It was 20 years ago today…

Around 20 years ago I took delivery of my first computer based editing system. It was the heyday of the Spice Girls, but you cant win ‘em all. It was also the days of dial up internet and 3½-inch floppy discs. For the initiated, I opted for DPS Perception hardware, running on Windows NT4 with Media Studio Pro, in preference to Speed Razor software. For the un-initiated. £10K worth of kit –many spent more than double that on so called superior systems, without any discernible benefit, except for a bigger bank account hole. Suitable data storage was very expensive. Video was stored on expensive SCSI Disc Drives. A 9GB drive held about half an hour of video and cost about £850. The only thing that was worse than a client not paying their bill was a client not finishing a project. YES 9GB, hard to believe but your USB stick may well be 32GB and cost £20.00.

I often refer to computer editing as word processing with pictures. As with the manual typewriter, (not that I ever used one personally), whilst correction fluids and ribbons could be used, the bodged-up results were far from invisible. Any changes or errors meant starting again to get a professional result. Until the arrival of computers, editing was tape to tape via an edit controller – playing from the source tape and re-recording on the master, albeit that the edit controller and associated hardware, ensured accurate edits and also allowed a preview. Fairly simple effects units (Vision mixers) could be used in the set up to get fades and wipes, freezes and dissolves. If any part of the edit needed to be changed further back, then it would often mean having to redo multiple edits, or dub to another tape, which until digital recording meant a loss of quality, referred to as generation loss.

The learning curve was horrendous. These days, with technical forums for almost every piece of software and hardware, tutorials in abundance on websites and YouTube, today’s newbies have a wealth of learning resources. Even very experienced users can have issues solved within minutes from anywhere in the world, but in 1997 the best would have been an email board, with answers if any arriving the following day. Forums started to develop a little later down the line.

So it’s 1997, there I am with £10K worth of new technology. A screen proudly displaying Windows NT and lots of work to do. I basically knew what to do but not necessarily what to do if things didn’t work as expected. It was very much the Donald Rumsfield “things we know we don’t know…” Whilst I wasn’t a pioneer, in any way, only a relatively small part of the industry, outside of high end facilities, were using computer editing. Add in bugs, instability, hardware incompatibilities and a degree of ignorance, it was not always smooth sailing-mixed metaphor alert and sometimes there were crash landings. I had used a BBC B since 1983, an Amiga for captioning since 1986 and a PC running Windows 3 since 1994 but nothing prepared me for the learning curve. As that learning curve kicked in, things that previously took seconds were taking several minutes or even hours when things didn’t go to plan, far from saving time it was quite the opposite…and so I learnt the joys of 3 hours sleep on the sofa for several weeks on end.

Finally the intensive learning on the job paid off and the creative benefits were shining through. I recall a wonderful man Glyn Powell-Evans, 10 years earlier, telling me that the faster computers became, it would not speed things up but merely push the creative boundaries…and how right he was. Suddenly I was able to do what West End post production houses could do >>> and fast forward 20 years and multi layers on complex opening sequences are just at the mercy of creative design, hours in the day and to some extent budget. I watched the first episode of BBC’s “Strike” last night. The title sequence is amazing …I was seriously impressed but how much did it cost and how long did it take? Straight forward editing as I mentioned earlier is word processing with pictures (and sound). As for all the other things that get “fixed in post”, colour grading, picture resizing, masking and replacing unwanted objects, “blobbing” (blurring faces and number plates) and many more, there is, dare I say a mixture of creativity and salvaging a disaster.

We have come a long way over the last twenty years and given that many mobile phones produce better quality video than the cameras that were around at the time and have almost better editing capability as well, who knows where it will end. The early days of editing were a good foundation and I’m glad I learnt both ways to edit. Those 20 hour days were a good investment and just as you won’t find a typist who prefers a manual typewriter to a word processor, computer editing is also a no-brainer.

Post Tags: Business Video , Corporate Video , Video Editing , Video Production

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