Timeline Analog 2: 1971-1981

By John Buck

Timeline Analog 2 (1971-1981) traces the amazing story of editing's evolution. Read how filmmakers like Coppola and Hitchcock used editing to craft masterpieces and how inventors and teams built wondrous editing machines for editors. Timeline is often updated with new material at no extra cost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Dec 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781925108583

John Buck

John Buck es presidente de GovernanceAlive LLC, una organización internacional de formación y consultoría con sede en Washington, DC, Estados Unidos. La firma también ofrece servicios de mediación y facilitación de reuniones. John ha realizado numerosas formaciones de sociocracia y liderado la implementación de muchos proyectos para una gran variedad de organizaciones, incluyendo proyectos de BOSSA nova. Presta servicio en la dirección de varias organizaciones. Realiza tareas de investigación y desarrollo. Por ejemplo, está trabajado con el laboratorio de software avanzado de Fujitsu para desarrollar Weaver, un software que ayuda a que las reuniones vayan mejor, tanto en persona, online y de forma asíncrona. John Buck tiene una amplia experiencia en gestión con gobiernos y corporaciones, incluida la gestión de grandes proyectos de tecnología de la información. Sus clientes están repartidos por todo el mundo e incluyen fabricantes de plásticos, escuelas, colegios y universidades, centros de atención a largo plazo, grupos de covivienda, ONGs, productores de alimentos y empresas de software. Posee un máster en Sociología Cuantitativa de la Universidad de George Washington.

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Foreword by William (Bill) Butler

After decades within the video industry, I landed at Memorex Corporation in 1970 - a critical time as it joined forces with the CBS Television Network to create a joint venture called CMX Systems. 

In the following year our amazing team discovered and solved the key problems associated with creating a digital video editing machine. They confronted the hurdles to building an 'electronic Moviola', like how to achieve frame-by-frame storage of sufficient analog video in a large random access memory system; how to record analog video in real time in a digital storage system with individual frame identity; and how to design a user interface that looked familiar to a film editor. 

The small group of engineers developed unique video processing and disc storage solutions over the course of 1970. Inventions like the brilliantly simple EDL (edit decision list) were so groundbreaking that they defined the editing industry for decades to come.

Although received with great acclaim it quickly became apparent that CMX’s end product, the CMX 600, was too radical. I believe Joseph Flaherty and others at CBS knew this from the beginning but they needed the CMX 600 as a lever to get things moving.

In the intervening twenty years, the editing industry reverted to a mix of analog and video machines built by former colleagues like Jim Adams and Dave Bargen as well as startups like Datatron and Convergence. This period also saw the emergence of Sony of Japan, first with its U-Matic and then 1" recorders that helped revolutionise access to broadcast images.

We knew all along that the limiting factors in electronic editing were video memory and videotape recorders. We also knew that the principal of exponentially increasing chip memory density and speed, with decreasing cost, was eventually going to solve both. 

Moore’s Law held true and eventually the economic digitization and rapid processing of video became a reality. The videotape machine, which had supplanted film as editing’s medium, gave way to the personal computer as the preferred platform.

This book, Timeline Analog 2, concludes with George Lucas’ plan to mesh technology and imagination to create affordable digital video production.  One that CMX 600 had already led the way.

Bill Butler, January 2018

William (Bill) Butler's career spans 1955 to 1995 at Brush, Precision Instruments, Westel, Memorex, CMX Systems, Robert Bosch and Lucasfilm.

Dedication

The Timeline books are dedicated to Adrian Ettlinger (1925 – 2013)

Adrian was a brilliant engineer, ground breaking inventor, astute observer and a much loved father during his life and career. In retirement he was a friend, advisor and mentor to me. Adrian is without question the father of nonlinear digital editing and his contributions to the editing field have been recognised by industry bodies and editors alike.

Thank you Adrian, rest in peace.

About the Author

     John Buck has been an editor since he needed a way to cut his Super 8 mm camera rushes. Using a splicer and cement, he cut together parodies of TV shows for screening in a home cinema, and eventually graduated to local filmmaker festivals. 

    After being fired from his first full-time job as a junior advertising agency producer, John struggled to explain his skill set to the employment official. His father advised him to get a job that people can understand what it is that you do.

    The manager of a production company saw potential, and offered him a role as an editor on the midnight shift. John turned his Super 8 mm cutting abilities to ¾, 1 and 2" tape. He edited everything from commercials to auctions. High fashion to sheep teeth.

