After a few different contenders had their day in the sun, the world largely settled in with Avid and/or Media 100 rooms. Towards the midpoint in the lifespan for this way of working, nonlinear editing took hold. A few facilities with money and clientele migrated to HD versions of these million dollar rooms. 2” quad eventually gave way to 1” VTRs and those, in turn, were replaced by digital – D1, D2, and finally Digital Betacam. Not too long thereafter, digital effects (ADO, NEC, Quantel) and character generators (Chyron, Aston, 3M) joined the repertoire. This was generally considered an “online edit suite”, but in many markets, this was both “offline” (creative cutting) and “online” (finishing).
When I started video editing, the norm was an edit suite with three large quadraplex (2”) videotape recorders, video switcher, audio mixer, B&W graphics camera(s) for titles, and a computer-assisted, timecode-based edit controller.
