This was the first Editing Oscar awarded to a digitally edited film (although the final print was still created with traditional negative cutting). In 1996 Walter Murch accepted the Academy Award for editing The English Patient (which also won best picture), which he cut on the Avid. By 1995 dozens had switched to Avid, and it signaled the beginning of the end of cutting celluloid. By 1994 only three feature films used the new digital editing system. The first studio film to be edited at 24fps was Lost in Yonkers, directed by Martha Coolidge. The first feature film edited natively at 24fps with what was to become the Avid Film Composer was Emerson Park. The film was edited at 30fps NTSC rate, then used Avid MediaMatch to generate a negative cutlist from the EDL. The first feature film edited using the Avid was Let's Kill All the Lawyers in 1992, directed by Ron Senkowski. By the early 1990s, Avid products began to replace such tools as the Moviola, Steenbeck, and KEM flatbed editors, allowing editors to handle their film creations with greater ease. It was "the biggest shake-up in editing since Melies played around with time and sequences in the early 1900s".
The Avid/1 was based on an Apple Macintosh II computer, with special hardware and software of Avid's own design installed.Īt the NAB show in April 1989, the Avid/1 was publicly introduced. It was founded by a marketing manager from Apollo Computer Inc., Bill Warner, a prototype of their first digital nonlinear editing system (the Avid/1) was shown in a private suite at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in April 1988.