    With a skill that people could understand he left Taimac, and began editing in earnest at local television station TVW-7. With a 6pm deadline, an accommodating boss and a talented senior editor to guide him, Buck became an editor. He took those skills across the country to a job on the international TV show Beyond 2000 where he helped create award winning programs.

    Eventually it was time to branch out on his own, but he was unable to afford the Avid that was so mesmerizing at a trade demo. Backed once again by his parents, he took a chance and bought a Media 100 digital nonlinear editing system. One unit became two, and three and four. 

    A one man band became a thriving business. 

Thanks

This book series would not have been possible without the help of many people. Everyone has my appreciation but a few people deserve an extra shout out. 

    Candace Machein sent her father’s files to make sure Kurt was remembered. Joe Roizen’s family did likewise. Tom Werner, Bob Pargee and David Crosthwait shared material that others had trashed while Carter Elliot bundled up pamphlets and drove them to Fedex. Marc Wanamaker shared his amazing Hollywood archive.

    Egon Gräfen discovered archived KEM material, Heidi Heftburger found the best Svilova images, Ekaterina Gracheva did the same with Russian filmmakers.

    Bernd Perplies helped with German inventors while Håkan Lindberg shared his images of editing in Sweden, and Christelle Naili sourced the long lost Italian Moritone. Pauline Duclaud-Lacoste ensured her great great grandfather Georges Méliès was honored, while Bob Phillips shared his own photos of Jack Mullin and Bing Crosby. Sumio Yamamoto and Kyoko Takahashi found materials in Toshiba’s vaults. 

    Sharleen Chen created the outstanding cover. 

    Brett Wayn chimed in measured advice. Gene Simon, John Delmont, and Barry Guisinger added humor to their notes just when I needed it. Loran Kary, Glenn Reid, Nick Schlott and Ralf Berger patiently explained the challenges of writing software code. 

Steven Cohen reminded me, Editors are people, editing systems are the tools, don’t mix that up. 

    Phil Hodgetts gave good advice, John Maizels opened doors, Ron Barker pushed me to try harder, and Chet Schuler insisted on getting it right. Bruce Rady, Bernie Laramie and Bill Hogan remembered when others forgot. Steve Edelman filled in the gaps, Peter Barrett was enthused. 

    The ladies at the Jerzy Toeplitz Library inside the AFTRS in Sydney found dozens of books, manuscripts, articles and trade magazines to check facts.

    The team at Stanford University had everything set for my short visit. Al Alcorn, Steve Wozniak and Steve Mayer replied when their inboxes must be full every day. 

    The people who helped invent desktop video Eric Peters, Jeff Bedell, Tyler Peppel, Carl Calabria, Ivan Maltz and Randy Ubillos answered all of my questions, many that they had heard before, with a smile. They never let me doubt my plan.

     I have to tip my hat to the text editors, Bob Glover and Gary Buck. They improved the whole book series.They volunteered to read this book over and over, and diligently worked through the raw manuscript, corrected it and made great improvements. 

Dave Pretty taught me more about filmmaking and business at Marketforce in a month, than a college course had in a year. His great advice is still ringing in my ears. Max Pepper explained the value of a flatbed and being on time and on schedule as we shot and cut lemonade and burger commercials. 

    Ross McDonald rescued me from an unemployment office and gave me a job. Drew Gibson taught me the online editing ropes. 

     My long time friend Dan Flanagan pushed me to apply for a job in broadcast news. It was advice that changed my life. I owe John Rudd a lifetime of thanks for hiring me at TVW7, and giving me the freedom to experiment. Fellow editors Ray Furness, Nick Glover and Ray Neale guided me in the craft of editing, even when I pretended to know everything. 

    Peter Abbott and Tim Worner encouraged me to hone my editing skills while Steve Christiansen, Jacqua Page, Dave Galloway and Michael Horrocks believed in me, and my editing company.

    Laura Gohery helped me turn it into a success. Bill Orr, Pete Hammar and Ralph Guggenheim were endlessly helpful before the idea of a book even existed, and continued with insight throughout its writing. Ralph’s enthusiasm is infectious, Pete’s advice forthright. 

     Despite the fact that Thelma Schoonmaker is one of the most awarded and talented editors ever, she answered my questions as if she were unknown and idle. Ted Horton and Vincent Zimbardi supported me with editing challenges through my transition from editor to editor/author.

