Vertical editing.(DV)

In the late '90s, things were going well for Media 100. Along with Avid and Adobe, it was one of the most dominant players in the nonlinear editing market. Sales were strong, and the market was hot. By 2000, in addition to its standard video editing tools, the company was bringing to market an array of products focused on the exciting new area of streaming video, and investors were dazzled by the possibilities.

Unfortunately, when the dot-com bubble burst in the Spring of 2001, that all changed. Over the next two years, sales slumped, market share dropped, and Media 100's stock price, which had reached roughly $40 per share, tumbled to less than a dollar.

Today, the Marlboro, Massachusetts-based company is fighting to regain its lost momentum with an offering that it says defies traditional product category definitions. It's not a streaming product. The company is out of that business. Rather, the new 844/X system is focused on Media 100's traditional video production market. But it doesn't fit neatly into the traditional nonlinear editing category nor into the traditional compositing category. Instead, it blends elements of both types of products, creating a new tool that Media 100 says is urgently needed by a wide variety of users.

Media 100 calls its new 844/X product a real-time, online, vertical editing system. But educating potential customers about what that means has become the company's main challenge.

The goal of the system, explains David Cobosco, Media 100's vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, is to enable editors involved with multi-layer material to work as quickly in the "vertical" direction as a traditional NLE allows them to work in the "horizontal" direction. In other words, it makes it possible for editors to combine multiple layers of video, graphics, and text at the same real-time speed with which they can cut and paste video along a timeline.

While that kind of speed is possible using a high-end, dedicated compositing system such as Discreet's flame, such a system costs upwards of a $100,000 and requires a dedicated compositor. With the introduction of 844/X, Media 100 is striving to put at least some of that power into the hands of video editors working in the broadcast, corporate, and education markets and in small, independent post houses.

However, Cobosco is careful not to suggest that the 844/X is simply a low-cost compositing tool. In fact, he says, 844/X users will still want to create certain elements in Adobe's After Effects just as they will want to create 3D elements in programs such as Alias Systems' Maya. What 844/X does is make it possible to combine those elements into unlimited layers within a video in real time. "We have a lot of the functionality you would find in flame, just as we have much of the functionality you'd find in a nonlinear editing system. But ours are in one box."