EditDroid

The EditDroid was a computerized analog NLE (non-linear editing system), developed by Lucasfilm spin-off company, The Droid Works and Convergence Corporation who formed a joint venture company. The company existed up through the mid-80's to the early 90's in an attempt to move from analog editing methods to digital. The EditDroid first debuted at NAB in 1984, concurrent with another editing tool that would compete with the EditDroid for all its years in production, The Montage Picture Processor. The EditDroid was never a commercial success and after the close of The Droid Works in 1987 and subsequent redevelopment of the product for seven years, the software for it was eventually sold to Avid Technology in 1993. Only 24 EditDroid systems were ever produced.

The system was Laserdisc-based, relying on several laserdisc players and a database system which would queue up the clips in the order needed from the laserdisc players in the most efficient way, so as to minimize skipping. This however wasn't always possible. So if the edits weren't sufficiently close, the system wouldn't always be fast enough to cue up the next clip.

It had three screens connected to it: one was a Sun-1 computer display (the graphical UI for the product), plus one small video (preview) monitor and one large rear-projected containing 'the cut' and was controlled by a custom controller. The controller, called the TouchPad, featured a KEM-style shuttle knob, a trackball, and a host of buttons with LED labels that changed in function depending on what the system was doing. The EditDroid pioneered the use of the graphical display for editing--introducing the "timeline" as well as digital picture icons to identify raw source clips.

Once the entire movie had been edited, a "cut list" of marked frames was turned over to a film laboratory where the actual pieces of film were spliced together in the correct order.

The EditDroid no longer exists as such, and the market for nonlinear editing systems has changed radically since its inception, with products like Final Cut Pro available at consumer level. In many respects the EditDroid was a concept demonstration of the future of editing, with a laserdisc being a good 1980s simulation of what digital access would be like, and an editing interface and workflow that was more like today's methods than any of the videotape linear or analog nonlinear products leading up to the Avid/1 in 1990.

Advantages and Disadvantages

The advantages of using a digital editing solution over the older analog solutions (like the Moviola), were many. Not only is it much faster to locate the clips needed, keeping track of what can in some cases amount to a staggering amount of footage, is also much easier digitally. Also, editing film digitally is a non-destructive process, where the analog process requires the actual cutting and gluing together of pieces of film as well as manual syncing of sound.

That said, Walter Murch in his book In the Blink of an Eye, mourns the loss of the older analog solutions where you had to move back and forth in the available material a lot to gain an overview, thus getting you very well acquainted with it. A process which is not necessary to the same extent with NLE solutions.

Furthermore, the resolution possible on a laserdisc is much much less than that of a 35mm celluloid (roughly 528 pixels wide on laserdisc vs roughly 5600 pixels on 35mm).

While the Laserdisc format was brought to market in the late 70's (as DiscoVision and later, LaserVision) and despite persistent promises from the Music Corporation of America, a cheap method of recording laserdiscs never surfaced, making it exceedingly hard and cumbersome to create the needed laserdiscs for the EditDroid (at this time the storage available on a hard disk was very small and extremely costly).

Furthermore, many potential customers of the EditDroid were put off by the fact that while Lucasfilm Ltd. were the creators of the EditDroid, George Lucas had never in fact used the EditDroid on a movie (despite the EditDroid having been shown with clips on numerous occasions at tradeshows and at demonstrations). Lucas eventually used his EditDroids in the early '90s on his series "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles."

External links

* [http://droidmaker.com Droidmaker]
* [http://www.digitalzoo.com.au/lunchtime/lunch_docs/books_05_vintage_01.htm Lights, Cameras... Computers (1984 Article)]
* [http://www.lucasfilm.com/inside/history/?page=6 Edit Droid in Lucasfilm Company History]