[Michael Gissing] "And what was the price of MC1?"
A lot less than you'd think. I couldn't find a reference that I felt was reliable for v.1, but by 1993, Models 210 (unbundled) and 220 (with Mac IIci) were $15,000 and $24,900 respectively.
They started getting expensive once you added hardware. (Offline film at the resolutions that Film Composer originally supported was computing intensive -- hence the brute force of the Mac IIci and its 6 slots -- but not THAT intensive.)
Things got interesting around 1995, when Media 100's Vincent and Avid's ABVB (Avid Broadcast Video Board) started duking it out: $30K vs. $90K.
Duke it out they did, with dueling lawsuits. The first shot was fired by Media 100, whose suit was dismissed with prejudice. I don't remember what happened with the Avid suit.
I also don't remember what the complete configuration of the ABVB Media Composer looked like (surely a breakout box, yes? Where did the configured workstations/storage come in?), but by the time I decked my Media 100 out with a computer, a modest amount of RAM and a small array (27GB - 18 for video and the 9 for music, graphics, etc), I was in for around $50,000.
By 1999, Avid dropped the ABVB to $49-ish if I'm remembering right....
...but to get to your original question, you could have gotten a Mac IIci, a Targa 2000 card and Adobe Premiere for around $20,000, which indeed I did -- not far off of the Avid price.
Of course part of the reason for that expensive Premiere system was paying $5000 for 8MB (that's MEGABYTES) of RAM. I kept the 8 SIMMs as holiday ornaments for years, and in a baggie in a drawer for years after that. I couldn't bear to throw away $5000 worth of ANYTHING.
And yes, you're doing the math correctly. $70,000 on editing gear in a 3-year period...not counting cameras and decks. This was in the days of "affordable" Beta SP - a $10,000 camera, $12K for a Canon zoom, $10K for a UVW-1800 deck, plus monitors, mics, batteries, a couple of VERY cheap lights, etc. -- another $40,000. That's $110,000+ in 2 years.
The COW's predecessor community, The WWUG, was comprised of thousands of a-holes like me who took out second mortgages to get started in this business -- including Ronald Lindeboom, who actually lit the whole thing up because he needed help to avoid losing the farm. There was nowhere else offering this level of life-and-death help, so he started The WWUG to get that help for his own business.
So yeah, we thought of Avid as expensive, and our $50,000 NLE setups as dirt cheap.
Goodness knows I could be remembering some of this wrong, and definitely writing far more than is necessary, but those were amazing days, and it's nearing midnight, and I'd just as soon be rambling on about this as take the dog out to pee one more time before bed.
I'd love for some of you other geezers to correct me and fill in the blanks. These stories are too good for me to have forgotten as much as I have.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou
