how far we've come...

[Craig Meadows]

Our first pc based animation system: 386 with like 8mb of ram, a puny hd running Crystal Topas software. BVW-75 beta deck punching in and recording frame-by-frame with each frame taking oh "Forever" to render.

Our first NLE: Immix TurboCube and later the Stratosphere.

Our first pro camera: Sony BVP-3A "tube" camera. It actually made some very nice video for the era.

Damn I'm old!

 

[Alan Skinner]

My first PC Clone ran at 4 mgz but lo' and behold, it had a button that "Turbo'd" to 8 mghz!!!!!

Damn! Those were the days!

 

[Omar Saad]

Hahaha... nice article! Ulead Media Studio Pro 5.0 really brings the memories back!

 

[Mark Collins]

Even though I'm not that old, I remember back when 20gb harddrives were a big deal. To have that much storage was simply 'woah!"

When the first flash drives came out, my entire family was simply astounded. We thought to ourselves "64 megs!! And it's so small!" Now of course I have several 4gb flash drives that I picked up for less than $20, and are smaller than those 64 mb ones. Back then, I couldn't even envision a terabyte of harddrive space. When i first heard about 1tb drives, I though that no one would ever need that space.

I was wrong

 

[Stephen Strangways]

I remember doing 3D animation on an old Amiga Video Toaster system, with some ancient version of Lightwave. It didn't have enough memory to buffer any more than one frame at a time, so the best part of the whole experience was sitting around for several minutes while it rendered a single frame, and when it was done, you'd record that frame to video tape, hit the spacebar (IIRC) and it would start rendering the next frame... several minutes later...

 

[Brandon Kraemer]

This was my first edit system, no rendering required!

[/IMG]

I actually worked on a "Showcron" not a Steenbeck, but same animal. I always felt lucky I moved from 16mm to Avid and skipped the whole linear workflow ordeal.

 

[Paul Lee]

I always felt lucky I moved from 16mm to Avid and skipped the whole linear workflow ordeal.

Aw, I so enjoyed working as an assist and having to go in Sunday night to fire-up the linear suite so it would be nice and warm in time for Monday's edit, after you timed all of the decks, of course...

now our 4K RED is in FedEx transit, heading to RED HQ for a new chip! All for less than the price of a D-2 record head!

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

This was my first edit system, no rendering required!

I guess I could make the argument that you would have had to "Render" work prints before you could ever start cutting.

 

[Brandon Kraemer]

I guess I could make the argument that you would have had to "Render" work prints before you could ever start cutting.

True, but that was the labs problem!

Maybe another analogy for rendering would be using the hot splicer.

 

[Paul Lee]

yes, but it was non-linear!