taught.)
He’s a very entrepreneurial guy, and like many entrepreneurs, is always looking for projects.
The first of them was of course Boris FX, within which he has aggressively developed an array of products well outside what most of us typically deal with..but there also have been some very interesting acquisitions along the way. Among the first, Final Effects Complete, which was once the most prestigious name in AE plug-ins. There was actually a time when many people bought After Effects PRIMARILY, if not SOLELY, to run Final Effects. More recently of course, Boris acquired Imagineer.
In between, Boris had a chance to buy Media 100, and I can’t imagine any scenario in which he’d pass on that. Coming full circle at all.
When I worked there, I experienced first hand the delicate balancing act he has to live with. The fact is that Boris mostly makes plug-ins. Host applications allow him to plug in at their pleasure. They have ZERO interest in providing Boris the resources to develop a meaningful competitor to them, whereas the “niche product for Media 100 guys working with other NLEs” model makes a lot of sense.
And so, Boris isn’t primarily in the business of competing with other NLEs.
That’s why I’ll be surprised to ever see him ride his mount into the gates of hell, six guns blazing from each hand, with his sword and reins between his teeth. As much as we former Media 100 guys fondly remember when that company was all about cracking heads, Boris cant afford to undermine the heart of his revenue stream, nor is he inclined to.
(In re: cracking heads, my first week at Avid, Media 100 was saddling up on Media 844/x, and had emblazoned across their front page, “Avid Sucks.” Nobody had EVER been so aggressive in this industry toward a competitor. I doubt many competitors ANYWHERE are that aggressive on their front pages. Believe me, this was taken with the utmost seriousness inside Avid. Media 100 drew blood in ways that Final Cut never did, and still hasn’t. Also fun: Avid and Media 100 were basically crosstown rivals in Boston.)
Anyway, as far as Boris’s strategy for Media 100 software, I’m guessing. I haven’t asked this time, and he knows better than to tell me. LOL I’ve certainly never spoken to anyone at another company about the NLE aspect of Boris’s business. It’s just a guess, but I’m pretty sure I’m at least pointed in the right direction.
In the meantime, I do think that Jim is rightly excited, and think that Media 100 really does have some good things to offer, especially to its former fans. For the price, it’s genuine insanity for them to pass up, imo, even if just for kicks.
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[James Culbertson] “Does it still have tracks?”
Oh yeah. In fact, as far as I can see, nothing has changed about it since the 90’s (other than maybe supported formats and hardware independence). Which is the really frightening part.
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[Tim Wilson] “and think that Media 100 really does have some good things to offer”
What? is the part I’m trying to figure out. Seriously.
[Tim Wilson] “especially to its former fans”
Shouldn’t that at best be “only”? Really. What possible aspect, feature or whatever else could actually sway anyone into spending that amount of money in this day and age instead of going with any of the other established NLEs for much less?
And by the way… I’m not only a former fan, but even a CURRENT OWNER, since my last board never even made it out the door and has found its peace in a drawer here somewhere. Hellaciously expensive DVBK-1/A and all! (want to wallow in even more nostalgia… I can take a picture… or send me the postage and you can have it for free for your wall) But oddly, I find what I see cringeworthy at best, sorry. They truly should have stopped when they were ahead, so at least I could lament about those “good ol’ days” without (now) being embarrassed by associating myself with the name.
And I also can’t understand the “great deal” for the Boris plugs either. I have them for FCP et al, and as well meant and overall nicely done some are, the handling and especially THE SPEED make them unusable. Especially in comparison to the various alternatives there are. At least as far as 3D titling for FCP is concerned, I have options in mObject for 50 bucks and FCP’s own for free… and all in realtime. And they even offer (far) more functionality and are super simple to use in comparison. Add Motion to the mix for another 40 and the sky’s the limit.
[Jim Wiseman] “You just can’t take it when someone gets some good news, can you Robin?”
The whole reoccurring “If you don’t just agree with me and smile, then you’re just a big, fat poopy-head!” attitude is so painfully jejune and has gotten so tiring. Every opinion is allowed… as long as it’s yours. No questions. I get it.
Apparently my definition of “Discussion board” (or should I say Debate?) is a completely different one. Oh well.
– RK
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Great post, Tim. I’m amazed to see the negative comments about this.
We are actually in a very interesting time. There are quite a large number of users – students, casual editors, people who do pro bono work – for whom even $299 for FCP X can’t be justified. Within a few months, when everything has been released, we’ll have a number of low-cost or free NLEs that offer tremendous power, including, Media 100, Media Composer|First, Lightworks and Resolve 12.
One of the strengths Media 100 offers is as a lightweight QuickTime-based editor. As Apple walks away from QuickTime, this might actually be useful. In addition it’s also a very good editor for working with native RED files.
So why not? The more, the merrier.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Yeah, I wanted an 844/x. Real-time blur! Think of the possibilities!”
I remember going to an 844/x demo. It was a news promo with three separate news anchors shot on green, folding their arms, and giving their best smile. The 844/x did all the composite of all three with background and text, in near real time, eons faster than After Effects could do. It was very impressive.
The 844/x was pushed off the cliff about a year later.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “The 844/x was pushed off the cliff about a year later.”
