Edit Droid

Edit Droid

The EditDroid was a computerized analog NLE (non-linear editing system), developed by Lucasfilm spin-off company, the Droid Works and Convergence Corporation who formed a joint venture company. The company existed up through the mid-80's to the early 90's in an attempt to move from analog editing methods to digital. EditDroid first debuted at the NAB 62nd Annual meeting in Las Vegas in 1984 concurrent with another editing tool that would compete with the EditDroid for all its years in production, the Montage Picture Processor. The EditDroid was never a commercial success and after the close of The Droid Works in 1987 and subsequent redevelopment of the product for seven years, the software was eventually sold to Avid Technology in 1993. Only 24 EditDroid systems were ever produced.

The system was Laserdisc-based, relying on several laserdisc players and a database system which would queue up the clips in the order needed from the laserdisc players in the most efficient way, so as to minimize skipping. This however wasn't always possible. So if the edits weren't sufficiently close, the system wouldn't always be fast enough to cue up the next clip.

It had three screens connected to it: one was a Sun-1 computer display (the graphical UI for the product), plus one small video (preview) monitor and one large rear-projected containing "the cut" and was controlled by a custom controller. The controller, called the TouchPad, featured a KEM-style shuttle knob, a trackball, and a host of buttons with LED labels that changed in function depending on what the system was doing. The EditDroid pioneered the use of the graphical display for editing—introducing the "timeline" as well as digital picture icons to identify raw source clips.

Once the entire movie had been edited, a "cut list" of marked frames was turned over to a film laboratory where the actual pieces of film were spliced together in the correct order.

The EditDroid no longer exists as such, and the market for nonlinear editing systems has changed radically since its inception, with products like Final Cut Pro available at consumer level. In many respects the EditDroid was a concept demonstration of the future of editing, with a laserdisc being a good 1980s simulation of what digital access would be like, and an editing interface and workflow that was more like today's methods than any of the videotape linear or analog nonlinear products leading up to the Avid/1 in 1990.