MEDIA 100

MEDIA 100: FROM BLOOD SECRETS TO 844/X & Xi

By Carol Patton

In Blood Secrets, an article in the June 1994 issue of Videography Magazine, John Molinari, the President and CEO of Media 100, Inc., wrote about a band of engineers that set out to change the video landscape. "Simplicity," he wrote, "made possible by high quality and the use of open and completely digital architectures are our blood secrets…Much of this future calls upon new technology and new technology creators with thinking that radically departs from the once-incontrovertible approaches defined by decades-old brand names. We observe a whole new landscape emerging."

Not even ten years later, much of that future has changed and the new landscape has emerged. Imagine catches up with Media 100, Inc., our high tech neighbors in Marlboro, MA, still lead by its fearless visionary leader, John Molinari, who is also said to be charismatic and enthusiastic. The Media 100 hot topics are 844/X and its newer less expensive version 844/Xi, which Media 100 people can get for under $20,000. People are starting to buy it; high profile projects are starting to be completed on it. And evidently the Xi is affordable for anybody doing professional work. No, it's not for the hobbyists or those just having fun. But for people who do want their equipment to deliver.

Media 100 prides their company as a manufacturer of computer products, of being a customer-driven organization that strives to build products that are loved by its users. The company encourages risk taking, especially if it means being able to solve an important technical issue or innovation in areas that are overlooked by others. "We question the status quo. While other companies have spent millions trying to perfect "dual-stream" editing solutions, we built a product that shattered the original A/B-roll metaphor of editing that came from tape-based editing of the 1960's," said Mike Savello, Vice President, Corporate Communications, Media 100 Inc., answering questions for IMAGINE.
In 1998, Media 100's main product, also called Media 100, was a huge hit. Their users numbered about 25,000. Most of their customers used Media 100 in conjunction with Adobe After Effects. There were a couple of major reasons for this. First, they all wanted to create interesting visual content by compositing multiple layers of video and graphics data, thus the attraction to After Effects. Second, Media 100 had a reputation for being an open system and in fact was the perfect complement to After Effects. Because Media 100's solution was QuickTime native, it could pass data back and forth to After Effects quickly and easily. The only downside to this workflow was speed. Media 100, a nonlinear editing solution, was real time. You played video in real time. You edited video in real time.

Conversely, After Effects required you to render - a process that could take minutes, hours or even days depending on the complexity of the image you were working on. Also, moving back and forth between applications created a workflow bottleneck that sapped creative ideas. Media 100 saw all this as a huge opportunity: to take editing, inherently real-time, and integrate it with compositing, but make the combination real time. Thus Media 100 kicked off what would become a 4-year development effort costing over $30 million to do something that no other company had ever done - produce an editing system that composited layers of video and graphics vertically as quickly as editing a single layer horizontally.
The original business model is still on track. Media 100 sales have been steady; and the 844/X and Xi have won every major product award that there is to win. The major sales driver is productivity and creative freedom. Many customers can now create content that they wouldn't have even thought about creating before 844/X, because they wouldn't have had the time to render.

"This is our value proposition," Mike Savello, told IMAGINE. "We are committed to rapidly developing 844/X. In support of that, we recently made three-product announcements. We announced HDX Technology for 844/X that will add 10-bit broadcast-quality HD format support for under $15,000. We also introduced The Finishing Release, our Version 2.0 software for 844/X that adds a long list of improvements to the product in the areas of editing, compositing and audio postproduction. And we also rolled out the world first real-time, multi-stream Gaussian Blur - the ultimate finishing effect. Gaussian Blur is used by creative types for creating interesting glow effects, softening mattes, giving images a "film" look, or creating depth-of-field effects for highlighting objects in the video. These important product advances will be on display at our booth at NAB in Las Vegas in April of this year," according to Savello.

Media 100 employs about 125 people mostly in their corporate headquarters in Marlboro, MA. In addition they have sales offices in the UK, France and Germany. The company is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol MDEA. Its traditional competitors are Avid Technology, Inc. and Discreet (now a part of Autodesk). Charter Communications in Connecticut and Time Warner Cable in Maine are
844/X customers/users in New England. At least 4 more customers are to be added to this list within the next 30 days. Media 100 continues to develop its original dual-stream products: Media 100 i for the Mac and iFinish for the PC.

Ireland's TG4 is the latest in a growing roster of worldwide broadcasters to purchase the 844/X for creating in-house promotions. The state-run television station recently installed 844/X in its promotions department and is already leveraging the performance and quality of the 10-bit system to complete projects in record time. This not only means greater productivity but also greater freedom to experiment creatively with the work they produce.

"With 844/X, Media 100 has really looked at what the industry wants and needs and has developed a system perfectly tailored to layer-intensive promo creation," said John Higgins, Chief Engineer at TG4. "We evaluated a number of well-known editing and compositing systems and concluded that 844/X is the only future-proof solution available today. We see Media 100 very much as a long-term business partner, and 844/X as a system with a clear development path that will grow with us as our business evolves."
John Molinari founded Media 100 in 1992 back when it was a division of Data Translation. In 1992, the NLE marketplace was still emerging. John Molinari has been involved in this industry since it started. It was his original vision that drove the initial success of the company. Originally, Molinari served as vice president of sales and marketing of Data Translation, Inc. - the company that initially funded the development and distribution of the original Media 100 product line. In more than a decade at Data Translation, he led the company's entry into image processing and in 1989 established the Multimedia Group that developed Media 100. In 1996, the Multimedia Group separated from Data Translation, becoming a separate, public company with John Molinari becoming its CEO.

For more information about Media 100, visit www.media100.com. Imagine is grateful to Mike Savello for his assistance in preparing this article for our readers.

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