Boston Avid User Group
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of presenting at the Boston Avid Users Group, held at National Video Boston. It was great to see many of the colleagues that I worked with at Avid and also to meet new members. The topic of discussion was “Accelerating Avid-to-Avid Transfers” which showcased the Signiant-enabled Avid Transfer Manager integration that we’ve completed. Directly from the Avid interface, the user can initiate a transfer manager send and that content is then secured and WAN-accelerated to its destination. Meanwhile, the Signiant administrator can log into the Signiant central manager (see screenshot), see all the transfers, and interact with those transfers by adjusting their network bandwidth utilization to get content to its destination when it needs to be there.
After the presentation, there were a lot of great questions so it’s clear that moving digital media content over networks is of concern and that, if anything, being part of the digital media supply chain whether you’re an editor, graphics designer, sound mixer, etc. will continue to place demands on working in distributed, collaborative environments.
But, of course, because it was an Avid event, prior to my formal Signiant presentation, I told a few stories about the early days at Avid (I was employee #8). While preparing for the event, I had done some rummaging through my Avid archives and started off the night by playing back what I believe is the earliest known video of “The Avid/1 Editing System”. This was done in August 1987 and prior to the system being given its formal name: “The Avid/1 Media Composer” (that came much later, in 1989). The video that you see below is the early prototype that ran on an Apollo workstation. Notice that the editing model is quite different than the eventual source/record model that defined the product in its first release. In this video, however, the filmstrip model is much more similar to early Quantel products. In any case, enjoy. It’s a piece of digital nonlinear editing history.
You can also find the video on YouTube. May the force be with you.
