Timeline Analog 6. John Buck

every frame of a movie (rather than interpolating between key frames), which makes it more suited to high-end production. QuickTime 2.5 will enable high-end video people to exchange and work more easily with M-JPEG video, provided hardware vendors adopt Apple's new formats.

      Adobe, Intergraph, Equilibrium, Macromedia, Media 100 and Truevision were developing products to work with QuickTime for Windows and NT.

       Engineers from all eight companies will be collaborating with Apple to architect key elements of the QT 2.5-Win product, including video frame grabbing, NT multi-processor support, memory management, media compression, and decompression as well as the high-performance playback necessary to ensure broadcast and professional adoption.

      While Truevision announced support for QuickTime, it had been prohibited from publicly developing drivers for KeyGrip. Within weeks Truevision was named as Microsoft’s key developer of ActiveMovie 2.0. CEO Lou Doctor told the press:

       Windows NT with ActiveMovie 2.0 and Truevision's TARGA hardware will be a compelling combination for digital video professionals looking for superior price/performance...

      Then Macromedia and Media 100 announced a major editing collaboration.Industry pundit Ron Lindeboom recalls:

       Kathlyn and I were guests of Media 100 and Macromedia for a preview party to give a sneak peek at (KeyGrip) leading up to the 1996 Conference.

      The KeyGrip application was to ship with Media 100's Vincent video engine:

       KeyGrip will support professional features including instant playback of edits, real-time effects, real-time audio mixing and digital video effects (DVE).

      The hardware to power KeyGrip was said to be:

       A new extended architecture version of the industry-leading Vincent digital video engine will power the Media 100/KeyGrip offering. Extended Vincent architecture is a highly scalable digital video platform comprising signal processing circuitry, industry-standard bus and peripheral connectors, and an upgrade framework that provides for future, in-the-field enhancements of hardware and software capabilities.

      In a press release, John Molinari explained the bold move.

       Macromedia has worked closely with a broad range of video editors and cinematographers to ensure KeyGrip will meet the requirements of video and film professionals without compromising ease-of-use and accessibility for non-professionals. KeyGrip coupled with Vincent's unique digital video architecture will be ideal for anyone aspiring to deliver broadcast quality results from the desktop.

      Macromedia's director of video products marketing, Tim Myers told the press:

       Media 100's unique Vincent digital video engine is the ideal hardware platform for KeyGrip. Together, they deliver the industry's leading open systems solution for digital video authoring.

      Anthony Dolph, Media 100’s director of marketing, concluded:

       With QuickTime for Windows, Macromedia's KeyGrip software and Media 100's next generation Vincent digital video engine, PC developers can feel confident that they can save time and money while getting products into customer hands more quickly and efficiently.

      When the Macromedia team returned from the Developer’s Conference they sat down for a brainstorming session to create a shipping name for KeyGrip.

      Tim Myers recalls:

       I had been through a few naming exercises both at Macromedia, and Adobe with Premiere. We got everyone on the team together and threw a bunch of names together, and then held a vote. There weren’t any marketing consultants involved, and when we landed on Final Cut we were all pretty happy with that as our choice.

      John Molinari saw the agreement with Macromedia as his best shot at shipping an affordable editing system on the PC platform.

      John Fierke had been with Data Translation as a senior engineer for 16 years. He was the obvious choice to lead a team, focused on making the Vincent hardware work with Apple’s QuickTime Windows API.

       I moved from the Data Translation group to the Media 100 group to start the Bobcat project. I was the main technical contact with Apple and Macromedia.

      A good-natured rivalry evolved between the PC and Mac engineers. Fierke recalls:

       We initially thought that getting our hardware, firmware, and low level driver code ported from Mac to Windows would be a huge challenge, but this turned out to be surprisingly easy. The Media 100 Mac guys started out mocking the Windows engineers with comments like, “It’s so complicated, you’ll never get it working on Windows” but when we got it completed quite quickly, they took credit!

       “Our design was so good” they said, “a monkey could have ported it to Windows”.

      Fierke needn’t have worried that the Apple engineers might not be Windows savvy enough.

       They knew, as much as anyone about the Windows pieces for QuickTime. The real challenge turned out to be dealing with a huge company 3000 miles away.

      Final Cut’s Michael Wohl recalls:

       Most of our engineers were Mac guys but the Windows version had priority for market share reasons and we worked to that. NT was pretty solid and it looked like with Apple's problems that it was definitely going to be NT.

      Then Macromedia hosted a meeting with Sony Corporation of Japan. Wohl recalls:

       We had spoken with Integraph about a complete turn key system and I even demonstrated a beta version on a turn key system for Toshiba at InterBee in Japan. Then we met with Sony and their video people because they wanted to buy the whole Final Cut operation outright.

       Along with Tim Myers and others, I demonstrated the current iteration of the product and we got a very positive reaction, until the executives from Sony asked us what we expected to charge for a single license.

      Macromedia had always maintained that it would ship Final Cut as a software package at around $5000 and let resellers bundle it with various hardware video cards for a total price of $8-10,000. Sony wanted to charge editors around $50,000 per licence.

      The meeting ended after price was discussed. Sony showed no further interest in KeyGrip.