Bill Warner, the man who created AVID - Part I

Today I have the great pleasure of posting Part I of a conversation I had with an incredibly successful person and a wonderful human being. engineer, entrepreneur and investor, Bill Warner., Founder of Avid Technology.

A graduate of MIT, Bill founded Avid Technology in 1987. With a small team of hardware and software engineers, Mr. Warner created the tool that radically altered the way movies, television, and all dynamic media are created, Avid Media Composer.

Avid had already started to revolutionize the publishing world when I met Bill in 1992. Media Composer was evolving rapidly, making strong strides in the world of high-end commercial post production. After watching a demo, I became obsessed with the idea of ​​”editing on a computer” and not long after I found myself helping a friend and fellow film editor Steve Cohen, working on one of the first long-form Hollywood productions to be released. digitally cut on the Avid. The project meant a lot to the still young company, and Bill and several other key players from the original team flew in from the East Coast to provide support, get feedback, and generally observe how we were coming up with a new digital publishing workflow.

The rest, as they say, is history. The following year the conversion to digital publication began. In 1993, Bill and And Avid received an Emmy from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the development of Avid Media Composer. In 1999, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Avid an Oscar® for his success in transforming the film editing process. Bill accepted the award on the worldwide broadcast.

But for Bill Warner this was just the beginning.

In 1992 he founded Wildfire Communications and designed the first speech-based electronic secretary, which he sold to Orange, PLC. in 2000. Since then he has shared his time between working with nonprofits and a focus on helping entrepreneurs. Additionally, he has acted as an angel investor for thirteen startups and three non-profit organizations. Startups are in areas as diverse as 3D animation, email-based blogging, event networking, ad insertion for online videos, visual environments for nightclubs, shared calendars, and compensation design and management. Non-profit organizations are involved with historical / current mapping of Boston for planning purposes; a film school and open source mechanical design approach for new vehicles for people with disabilities. Recent angel investments include sparkcloud, marginize, posterous, and zelfy.

He is also working on a book on entrepreneurship called “Intent and Invention.” Explore how to optimize the connection between what drives an entrepreneur and how they make the inventions that emerge from that drive.

Mr. Warner has been a longtime administrator of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and has taught classes for entrepreneurs through that organization. In 2008, Warner created and co-chaired the MassTLC Innovation 2008 unConference. Now in its third year, the 2010 Innovation 2010 unConference will be held in Boston and has become the annual focal point for the Boston area innovation community. In 2009, MassTLC presented Warner with the Innovation Catalyst Award for its work with startups and the innovation community.

A true renaissance man, over the years, Bill Warner has created these companies:

1975 – Bionic Control Corporation – Designed environmental control systems for people with disabilities. Turn lights on / off, change TV channels using your own whistling ability. 1980 – New England Hand Motorcycles – Manufacture of manual pedal bicycles from 1980 to 1990. 1987 – Avid Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: AVID) – Manufactures video, audio and film editing systems. Public company. 1992 – Wildfire Communications, Inc. – Designed the first speech-based electronic secretary – Sold to Orange in 2000 1999 – FutureBoston, Inc. – Non-profit – designs high resolution mapping systems combining past / present / futures as layers. The city of Boston uses technology. 2002 – Warner Research, LLC – Angel Investment & Software Development Company. He directed the Collaborative Space at Warner Research – shared space for entrepreneurs until 2008. 2006 – Move With Freedom, Inc. – Non-profit organization focused on open source designs of mobility tools for people with disabilities. Move With Freedom soon to put the Morphing Handcycle into production. Anything Goes Investing – personal angel investment fund focused on new entrepreneurs, new technologies and new markets 2010 – Anything Goes Lab – An acceleration lab focused on helping new entrepreneurs and new teams help each other and design products and companies that align intentions of founders with the needs of the market.

Larry Jordan: So where did you get the idea for the Avid?

Bill Warner: Well, I loved photography and I always loved photography. From the age of six I had a Brownie camera and then the Instamatic camera. And I remember that moment when I bought a Nikon FTn. It was like graduating from college and I was 15 or something like that. And it was a great thing.

And then when video cameras got small enough that you could buy and transport them, something that would be huge today, but for $ 2,000, which would go to the side and the camera separate. I bought one of these things. And I started recording videos.

And then I realized: “You need to edit this material.” And the question then was, how do you edit?

Me too; we always had family vacations at my parents’ house in Palm Springs. They were retired and lived in Palm Springs. The whole family arrived. And I came with my video camera. I started recording videos of my nieces and nephews.

And once I decided that I would make this video called “Take the money and run.” And we wrote it and we did parts for all the kids and I directed and filmed it. And it was a great production: the whole family.

And then I went into post-production, in front of the fake fireplace at my parents’ house in Palm Springs. And I sat there with the camera deck connected to their home deck, which means they couldn’t watch TV the whole time. And it took hours and hours and hours and hours and hours, and of course I couldn’t dial in the right places and I couldn’t get it all right.

Larry Jordan: Clean issues?

Bill Warner: Oh no. Forget it. And being anywhere in the stadium was a good thing, and you keep going.

Larry Jordan: Pure frustration.

Bill Warner: Absolutely.

So I made this video called “Take the money and run.” And I have to tell you that we just saw it and I’m still glad to see that. And it happened to our entire family.

And it was that experience, which was so difficult to edit, that made me feel like something has to be better than what I have.

Larry Jordan: And how did you proceed from there? How did you get from that idea to, say, prototype?

Bill Warner: Well, there was a great distance between “Take the Money and Run” and the Avid. So, I was making these family videos, and that was wonderful but incredibly difficult to do.

And then at the company I worked for, Apollo Computer, they had a little editing system. So I thought, “Ah. So now, this is going to be good.” So I went and started using their little editing system; Panasonic knob editor. And it was more accurate, but it was still the same pain from linear editing. I was beginning to understand what this linear edit meant. What it really meant was you change your mind, you lose it. I mean, it was really painful. You basically had to keep building and building, and if you ever wanted to go back, forget about it.

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