Media Composer - History

History

According to Eric Peters, one of the company's founders, most prototypes of "the Avid" were built on Apollo workstations. At some point, Avid demo'd one of their products at Siggraph. Says Peters: "Some Apple people saw that demo at the show and said, "Nice demo. Wrong platform!" It turned out they were evangelists for the then new Mac II (with *six* slots!). When we got back to our office (actually a converted machine shop) after the show, there was a pile of Fedex packages on our doorstep. They were from Apple, and they contained two of their prototype Mac II machines (so early they didn't even have cases, just open chassis). Also there were four large multisync monitors. Each computer was loaded with full memory (probably 4 megs at the time), and a full complement of Apple software (pre-Claris). That afternoon, a consultant knocked on our door saying, "Hi. I'm being paid by Apple to come here and port your applications from Apollo to Macintosh." He worked for us for several weeks, and actually taught us how to program the Macs." At the time, Macs were not considered to be fast enough for video purposes. The Avid engineering team, however, managed to get 1,200 kBytes per second, which allowed them to do offline video on the Macs.

The Avid Film Composer was introduced in August of 1992. The Film Composer was the first non-linear digital editing system to capture and edit natively at 24fps. Steven Cohen was the first editor to use Film Composer for a major motion picture on Lost in Yonkers.

The system has been used by other top editors such as Walter Murch on The English Patient (the first digitally edited film to receive a Best Editing Oscar).

In 1994, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences awarded the Avid Film Composer with a plaque for Science & Technical Achievement. Six persons were recognized in that effort; Bill Warner, Eric Peters, Joe Rice, Patrick O'Connor, Tom Ohanian, and Michael Phillips. For continued development, Avid received an Oscar statuette representing the 1998 Scientific and Technical Award for the concept, design, and engineering of the Avid Film Composer system for motion picture editing.

Film Composer is no longer sold as a separate product, since - over time - all of its specific film editing features were implemented into the "regular" Media Composer and/or the Avid Symphony.

Catering to the mid and high end of the non-linear editing market, Avid is still used in a lot of major film productions, though it's facing increasing competition from Apple's Final Cut Studio.

In July 2009 American Cinema Editors (ACE) announced that the ACE Board of Directors had recognized Avid Media Composer software with the Board’s first-ever “ACE Technical Excellence Award” - recognizing it as the preferred choice of the industry’s most acclaimed editors.