I saw the 844/x demo at NAB and was wowed by it as well. I believe it was their investment in the 844/x that pushed the whole company off the cliff. From what I understood they made a huge research investment in it and came up empty as newer computers kept getting faster and the need for specialized rendering platforms disappeared.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
You have no clue, Robin.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1 TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-680 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD -
Great post, Tim. You and I share some history, but with different viewpoints, which is certainly one of the best reasons to write it down. I moved to Hawaii in 1985, freelanced in Honolulu doing production, but lived on Kauai. In San Francisco over ten years I had been with One Pass Video (first one inch in the US) and Chronicle Productions (KRON, NBC at the time) in their production units. Upon moving to Hawaii I started the visitor channel with two partners here on Kauai. Hurricane Iniki in 1992 ended that for me, and I ran into an opportunity to sell an Avid Media Suite Pro to a wiped out production company with insurance money. In short order, I became the exclusive Avid dealer in Hawaii. NAB 1994, enter a Media 100 rep who took me to lunch and offered me the dealership for Media 100. I knew what I was getting into, but I always liked to take a chance or two, so I took it.
I had seen Media 100 at a demo in SF, I believe it was their introductory tour. A guy named Tobin was doing the demos, maybe you can remember his last name, we stayed in touch for a bit. In short, I was amazed at the image quality. That stuck with me. Flash forward a couple of years, and now I was selling the products of the two cross town Boston rivals.
A place like Hawaii was actually a perfect place for Media 100. Although a greater part of my income was from Avid, who can argue with 25% margins when you have an exclusive and retail, which I got, was $50 to $125k. Anyone “serious” about production, the local post houses, needed Media Composer to be taken seriously. But there was the rest of the market who could only afford the low end Avid Media Suite Pro at about $25-30K. Compared to Media 100, which was close to the same price, a bit higher tricked out with storage, it suffered badly. It actually line doubled because of bandwidth constrictions. Media 100 was in a different league in quality, and was actually perfect for this market.
You’re correct, After Effects, originally from COSA, (still have my copy from when it was introduced at Macworld) was a huge reason people flocked to Media 100. They had the same image quality as the one inch houses on their desks at home or boutique, and they could do effects that the big places took a while to catch up with. But unlike in the bigger markets, most of my customers were doing straight production. Guys making surf videos for broadcast, people doing event video at the hotels for big corporations who demanded Betacam quality, boutiques doing commercials, in short people moving to digital who wanted high end quality, but couldn’t afford a linear tape suite. The Sony 1800 was the only VTR in the room. So the effects business wasn’t the driver it probably was on the mainland. It was the boutique and niche market one or two man production companies. I did sell a M100 to the Honolulu CBS station once they saw the light, but that was rare.
You’ve run down the history from there. What is missing is the improvements made after this period, when AJA became the supplier of boards and Boris took over. They made major changes such as excellent HD, better audio handling, many new features. Certainly enough to keep the average small production boutique happy. But then came Final Cut for $995. You could get in with an AJA board a Mac and software for less than $20K, depending on storage. It even appealed to the Avid houses. In 1998 I got out of sales for the most part, and went back to production. And I cut everything on the Media 100. Boris and company were making improvements in the software until a little over a year ago when they just issued updates for new versions of OSX and AJA drivers. It was looking bleak when Yosemite came out, as it wouldn’t launch without a hack. I have no solid information, but the main evangelist for M100 over the last decade has been Florian Peters who runs a respected M100 based production company in Germany. I believe he has a lot to do with the 2.1.6 version of Media 100 that provides Yosemite compatibility. That and cooperation from BorisFX. Floh, as he is known on the boards, has been doing the lion’s share of the Tutorials, many of which are on the new website, over the last decade or so. That is why so many versions of Media 100 are represented in the tutorials. They occurred over the multiple versions of the software that was released over that period. Media 100 continued to be developed. It is not the same as it was in the mid-nineties as some here have said. Many new capabilities and video formats, up to 4k and RED, for instance.
But the main thing that has current users excited is the marketing push that has been currently embarked upon. The media100.com website actually has a mission to push the product which it hasn’t had for years. There is some new blood in the equation. I honestly believe if this had occurred during the early days of the switch to FCPX, M100 could have been one of the top four along with Apple, Adobe, and Avid. For Boris, for whatever reason, it was not a decision he was willing to make. His business is obviously effects. But I am glad he and his company are involved, and welcome the new energy we are seeing from this current venture. I think it has a great chance of winning some converts. And who can argue with the pricing?
As they say, stay tuned!
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1 TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-680 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD -
[Jim Wiseman] “What is missing is the improvements made after this period”
Quite so! I was speaking about my personal experience, and I’m very glad to hear yours! I’ve been out of the direct editing game this century, so I didn’t have much to add about M100 since Boris took it over.
Like you, I’m very glad to see this once-proud brand unambiguously present itself as a viable part of the toolkit for any dinosaurs willing to tolerate tracks and other arcane, long-discredited concepts. LOL
[Oliver Peters] “One of the strengths Media 100 offers is as a lightweight QuickTime-based editor. As Apple walks away from QuickTime, this might actually be useful. In addition it’s also a very good editor for working with native RED files.”
Exactly. Perfect examples. My impression is that Boris FX has not been promoting Media 100 as a reason to leave one’s current NLE, but rather as a capable utility. Adding a couple of very capable tools to the kit for only $99 seems pretty cool.
Certainly not something to get upset about. Fast, cheap, and familiar may be just the ticket.
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