Part II of my interview with Bill Warner, telling the story of how he came to create Avid Technology.

The Man Who Created Avid Technology – The Bill Warner Interview – Part II

Bill Warner: So, I was just discovering this. I didn’t really; I had never heard about it or read about it. I’d just sort of discovered the pain (of editing) myself for the very first time. And so then I kept looking for ways to solve this pain, because I liked editing and I needed my; some sort of good editing fix.

And so I was a product manager at Apollo Computer. We made this; I was a product manager for a 3D graphics workstation like Silicon Graphics; compete with Silicon Graphics. And I convinced my boss that we needed a video for this thing, not a brochure.

And so; and the whole idea was to use one of those computerized editors that would do editing just the way I wanted it to be, if I had enough money to rent one. So, he said fine; I got the budget.

I called up this place, Video One in Boston. I said, “You have a computerized editor?” And they said, “Sure do.”

And I said, “How much is it?” And they said 300 bucks an hour and I was, “Oh, God.” But I had the budget.

So I said OK and I shot my stuff on three-quarter-inch tape with time code. I thought that was very fancy. And I came in to Video One with my stack of tapes.

And they said, “Where’s your script?” And I said, “I don’t have a script, I’m just gonna work it out on your computerized editing system.”

And they kind of tilted their head a little bit. And I said, “I want you to show me how to run it.” And they tilted their head a little more. But they said; I’m an engineer; I was young. They said OK.

So they sat me down at the machine. And when I saw the green monitor I was a little worried. And I said, OK, show me how it works. And they said, OK, P is play, and I hit P and it started playing. And they said spacebar is stop, and that stopped. And I hit R is rewind; it started backing up. And I said, “What do you mean, rewind?” And they said, “What do you mean, ‘What do you mean, rewind?’” And I said, “Is there a tape deck?” And they said, “Well of course there’s a tape deck.”

And I said, “Wait a minute. This is a computerized editor, right?” And they said yeah. And I said, “You’re just controlling tape decks?” And they said, well, yeah. And I said, “So what good is it?”

Larry Jordan: So you had a vision of the Avid before it was even . . .

Bill Warner: I thought I could rent one. I thought if I had enough money I could rent one. All right? So I went and I rented what I thought was an Avid. And I get there and it’s controlling the tape decks. And I said, “How is this better than my knob editor that I already have, the Panasonic?”

And they said, “You can’t do frame-accurate editing with that.” And I said, “You’re right. So, you can punch in exactly to the frame?” And, “Yeah.” And they said, “Oh you can rebuild the edit list if you want.” You know, if you want to take forever to do that.

And they said, “When do you need this tape?” And I said, “Tomorrow.” And they said, “Call your boss . . .” (Remember, I was a young guy at that point.) “Call your boss. Call it off. You’re history.”

Larry Jordan: And they were gonna charge you, right?

Bill Warner: They were actually very nice. But I said, “No.”

And they said, “All right. Then you have to go make a paper edit. We’ll give you a burn-in on tape and you go and make a paper edit, you come back tomorrow and we’ll do an online.” And that’s what we did.

Larry Jordan: Boy, you’re bringing back bad memories.

Bill Warner: Yeah. And I got it done. The video was an enormous hit.

Larry Jordan: Oh, was it?

Bill Warner: Oh, yes. The sales force loved it. I mean, here was this product they didn’t understand: 3D graphics, you know, how many polygons per second and vectors per second. They’d never even heard of this stuff.

Larry Jordan: It made it crystal clear.

Bill Warner: Yep. Well, they just popped it in for the customer. And so they loved it. And what happened then was every new product, then, had a video. And I was involved in making these videos.

End part II Interview with Bill Warner, Founder Avid Technology.