Industry Innovators: Bill Warner, Avid

Invention is the mother of necessity and all that but there are only a handful of people equipped to turn a problem into an opportunity. Faced with the torture of editing video using existing linear technologies, 28-year old Bostonian Bill Warner channelled his frustration into launching the company that has dominated digital editing for the quarter-century since.

Author Russell Evans declared Avid’s breakthrough “the biggest shake-up in editing since Méliès played around with time and sequences in the early 1900s.”

That ignores the strides made by Sergei Eisenstein, Charlie Chaplin or any of the dozens of editors and filmmakers working before 1980 but there’s no doubt that Avid shook up editing technology and put a whole new set of creative storytelling possibilities into the hands of a lot more people.

Put it this way: pre-Avid, film editing relied on the century-old technique of cutting and splicing frames of celluloid together using flatbed systems like the KEM, Steenbeck and Moviola.

This slow and clunky approach (nonetheless demanding a discipline many older editors decry in modern NLE) was actually a lot more non-linear than the prevailing videotape editing technique which by the 1970s involved playing back master footage from one machine and copying select takes onto another.

This was the linear wall confronting Warner in 1984. He was a…