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This popped up on Twitter today. The Avid 1 Media Composer from 23 years ago.
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I thought Premiere’s new ability to trim right in the program window was really really cool until I saw this video. Welcome to 1989, Adobe. 😉
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“THAT’S our fail-safe point. Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine… But after this windmill it’s the future or bust.” -
Am I the only one that remembers the first thing we did when we started a project? Insert 30 minutes of black! You had to put a frame of something on the timeline, then insert a buttload of slug. THEN, and only then was the thing useable.
My first baby was the video cube in 1993. We were taking it to a satellite feed once a week and nobody ever questioned the quality. 12:1 Wavelet compression! Looked about like AVR75/77 though. No rendering required either. When I started using Media 100 and then the Avid 3 years later, I thought I was in the stone age by comparison.
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And what was the price of MC1?
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[Michael Gissing] “And what was the price of MC1?”
A lot less than you’d think. I couldn’t find a reference that I felt was reliable for v.1, but by 1993, Models 210 (unbundled) and 220 (with Mac IIci) were $15,000 and $24,900 respectively.
They started getting expensive once you added hardware. (Offline film at the resolutions that Film Composer originally supported was computing intensive — hence the brute force of the Mac IIci and its 6 slots — but not THAT intensive.)
Things got interesting around 1995, when Media 100’s Vincent and Avid’s ABVB (Avid Broadcast Video Board) started duking it out: $30K vs. $90K.
Duke it out they did, with dueling lawsuits. The first shot was fired by Media 100, whose suit was dismissed with prejudice. I don’t remember what happened with the Avid suit.
I also don’t remember what the complete configuration of the ABVB Media Composer looked like (surely a breakout box, yes? Where did the configured workstations/storage come in?), but by the time I decked my Media 100 out with a computer, a modest amount of RAM and a small array (27GB – 18 for video and the 9 for music, graphics, etc), I was in for around $50,000.
By 1999, Avid dropped the ABVB to $49-ish if I’m remembering right….
…but to get to your original question, you could have gotten a Mac IIci, a Targa 2000 card and Adobe Premiere for around $20,000, which indeed I did — not far off of the Avid price.
Of course part of the reason for that expensive Premiere system was paying $5000 for 8MB (that’s MEGABYTES) of RAM. I kept the 8 SIMMs as holiday ornaments for years, and in a baggie in a drawer for years after that. I couldn’t bear to throw away $5000 worth of ANYTHING.
And yes, you’re doing the math correctly. $70,000 on editing gear in a 3-year period…not counting cameras and decks. This was in the days of “affordable” Beta SP – a $10,000 camera, $12K for a Canon zoom, $10K for a UVW-1800 deck, plus monitors, mics, batteries, a couple of VERY cheap lights, etc. — another $40,000. That’s $110,000+ in 2 years.
The COW’s predecessor community, The WWUG, was comprised of thousands of a-holes like me who took out second mortgages to get started in this business — including Ronald Lindeboom, who actually lit the whole thing up because he needed help to avoid losing the farm. There was nowhere else offering this level of life-and-death help, so he started The WWUG to get that help for his own business.
So yeah, we thought of Avid as expensive, and our $50,000 NLE setups as dirt cheap.
Goodness knows I could be remembering some of this wrong, and definitely writing far more than is necessary, but those were amazing days, and it’s nearing midnight, and I’d just as soon be rambling on about this as take the dog out to pee one more time before bed.
I’d love for some of you other geezers to correct me and fill in the blanks. These stories are too good for me to have forgotten as much as I have.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
You guys had it so cheap in the USA. Prices in Australia for AVID systems with hardware and plenty of storage (a few 4 gig SCSI bricks), was much more expensive.
A facility that I shared space with bought an Editbox for around US$400k in the early 1990s. They had around two hours of uncompressed 8 bit PAL SD storage and had to archive to an expensive Sony digi beta deck. The huge cost of hardware and software compared to today does make me chuckle at the winging over a $300 software system like FCPX.
These days I see no reason for a facility not to have a few of each NLEs. I am a small facility and I am getting Resolve, CS6 and probably Smoke as well as keeping FCS3 and adding FCPX as a ‘plugin’ translator to generate XMLs (if any local editors actual bother to use it for a real job). All that for the price of one 2 gig of SCSI drive from the late eighties.
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[Michael Gissing] “All that for the price of one 2 gig of SCSI drive from the late eighties.”
My first 27GB RAID, which was approximately the size and volume of a small airplane, set me back $15,000 — which was dealer cost. This was when ProMAX was also a distributor, and Charles McConathy said, “Yeah, but I don’t actually like my south Florida dealer. Since I can’t get rid of him before you need the drives, I’ll give it to you for his cost.”
Just another reason why those of us who started with ProMAX in 1994 still feel so strongly about them.
(BTW, no Wikipedia entry for Promax or Charles? Somebody fix this.)
Anyway, I just got a 16GB USB key, shaped like an ACTUAL KEY, for FREE with the purchase of a bus-powered USB 3 2TB drive for $149. Unbelievable.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
I only remember that I paid the equivalent of US$72.000 in 1992 for my Avid which was an ex demo model because I couldn’t afford the full price. It was the 25th license sold in Germany. It was running on a IIfx and I had 3x 600 MB hard drives which each cost the equivalent of US$6.500.
Over the next five years I paid at least another US$40.000 for upgrades. There was a reason why I switched in 97 or 98 ( can’t remember) to FCP v1.
But don’t forget that we could charge very different rates at the time 🙂
Funny thing is that I had similar discussions around 1991-92 with tapes houses about pro and contra of the Avid system that we have now about FCPx. History likes to repeat itself.
Best
Carsten -
[Tim Wilson] “A lot less than you’d think.”
We paid around £80, 000 for our first system in 1992. As a commercials editor agencies insisted upon using it despite the fact it was slow and unreliable. I bought a Lightworks a couple of years later for the cut-down price of £42, 000 – still my favourite NLE…
Liam Hall
Director/DoP/Editor
http://www.liamhall.net -
Does anyone remember Radius Mac Clones and their Radius Telecast.
That was my first system, you used an early version of Premier that could not keep audio sync for more than 3 minutes at a time. You had to render 3 minute clips and then write a script to play them in sequence to record to tape, it sometimes worked and sometimes not.
This system was a nightmare, and I got a M100 in 97. It still is my main system now using Kona cards and my oldest Vincent board system still runs as does a “Huge” RAID. I sold a few of the systems over the years, usually for 10% of what they cost me, just to make room for new gear.
It gives me a head ache to think of the more than multiple six figurs I spent on upgrades, platinum contracts, Ram, Raids etc.
Olof Ekbergh
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What struck me the most is that even though MC looks very different today, the basics are in there. In/out, bins, source/record, trim mode, tape capture.
[olof ekbergh] “It gives me a head ache to think of the more than multiple six figurs I spent on upgrades, platinum contracts, Ram, Raids etc.”
It is certainly a different world.
I remember when M100 was able to work with VST FireWire drives that were in the neighborhood of 30 GBs via FireWire. Transferring those from our ProMax SCSI arrays was a huge deal, and the sneaker net was born at the studio I was working in. Being able to switch rooms/projects without mounting another set of SCSIs was golden, even with ProMax’s handy “swappable” SCSI trays (which came after the $9k 9GB “fixed” array). After that, things exploded very quickly and capability took off.
https://www.macobserver.com/newreviews/bc/00/000602vstdrives/vst.html
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