In the spring of 1924 Lyta Cinema Works built the first dedicated device for editors but it would be more than sixty years before a digital equivalent, the Avid/1 Media Composer arrived. In the intervening years individuals and teams imagined wondrous tools that could turn images into entertainment in the blink of an eye as they wrestled with technology, sought finance and battled to ship their products. Timeline is the journey of those inventors from Lyta's workshop in Freiburg to an oily warehouse in Burlington and finally to an air conditioned cubicle in Silicon Valley. It contains exclusive interviews with all the key players including Randy Ubillos, Bill Warner, John Molinari, Bruce Rady, Ivan Maltz, Nick Schlott, Glenn Reid, Jack Buchanan and the QuickTime team. Here is an insight into the development of Final Cut Pro, Avid, Media 100, D-Vision, iMovie in:sync, Premiere, Ediflex,ImMIX and many other systems from a personal perspective, told for the first time.
The Avid Media Composer changed editing because it finally freed editors from the mechanical constraints of their craft. No more lost trims or analog video errors. It delivered digital nonlinear editing for professionals and soon after Apple’s iMovie and Pinnacle’s Studio 400 delivered editing for all. The machines that had served editing faithfully before the digital revolution were left to gather dust in back rooms. Timeline 1 and 2 shine a light on the remarkable tools that editors have used for all of the ages.
