Timeline Analog 5. John Buck

convention was born.

      MediaBlender was aimed at users who wanted an uncomplicated way to edit video. Pavley told the press:

       We want to have the easiest and least expensive video program. Nobody knew anything about desktop publishing when it first came out, but now you have secretaries who know about kerning. In a couple of years, they'll know all about scene transitions.

      Using loan Mac equipment in a booth funded by Apple, the team from DiVA demonstrated their VideoShop application that allowed users to digitize video, then view and arrange the clips or edit graphics and audio files. Luyen Chou from the Lab for Teaching and Learning was impressed with the UI.

       There will be plenty of video editing packages but this will have the advantage of its interface.

      SuperMac demonstrated the VideoSpigot digitizer board at MacWorld. Earl Christie observed for tidBITS:

       The longest line at the show wrapped around SuperMac's booth where show-goers were posing in front of a blue screen waiting to have their image overlaid onto one of Faneuil Hall Marketplace to create a four-second video postcard on disk. SuperMac accomplished this with the aid of its VideoSpigot card, which digitizes incoming video and stores it in a compressed movie form.

      E-Machine's Ken Scott was showing Mac users the QuickView Studio (QVS) editing application.

       I knew that QVS was dead in the water when I saw SuperMac's VideoSpigot magazine ad. It showed a faucet turned on full-blast, with very colorful "water" spilling into a computer positioned below. The tagline was the killer: "Pour Video Into Your Macintosh". I hated and admired that ad, both at the same time. I have not bad-mouthed a marketing person since that day.

      Jon Pugh wrote for tidBits:

       All in all, the VideoSpigot is the ideal home digitizer. It cheaply provides sufficient quality to enable you to completely fill all of your disk space with pointless QuickTime clips. If you are inclined, you can also use Premiere to assemble your clips into an actual QuickTime movie. Go for it.

      SuperMac also announced Randy Ubillos' ReelTime software package which he had created to demonstrate the VideoSpigot. Pugh said it was:

      ...was worth $699 but it would be bundled for free. ReelTime offers ‘comprehensive’ video-editing capabilities and an easy-to-use interface that features separate windows for record/play, video construction, digital effects and source material. It will let users select input from video sources, as well as graphics, animation, text and sound files; set up special effects between clips, mix audio, preview segments, compile video, and export movies in QuickTime or NTSC format

      MacWorld magazine proclaimed:

       SuperMac's ReelTime is an example...of just how much the cost of digital video editing on the Macintosh has fallen. ReelTime brings, in effect, the tools of a video-editing suite onto the desktop of a color Mac. In conjunction with a color-digitizing card, it brings video in, allows users to sequence video clips, and adds sophisticated special effects and transitions.

       With an optional video-out card and a video encoder, QuickTime movies can be created on the Macintosh and exported to videotape.

      Roger Karraker tested ReelTime for MacWeek:

       ReelTime, along with Light Source's MovieTime, Diva Corp.'s VideoShop, not only are the vanguard of new video-savvy applications, they are clear evidence that a long-awaited day, digital video on your Macintosh, will arrive this year.

      SuperMac's Steve Blank offered insight into the realm of desktop editing that John Molinari later embraced at Media 100. Although the VideoSpigots could play out to tape, Blank believed that the majority of users didn't need to export to tape but instead just needed to integrate their edited videos into internal communications, interactive training, online video help, video mail and teleconferencing. Blank told the press:

      ...making movies on the Mac becomes as easy as desktop publishing with PageMaker.

      Ken Scott recalls ReelTime and QVS.

       I do recall admiring ReelTime but noted the QVS app I had created for E-Machines had many more capabilities in the works. I had an A-B (-C-D-E...) roll system working in the lab with full QuickTime support as well as a transition and effects plugin architecture. This is not to say that ReelTime wasn't a good app, it was a very good app and did some things much better than QVS. In the end, the QVS effort was stopped by the execs at E-Machines.

       NUBUS or HBUS

      SuperMac, Radius, RasterOps, and others competed to sell hardware that extended the capability of Apple's computers. With near saturation in monitors and graphics cards sales, they had shifted focus turned to desktop video and video cards.

      But there was an immediate technology bottleneck. Bandwidth.

      Ben Jamison, Radius product manager told MacWorld:

       One reason the multimedia market has not taken off as some predicted is that video has proven itself an extremely difficult and expensive data type to deal with.

      Apple then went public with what appeared to be a way to solve part of the multimedia bottleneck.

      Lexington, or Touchstone as it was to be called on release, was a combination of a new architecture, new system software and new hardware that let a Macintosh computer ingest, process and output a video signal to scalable video windows and flicker-free 24-bit signal to composite video.

      It was hoped Touchstone could be combined with Apple’s upcoming QuickTime system extensions to make digital video more versatile to use and less expensive to produce.

      Apple pushed the narrative:

       Today, users can pass video across the NuBus, or the Macintosh motherboard, and display it on the monitor using a video card. A video window of 640x480 lines at 30 frames per second is the limit of what the NuBus can handle. Therefore, to manipulate the video in any way such as compressing it and storing it on a hard drive in real time a user would be required to reduce the resolution, make the window smaller or cut the number of frames being displayed.

      The engineers had achieved a way to increase the quality of the video image as it was run through image enhancement, compression, digitizing and resizing. The eight subsequent Touchstone patents included work on Apple-designed custom chips and a new architecture called HBus (H stood for high performance).

      HBus moved video traffic off NuBus. High bandwidth video information was processed quickly without slowing concurrent operations of the computer.

       Touchstone technologies are not necessarily dedicated to one product, a single “super video” card, but will be used in a wide variety of products in different combinations over the coming months and years.

      Additional processors or dedicated daughter boards could be connected through an HBus slot which would sit on the NuBus cards. In a significant move, Apple announced that it was to license Touchstone to third parties rather than keep it in-house.

      The decision appeared to signal a move away from hardware compression to a software approach like QuickTime. Spokesperson Patty Tulloch:

       Apple is concentrating on system software and platform development, and has chosen to offload resource-intensive NuBus development projects to those third parties that have more incentive to bring them to market.

      CEO Barry James Folsom of monitor maker Radius saw:

       ...Touchstone as the