Rise and Fall of the EditDroid - REPOST from DVXUser

[Brian Timmons]

Very interesting short documentary about the Edit Droid developed by George Lucas/Lucas Film. It was perhaps the 1st nonlinear editor built off of computer and video technology.
Shows the technological heritage that is the beginnings of out current modern editing apps of choice.

This was originally posted on DVXuser by David Jimersom.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Nick Morrison]

Cool.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Very interesting short documentary about the Edit Droid developed by George Lucas/Lucas Film. It was perhaps the 1st nonlinear editor built off of computer and video technology.
Shows the technological heritage that is the beginnings of out current modern editing apps of choice.

This was originally posted on DVXuser by David Jimersom.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

Yeah, we bought one at Complete Post in Hollywood, and had one of the few EditDroid systems in Hollywood. One thing the short doesn't mention: it never worked very well. They had a lot of technical problems with it, and our company refused to pay Lucasfilm for it until it worked. Around 1987, our general manager called it up and said, "hey, we're moving in other editing systems to that room, so we need to ship this back to you." And Lucasfilm said, "oh, we've already written that off -- you can just have it for free." They hauled it out to the dump and got rid of it.

I was able to rescue some of the demo Laserdiscs used for editing before it left the building, but that's about all that survives. Avid eventually bought all the patents and incorporated a lot of the ideas into the Media Composer... but they didn't use the cool "KEM flatbed editor" controller that EditDroid had.

 

[Brian Timmons]

It’s one thing to read or hear about something.
It’s another to live it.

Marc if you ever wrote a “Kitchen Confidential” style book on your experiences in the tv and film post world I would be one of the first to go out and purchase it.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Marc Wielage]

It’s one thing to read or hear about something.
It’s another to live it. Marc if you ever wrote a “Kitchen Confidential” style book on your experiences in the tv and film post world I would be one of the first to go out and purchase it.

I've been threatening for some time to do advanced resolve training, and I hope to do that in the next month or two. The last hour will be (among other things) war stories with some famous names in the color room: Brian DePalma, Billy Friedkin, Barbra Streisand, George Lucas, Kevin Costner, all kinds of people. Generally nice stories. (I may not be able to tell the Faye Dunaway story because of libel laws.)

 

[Stuart Hooper]

Thanks for this. My mentor in film, William E McEuen bought was I believe was the 2nd Edit Droid, but said he could never get it to work. The excitement around the idea led to better things, though, of course...

 

[Brian Timmons]

I've been threatening for some time to do advanced resolve training, and I hope to do that in the next month or two. The last hour will be (among other things) war stories with some famous names in the color room: Brian DePalma, Billy Friedkin, Barbra Streisand, George Lucas, Kevin Costner, all kinds of people.

Cool- If you release I'll buy it.
Such a course better sell through the roof considering the many "experts" on social media that seem to be doing well their own courses.

Generally nice stories. (I may not be able to tell the Faye Dunaway story because of libel laws.)

Interesting, a friend of mine had his own run-in when he was an editor on a project she was involved with.
It didn't sound like a pleasant edit session in fact IIRC he actually may have ended it prematurely.

I always felt the tech and the creativity is one of the easier parts of filmmaking.

Managing the human element (personalities, ego, ambitions, trauma's, etc) whether with other people or one's self is where it can get tricky.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Paul Fr]

I don't much about the first implementation of Editdroid. But I designed the hardware for the second implementation. We redesigned it from scratch, using all the concepts of the original. I don't know why they went on this venture to redo it. At that time, Lucasfilm seemed to be looking to expand beyond George's original goals into things like being a theme park design company. So I guess they were venturing out with new businesses.

I supported one of the original units that was being used in Detroit for commercials. Yes, it was unreliable, requiring change outs of the computer machine controllers that drove the disk players, on a regular basis.

Our second implementation used all new hardware design and it was reliable, having supported Law & Order, Oliver Stone's movie and other projects without a hitch. But then, it was too little too late as Avid showed up at NAB and I knew it was over for us. But it was a lot of fun.

As to Avid buying the IP, yes, they did. But there were no patents I'm aware of, unless those were before my time. I agree. I thought the reason they wanted it was for the Touchpad (the KEM knob) and perhaps the software that converted the edit to negative cut lists.