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I was browsing the Wikipedia article on video editing software, but I noticed it doesn't include a History section.

I'm specifically interested in early digital or computer-assisted video editing tools — software that ran on computers — rather than analog or tape-based editing systems. When did such software first appear, and on what platforms?

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    You might have restricted the question to PC software. Tron was released in 1982, but I don't really care what software Disney used on their mainframes. Commented Jun 25 at 16:09
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    @MissUnderstands - Tron was edited in the traditional way, it was not edited on a computer (in the spirit of what the question is asking). Yes, there are CGI scenes, and while they were edited on a computer, they eventually would be generated and produce something that was transferred to film. Those film sequences (about 15 minutes or so all said and done) were spliced together with traditional live action film cuts. So no, the movie Tron was not done on a mainframe or whatever, it was a traditional film with CGI and "neat lighting" mixed in. Commented Jun 25 at 16:33
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    You might have restricted the question to PC software - why? You might not be interested in a wider answer, but some of us are, and it's the OP's prerogative to ask the question he wants to ask. Commented Jun 25 at 22:47
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    @RitcherSr. -- It's about retrocomputing - which encompasses at least every electronic computing device from Eniac onwards, or earlier if someone can make a good case for it. Look at the large number of questions, answers, and discussions of pre-PC systems. Commented Jun 26 at 11:36
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    As an old Amiga user reading a lot about the Video Toaster and such things, I'd be offended if the question only cared about the boring PC stuff! (Though the Video Toaster was of course not first in any way) Commented Jun 26 at 18:34

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The CMX-600 was in use by the early 1970's. I think it's the first of what we could reasonably call a computer based video editing system that we would recognize in modern terms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bNmsKBqFPQ

https://www.vtoldboys.com/editingmuseum/cmx600.htm

It used a PDP-11 Minicomputer, and 6 hard disks capable of holding a whopping 39 Megabytes each. In order to fit on the disks, the video was recorded in monochrome with low quality. Interestingly, it was stored on hard disks, but the video itself wasn't digital. It was some sort of counterintuitive analogue format stored on disk, where the computer controlled seeking, but the output of the disk was fed directly to analogue video equipment. The minicomputer only had enough memory to operate the control software, but not enough to hold whole frames of the video. A PDP 11/20 maxed out at 64 KB of RAM, but 16 KB was a more typical configuration. Once you had your edits programmed into the system, you used the "edit decision list" file to control VTR's loaded with tapes of the broadcast quality version of the footage and it would automatically assemble the final edit.

So... Does it count? It's fuzzy. It was a non linear computer editing system, where you could seek randomly and playback was all controlled digitally.

But it was also analogue and tape based. The video on the digitally controlled hard disks represented an analogue format, not digitized data. And if you wanted to assemble a full color broadcast quality edit, you did have to go back to tapes. But you could theoretically throw away the tapes and play out the black and white video from the CMX system if you wanted to for some reason, so it's technically not tape-mandatory but that was the only practical professional workflow in 1971.

A descendant of the EDL file format that the CMX system used is still in use today. It's definitely the earliest computer editing system that still has obvious continuity to modern workflows. You could load a 1970's CMX-600 EDL into a modern copy of Davinci Resolve and re-conform it to some digital video files on your hard disk.

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    This absolutely counts in the traditional industry definition of "editing." Traditional film editing is not done on the original negative, but is done with lower-quality copies from the negative. Once the edit is complete, you have in some form an edit decision list indicating which frames are to be in the final version. This then goes to a negative cutter who, following that EDL, will edit the negative to conform to the edit created with the copies. Commented Jun 29 at 2:21
  • In this case, the edit is just as above, and going back to the tapes with the EDL to create the final output is the equivalent of negative cutting, which is not considered part of the editing process. Commented Jun 29 at 2:21
  • @wrosecrans What took you time to post answer? Commented Jun 29 at 5:21
  • In the 1970s the BBC had video hard drives that had been acquired primarily for things like sports broadcast instant replays, but were also used in some Doctor Who stories featuring Tom Baker, including his first (Robot, 1974). Not sure if computers could control it. Commented Jul 21 at 21:47
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I would say the Quantel 'Harry' system of 1985 was the first non-linear digital editing system.

In 1985, Quantel released the "Harry" effects compositing system/non-linear editor. The Harry was designed to edit in real time and render special effects in non-real time using the video recorded on its built-in hard disk array (much like most computer based non-linear editing systems today). The hard disk array used drives made by Fujitsu, and were connected to the Harry using a proprietary parallel interface, much like a modern-day RAID array. Technically, it was the first all-digital non-linear editing system. Due to technical constraints of the time, the Harry could only record 80 seconds of video, albeit encoded in full broadcast-quality, uncompressed D1-style 8-bit CCIR 601 format. This aside, the Harry was quite an advanced machine, and the only system like it for its time.

Source: Wikipedia

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  • Do I understand correctly that this was a complete system including custom hardware and software? OP accepted the answer, but I understood the question as looking for software only. Commented Jun 26 at 2:57
  • @KarlKnechtel computers run software, no? Commented Jun 27 at 15:05
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    Sure, but this answer doesn't tell us specifically what software the Harry ran, or if it was ever usable on other hardware. Commented Jun 27 at 15:07
  • While I couldn't find any pictures of the device, the manual makes it more or less clear that this is a custom piece of hardware that does not run on a general purpose computer, not even as a plugin card. It mentions a custom CPU card and a number of specific function cards, and a dedicated overheating protection (fan monitor etc). Maybe that still is what OP is asking about, although adding "software" makes it weird. Commented Jun 27 at 19:58
  • It gets a bit awkward to define the earliest "pure software" video editing program because things changed over time. You can point to something like Avid Media Composer. Today it's software that you can install on any PC. But in the early days you bought "an Avid" much like "a Harry" with some custom hardware. The first public iteration used a Macintosh II as the host, but you couldn't just install the software on an off the shelf Mac and start editing. That came later. So Avid as software dates anywhere from 1989 to maybe 2005, with caveats. Commented Jun 29 at 1:28

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