What was EditDroid?

The EditDroid was developed by a company called Lucasfilm, which was found by filmmaker, George Lucas in 1971, along with Droid Works and Convergence Corporation who formed a joint venture company. Lucasfilm is best known and responsible for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises. The company was active through the mid-80's up until the early 90's and it attempted to move from analog editing to digital editing. In 1983, editing was a long and time -consuming process. George Lucas set this team the challenge for improving the editing stage of filmmaking, and after investing $40 million and three years of work, the EditDroid was created. 

The EditDroid was a computerised analog non-linear editing system. It first debuted at the National Association and Broadcasters 62nd Annual meeting which took place in Las Vegas in 1994. There was also another editing tool called the Montage Picture Processor that the event, which was it's competitor for all of it's active years. The EditDroid was never sold commercially and The Droid Works closed in 1987 and this led to the redevelopment for the EditDroid over the next 7 years. In 1993, the software was sold to Avid Technology and overall only 24 EditDroid systems where ever produced. 

The system was Laserdisc based, which meant that it counted on several laserdisc players and a database that would queue the clips up ready for the laserdisc players to play the clips in the most efficient way. There were 3 screens attached to the system, one was a Sun-1 computer display, another was a small video preview monitor and the final one was a large rear-projected monitor, which contained the cut and was controlled by the custom controller. The controller was called the TouchPad and had a KEM-style shuttle knob, a trackball (very similar to a mouse), and various buttons that included LED labels that changed in function depending on what the system was doing at the time. The EditDroid introduced the timeline as well at digital picture icons to identify what each clip was.