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Early Media Composer and Final Cut Pro promo videos

Scott Simmons
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Early Media Composer and Final Cut Pro promo videos 1

I got taken down into one of those You Tube time sucks the other day. It came courtesy of a couple of tweets by Rob G Wilson that pointed to some very old Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro promo videos. If you want to realize just how far your NLE software has advanced then give yourself 20 minutes to check these things out. They are full of bad music, cheesy video effects and plenty of bad hair. Those two videos as well as a an early promo for Media 100 are embedded after the jump. 

This was the tweet from Rob about the Avid Media Composer promo (The twitter embeds may or may not show the YouTube video so the seperate YouTube embed is here too):

And here it is in all of its standard def glory:

Next came this tweet from Rob about the early Final Cut Pro promo:

And of course the video:

If you're wondering why the early Media Composer looks so much more primitive than the early Final Cut Pro remember that the Media Composer video says it is from 1989, a full decade before the FCP video in 1999. And then at some point (maybe around 1996) came Media 100. This is their promo video:

Media 100 is still around. It is owned by Boris FX and you can buy it for $1,000. There's a free trial available too. If you read over those bullet points it really looks quite powerful. I wonder if anyone is actually using it these days?

I tried to find an early Adobe Premiere promo video as well but I was not successful.

If you're at all curious about the history of non-linear editing software then check out the Timeline books by John Buck. They dig into the history of editing.

Timeline 2 covers the years from 1988 to 2000 so that'll be a good read if the above videos were of interest.

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