EditDroid

The system is LaserDisc-based, as well as digital picture icons to identify raw source clips. Once the entire movie has been edited, an Edit Decision List of marked frames is turned over to a film laboratory where the actual pieces of film are spliced together in the correct order. The EditDroid is obsolete by market standards, as the market for nonlinear editing systems has changed radically since its inception, with computer-based products like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro ranging entirely from the consumer to professional markets. In many respects the EditDroid was a concept demonstration of the future of editing, with a LaserDisc being a good 1980s simulation of what digital access would eventually become, and an editing interface and workflow that was more like today's methods than any of the videotape linear or analog nonlinear products leading up to the Avid/1 in 1990. == Advantages and disadvantages ==

There are numerous advantages of using a digital editing solution over the older analog solutions, such as the Moviola. Not only is it much faster to locate the clips needed, keeping track of what can in some cases amount to a staggering amount of footage, is also much easier digitally. Also, editing film digitally is a non-destructive process, whereas the analog process requires the actual cutting and taping together of pieces of film as well as manual syncing of sound. Aside from the technological advantages of digital editing, in his book In the Blink of an Eye, editor Walter Murch mourns the loss of the older analog solutions. Analog editing requires the editor to frequently move back and forth or scrub in the source material to gain an overview, thus increasing one's familiarity with it. Since undoing an edit is such a laborious process, there is a high incentive to get the best edit cut the first time. This process which is not necessary to the same extent with NLE solutions in which one edit point can be made and undone very quickly. Furthermore, LaserDisc has a fixed resolution, whereas film can be focused to look ideal at any display size. While the LaserDisc format was brought to market in the late 1970s, first with the name of DiscoVision and later as LaserVision, and despite persistent promises from the Music Corporation of America, a cheap method of recording LaserDiscs never surfaced. This lack made it exceedingly difficult and cumbersome to create the needed LaserDiscs for the EditDroid. Also at this time, the storage available on a hard disk was prohibitively small and extremely expensive. Furthermore, many potential customers of the EditDroid were disappointed by the fact that while Lucasfilm Ltd. were the creators of the EditDroid, George Lucas had never in fact used the EditDroid on a movie. This fact stood in contrast to the fact that the EditDroid had been shown with Return of the Jedi clips on numerous occasions at tradeshows and at demonstrations. Lucas eventually used his EditDroids in the early '90s on his series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. ==See also==