The pace at which computer technology is able to take over the boring and repetitive tasks in movie making is little short of revolutionary, and the latest example turned up at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas this week. Coming from a company called Avid Technology Inc, location unknown, it is a system for editing film and video right there on the screen of an Apple Computer Inc Macintosh IIx computer. According to Microbytes Daily, the Avid/1 Media Composer digitises full-motion, 30-frames-per-second standard NTSC video onto the hard disk of the micro, and an editor can then directly – and randomly – manipulate and assemble the digitised film clips into finished sequences using a dual editing window that provides on-screen monitors of source and edited material. Avid/1 is used with a second colour monitor that contains a directory of the film clips being worked with, appearing as a visual of the first frame of each clip. The system also records one or two channels of 44KHz, 16-bit CD-quality sound, using a board with dual digital signal processing chips. Once editing is complete, the Mac IIx is linked to multiple video dubbing decks, and makes up a new master tape of the edited version – and because the digitised images are used only for the actual editing process, there is none of the image degradation that occurs when sequences are re recorded several times during editing. It sounds just the thing for advertising agencies making TV commmercials, and while in computer terms it may sound expensive, $50,000 must be a reasonable price for such a powerful and simple-to-use editing system – which for those using film would likely obviate the cost of having a cutting copy made. The $50,000 buys a system with 8Mb memory in the Mac, and a 600Mb disk that is good for about 25 minutes of video. A top-of-the-line version for editing feature length material has 4Gb of disk storage and costs $80,000.
