Media 100's Blood Secrets

09/08/2022

Media 100's Blood Secrets

John Molinari August 9, 2022

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In Blood Secrets the founder of Media 100 Inc., John Molinari, laid out the vision and the driving force that fuels Media 100. Even today in 2001 2022, seven twenty-six years after it was first published, it gives a clear and open window into the company that has changed the video industry so markedly.

We are a small band of engineers, joined by a growing circle of heretics, out to change the demographics of video forever. These are our blood secrets.

Our mission is to make video personal. Nonlinear systems emerged in the Eighties to simplify working with video however, these systems mainly benefit trained editors creating edit lists, not finished videos, at dedicated post facilities. Like the tape systems they replace, these systems are costly and dedicating one to a single individual is usually impractical.

Our purpose is to build nonlinear systems that empower the individual to compose finished videos, largely on their own, with small overhead costs. We call these people new users and see the individualism of their work leading to new forums of interest for video and altering how programs are broadcast to a target audience.

By new, we mean new authors of video programs with creative backgrounds or communications jobs, creating new kinds of video programs, using the computer as a media source, and using new delivery systems, such as CD ROM and digital transmission over the internet. Not all new users are new to video or video inexperienced, but have found working with video to be difficult, limiting, and costly.

In the vanguard of this circle of heretics are longtime video sophisticates, drawn from high overhead facilities to the personal empowerment and productivity of working on their own. They are on the frontline leading the liberation, first to understand the epochal change represented by personal systems.

Yet it's no wonder people are confused. Video users and equipment manufacturers unfamiliar with the rapid evolution of computers see themselves under seige by new computer users and suppliers. Computer users and computer suppliers, in particular, see a world of opportunity in digital video, but faintly understand the origins and particulars of analog video. While many might jump to agree that the take over by nonlinear systems is imminent, real understanding of the motives behind the engineering of these systems is less sanguine.

The bulk of nonlinear systems shipping today were conceived in the Eighties for offline editing. The manufacturers primarily engineer computer software. This history is important: while software can manipulate video pictures and sound in real time for nonlinear editing, powerful hardware is required for higher quality. Since this hardware would only come later, and not from these companies, the idea of actually finishing a video program using a nonlinear system was not a part of their original plan. At best, the idea was fanciful something for the future. We were told, that's not possible, when we proposed the idea.

Nonlinear systems architected as computer interfaces for editing may save time for professional editors, but they in effect preserve the status quo. Because finished programs are still assembled online with videotape equipment, these systems leave the video creation process as expensive and inaccessible as ever for the rest of us. This thinking motivated us in late 1989 to begin engineering hardware for a new kind of personal nonlinear system. Herein our blood secrets.

Our strategy is to create a new mold by making a video system which is simple a personal system for new users aspiring to have greater personal control over working with video. Technically, the means supporting this strategy is to provide output picture and sound quality which is unassailably broadcast quality in a nonlinear system built from a small, ubiquitous, and inexpensive computer. Matching or exceeding the video quality provided by broadcast videotape equipment eliminates the need to return to it for final program output. Quality becomes the path to finished results without complexity. Achieving quality naturally leads to simplicity and the means to creating new users and applications.

Likewise, the goal to meet broadcast standards is not tantamount to a goal to serve broadcasters. This point is often confused. Historically in video, manufacturers and users have suffered the worst inconveniences, technical difficulties, and high costs to get to high output quality adopting new, incompatible tape formats, bumping up, rerecording restrictions, multi-wire component hook ups, etc. have all been part of the complicated video culture to get to quality or avoid quality shortfalls; every facet of the process is a means to get to that end, quality. Since broadcasters seek the highest quality of all, they go to the most trouble and expense to get it. In our world, high quality is etched in digital stone upfront, so it is automatic and can even be varied by the user to meet the needs of new, digital applications, like CD ROM. With quality built in, the sole challenge in the process of creating programs is to be creative. While we may provide the quality that many broadcasters seek as we seek to meet their standards, serving them is not the end goal.

Quality cannot provide simplicity if its cost is impractically high. The other factors that ensure simplicity start with the economic: simplicity should mean the system is easy to buy it is not so expensive that business and creative users cannot afford to own it. Simplicity means the system is easy to set up. A measure of simplicity? Count the cables to be connected to assemble the system: you should find they are few. Yet, many self-described desktop systems have as many cable hook-ups as conventional A/B r

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