    Andrew Morris starred in my 8mm movies, listened to my plans, gave me work and remained an unwavering friend throughout. Donna, Manny, Tillster, Miranda, Elena, Mario, the Colettes and Wild Matt encouraged and humored me. 

    Bill Warner changed editing forever. Without Bill there would be no Avid. There would be no book called ‘Timeline’. He encouraged me at every turn, welcomed me to his home, selflessly assisted my research, lent me documents and tapes, drove me around Boston, twisted former colleagues’ arms to talk, and opened up his heart to the project. 

    Without reservation. 

    Bill has faced challenges that would humble most, and never gave up. He is an inspiration.

     The Bucks, Waddells and Kuehs have been hugely supportive of Timeline. 

    Mum and Dad gave me the freedom to dream.

     Tan gave me patience and understanding.

Preface

In the spring of 1924, a small Germany company Lyta Cinema Works built the first dedicated editing device. A few months later the American made Moviola went on sale in Hollywood and become a huge success but it was sixty five years before a digital equivalent arrived for professionals. 

In the intervening years individuals, and teams imagined tools that could join images together in the blink of an eye.

They trialled technology, experimented with the impossible, quit secure jobs for the unknown, and ran out of money. All the while, they tried to ship the best editing product possible. For many years their stories went untold.

Hoping to solve an amicable dispute with Boris Yamnitsky, who had just acquired Media 100, I found myself at the local library staring at books that talked about 'how to' edit but not how editing came to be. 

My casual conversation was now a niggling annoyance. I turned to the web and found two names listed in submissions to the U.S Patent Office about electronic editing. 

Adrian Ettlinger and William Warner.  

One had created the CBS RAVE and the other, Avid. They graciously took my phone calls, retold stories of electronic editing’s rich history, and connected me with lesser known individuals who had created the tools we use today. 

Adrian and Bill helped then actively encouraged me.

Bill made time to talk, linked me to others and poured me coffee in his kitchen. Adrian braved the wet streets of Manhattan to tell me, over lunch at the Chiam, about a remarkable period of innovation.

My part-time quest changed again when two key contributors passed away.

Art Schneider and Jack Calaway both made huge contributions to editing, yet their efforts had gone largely unheralded. 

I decided to record the history of editing because it fades. Timeline zigs and zags from people to places, within companies, across continents. 

People's lives rarely run from A to B.  

Former Xerox scientist David Canfield Smith told me: 

In any revolution, technological or otherwise, there are interesting characters. In fact, the characters often are the story.

This edition

Timeline: Analog Two April 2018 is the second in a series. 

I am updating the digital version regularly with new interviews and images to make it more interesting but at no extra cost to you.

This update has revisions, corrections, slight additions and further spell checks. Despite being an Australian author, versed and schooled in UK English, I have adopted US spellings and grammar for the non-quoted sections of the series.

The book will take you about 4 hours to read. 

William Herbert Orr, 81, of Huntsville, Alabama was a key contributor to electronic editing by virtue of buying CMX Systems and building it into a vibrant independent company with an 80% share of editing system sales worldwide. Sadly Bill passed away August 22, 2016. I offer my condolences to his family and former colleagues. We all miss him.

I have made recorded contact with all known copyright owners. Email me - velocite at live dot com - if you see material that's incorrect or inaccurate. 

Timeline 2

Everyone who has had in his hands a piece of film to be edited knows by experience how neutral it remains, even though a part of a planned sequence, until it is joined with another piece, when it suddenly acquires and conveys a sharper and quiet different meaning than that planned for it at the time of filming.

Sergei Eisenstein

1. The race for CMX

In January 1970 a Pan American World Airways flight (above) from New York to London became the Boeing 747’s first commercial flight. So began the Seventies.

Eric Peters was the first person from his home town of North Vassalboro to attend an Ivy League school. Peters wanted to complete two degrees at Cornell University, in engineering and computer sciences, but Cornell didn’t teach the latter. Peters recalls his advisor’s reaction 

He said, ‘I guess we will have to put something together for that because we don't have a computer sciences program right now.' Cornell was very flexible and accommodating and created one.

Peters graduated with both degrees and started as a software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the Small Systems Engineering Group. DEC, or Digital as it was often called, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1950s to the 1990s. It eventually became second only to IBM.

