Rise and Fall of the EditDroid

[David Jimerson]

Dovetailing off another thread, @Paul F regaled a tale from when he was on the EditDroid team.

EditDroid was an early computerized non-linear editor, pioneered by LucasFilm, that used laserdiscs for media and was first introduced in the mid-'80s.

Here's a featurette about it which should be really interesting to editors especially.

 

[Paul F]

In the film, they talk about the Editdroid crashing. At 14:18, Edgar talks about the ILM editing department coming to Skywalker ranch to see a demonstration of Editdroid. I put on that demonstration, with John and another editor doing the edits on the droid and a KEM. Right at the beginning of the demonstration, the droid crashed. John did a great job of covering that up and the editors never knew that it crashed.