It was an intensely creative and challenging and open working environment, I guess somewhat like Google is today, DEC was back then. My relatives asked me where I worked and I would say, ‘Digital’ and they would say, ‘Oh you make watches!’ It was the only thing they knew that was digital, a digital watch.

While it became famous for the VAX line of computers, Digital's financial success was built on the PDP (Programmed Data Processors) minicomputers. It created the PDP-1 in 1959 and then iterated faster more capable versions through the next decade. 

I worked on a number of real time operating systems projects and was part of the four-man team that created RT-11, the real time (RT) operating system for DEC’s PDP-11 microcomputers. I gained a very good background in real time programming which turned out to be very important for editing! 

Which is certainly real time to the extreme because there aren't many applications that are that hard as playing real time media. 

Eric Peters was a key contributor to Avid in future but with the release of the PDP-11/20 in January 1970, he had helped create the platform for the world's first nonlinear computer editing system.

The joint venture between Memorex and CBS Television, CMX Systems, transitioned from analog to digital. Group manager Ken Taylor hired more staff to design the control systems, digital circuitry, disk pack switching and user interface for the unnamed editing system. Jerry Youngstrom recalls:

Obviously we needed some sort of program to ‘run’ the system. Memorex had put in an IBM 360 computer to aid the hardware group but the only person in the media group that knew how to program it was a statistician. For that matter in the wider engineering community there was almost nobody writing code. Programming was a brand new discipline. We were exceptionally lucky to find Dave.

David (Dave) W. Bargen worked at the Medical Diagnostics Operation of Xerox Corporation on N. Halstead Street, Pasadena, California. He recalls:

A friend heard about the new joint venture between CBS and Memorex and told me before he left Xerox to work for Memorex.

Bargen started at CMX in May 1970 and among his first  were to choose a computing platform.

I selected the DEC PDP-11 computer.

The PDP-11 computer, released just a few months earlier, had 16,000 words of core memory (16 bit), no hard drive and ran at 3 to 5 microseconds per instruction. (about 1000 times slower than a typical PC today).

The PDP-11 was a new computer model. It was 16 bit but also handled 8-bit bytes efficiently, which would be helpful for hardware control. It had good performance for the money. The original CBS system had used a DEC PDP-8, but that it was at the end of its model life-span.

Bargen went to Bill Butler and Ken Taylor with his recommendation. He recalls:

At the time it was the preferred mini-computer. DEC  was the original mini and a huge success until the advent of the Apple and PC. The PDP -11 had adequate power and speed, and supported all the peripherals we needed, including a punch paper tape reader/writer and the graphic interface which was quite new at that time.

Bargen's next decision, software coding.

Assembly (language) was used because of the need for speed and the limited memory capacity of the day.

He now needed software coders, who were uncommon in the Bay Area. 

James (Jim) C. Adams Jr. had moved from Fairchild Semiconductor to Link General Precision. Link had created flight simulators for the Apollo Lunar Lander (above) and then the F-111 fighter aircraft.

I was using an Xerox Data Systems​ (XDS) Sigma 5, developing the radar simulator software for the F-111. With this, and all of my previous jobs, I was sent to the factory schools to learn the software development process as well as the underlying hardware philosophy of the specific computer.  

DEC for the PDP-8, Scientific Data Systems for the SDS 930, Xerox for the SIGMA 5, as well as others such as Control Data Corporation (CDC)for their systems and Texas Instruments for analog/digital circuit design. At XDS the key take-away for me was how to process interrupts. An interrupt is a signal sent by a device that it needs attention. This is very different from a processor interrogating a device periodically to see if it either has data or is able to receive data.  

Adams soon left Link.

I answered an ad in the San Jose Mercury-News for a programmer 'to work on a new innovative system'.

Adams became the first outside hire by CMX. He adds:

Once onboard I met my immediate manager, Dave Bargen, I was introduced to the concept of video tape editing. Specifically, the process of many camera takes, selected parts of each take which were to be linked together to create a deliverable package.

The older technology was to cut the desired part out of the original take and glue it to another piece cut from another piece. The newer scheme involved using a frame counting code recorded on the tape and recording a number of frames from that point to another tape.This required two machines able to synchronize to the correct frame code for each machine. 

This concept had been carried to a computer to perform this task, rather than a dedicated hardware device that was quite operator intensive.  

Adrian Ettlinger’s proof-of-concept system, employing a PDP-8, could perform a single recording, but only the one segment buried in the computer program. CBS wanted to create a two-part system, the first of which was to determine the segments and sequence of the original takes at low resolution, what we now call Offline editing, and the second part was to copy the edit decisions onto a blank tape at high resolution for review and eventual delivery to the broadcast stations. What became known as Online editing.

Bargen adds:

The first product priority was development of the low resolution offline editing system that became know as the CMX 600, because that was the most innovative, and had the most unknowns.  

Adams continues:

From a control viewpoint, the offline process was pretty straight forward. Each frame of the original material had a frame code associated with it; this code tallied hours, minutes, seconds and frames associated with the time at which it was originally recorded. This frame count information was penciled into the program script such that any segment of tape could be quickly located from the script notes.

The frame count codes came in two variants: straight 30 frames per second (fps) for the black and white low resolution video and a somewhat different method to accommodate the color video at 29.97 fps.  

The complexity came with the desire to display the selected frames at other than 30 fps; faster, slower and frame-by-frame. A further complexity was that only the first field of each frame was on the disk, the second field for interlaced video came from an auxiliary disk which recorded the first field and delayed in a line-time to provide the second field.

Dave Bargen wrote:

King Anderson did much of the digital hardware design, for control and interface. Later, he headed the manufacturing of the products.

 Jim Adams continues:

Dave had selected the PDP-11 as the computer to use in this system and I believe that turned out to be the best decision made in the entire project.This computer had many attributes of larger systems and the machine assembly code was extremely versatile. 

Add-on (interface) boards for the PDP-11 were designed to link the necessary control features of the disk players, video switching circulatory and light pen position to the processor.

I was provided with a high-speed paper-tape reader and punch and an ASR-33 teletype for my software development.The printing speed of the ASR-33 is 10 characters per second.After a couple of months, I was able to persuade the company to get a Memorex printer which was about ten times as fast, but I still edited my programs on the ASR-33.

The analog team were still dealing with issues as Cal Strobele recalls:

I spent many days, in a fog, trying to figure out how to apply what we already knew about compression and recording to this project. In the end I came up with an idea to skip every other video field, in black and white and to record the audio on the back porch of the video for the missing field.

The ‘backporch’ is a term referring to the signal time between the horizontal sync pulse and the next active portion of the video signal. This is the area where the audio signal was stored.   

The Memorex disc pack was typically driven at 1,800 rpm so that each revolution took 1/30th of a second. Since it took one-sixtieth of a second to generate one video field, exactly two fields of video were recorded on a disc corresponding to one revolution of the disc pack.  

In skipfield recording only one field of video is recorded per frame. When replayed, each field is duplicated (and interlaced) to produce a fairly accurate reproduction of the original video sequence.

Gene Simon continues:

Because bandwidth was such a premium, only every other video field was recorded on the Memorex drives and they were only low bandwidth monochrome images. A separate single platter skip field disk drive was used to synthetically create the missing fields by creating a one-field delay.

Yves Faroudja recalls:

This method was the same as what Sony used with their helical scan tape machines at the time. There are ways of course to extrapolate better data and see the beauty of disk images with more heads but that was more complicated and more expensive than CMX wanted. The video was more or less preserved with the skip field method to achieve a way to edit in the most expedient way."

Strobele recalls:

The sync coming from the original video feed then drove the servo and we could treat the whole system as a closed circuit. Then we could destroy the sync pulse, the back porch and remove all of that and insert our signal in there with only a narrow leading pulse of the leading edge.

The skip field method had solved the storage issue by enabling more video to be crammed onto the disk platters but it created another problem. Bargen, Strobele, Anderson, Adams, Youngstrom, Faroudja, Scaggs and Eppstein cited it in their subsequent patent:

… the visual quality of a reproduced skipfield recording at the editor's monitors is sufficiently high that editing functioning is possible. However, while it is satisfactory to eliminate one-out-of-two or more fields of video, the same is not true for audio. In fact, it has been found that for satisfactory audio reproduction, the audio samples associated with each field of video must be retained and ultimately reproduced.

Jerry Youngstrom recalls:

Every field of audio had to be retained and kept in sync with the skip field video.

Faroudja adds:

Tony Eppstein and Lee Scaggs designed a very smart scheme to keep the audio in sync and at high quality.

Gene Simon continues:

The missing fields of audio could not synthetically be created, so both fields of a single audio channel were recorded on the back porch of each video line (where color