What is Avid Cinema?

Americans shoot billions of feet of home video each year, and hardly any of it is edited. Calculate the number of valuable hours wasted fast-forwarding through endless footage of babies drooling, kids mugging, Gen-Xers slacking, and wedding guests staggering and you’ll see why Apple and Avid have a winner in Avid Cinema, the first truly easy-to-use digital video-editing solution for ordinary, home moviemakers.

Avid Cinema (developed by Avid, but offered exclusively through Apple) is a combination hardware/software product. The software helps you capture and export the video, and offers an editing interface; the hardware is a 7-inch PCI video digitizer card that fits in all PCI Macs and supplies RCA composite (standard video) and S-Video out jacks. To use Avid Cinema with a Performa, you’ll also need the Apple Video System ($109), a separate board with video-in and audio-in jacks that plugs into the Performa’s video slot. Some newer Performas, such as the 6400, include both Avid Cinema and the AVS. AV Power Macs with integrated video in — including the 7500, 7600, and 8500 — don’t need the AVS.

In all, the hardware does an impressive job of simplifying video hookup. Your Mac becomes just another video peripheral: simply connect a camcorder to the input jacks, a VCR into the output jacks, and run video right through the system.

The Avid Cinema board offers hardware compression/decompression for Motion-JPEG. Ideally, you can grab and play back 30 frames-per-second, 320 x 240-pixel video, which can be bumped up via an interpolation scheme to a full-screen 640 x 480 pixels. You probably won’t get all 30 frames per second in or out unless your Mac runs at 180MHz or better, and you’ve tuned your system to maximize video throughput by quitting all other open programs, turning off file sharing, disabling extensions that do things in the background (such as RAMDoubler or Virtual Memory, for example), and making sure there’s plenty of free RAM available. The interpolated full-screen output looks surprisingly good — like a second-generation VHS recording.

It’s the editing software that provides the real ease-of-use kick. Avid Cinema boils down the moviemaking process to just four steps: working with a storyboard, bringing video in, editing the movie, and sending the movie out.

To begin, you pick a storyboard template. Templates for common life-cycle experiences — from birthday to vacation to wedding, as well as school and office events — make it relatively simple to organize your raw material. The templates are relentlessly conventional and narrow-minded, as are the event choices — how come there’s a “Christmas Holiday” storyboard, but no Kwanzaa or Hanukkah? — but this is the feature that may well be the most popular with folks who just want to get their videos made without reinventing the cinematic narrative basics.

The next step is to grab the video footage, which is straightforward enough, as long as you have enough hard disk space to store it all; a finished 10-minute video occupies about 500MB. The third step, editing the movie, takes place in a stripped-down, four-track, editing timeline that is reminiscent of an ancestral version of Adobe Premiere. This is where you piece together the clips according to the storyboard, adding music, narration, titles, and some basic transitional effects such as wipes and dissolves. Finally, you dump the finished product to tape, CD-ROM, or a standalone QuickTime movie.

Avid Cinema’s tabbed interface, simplified feature set, extensive support for drag-and-drop, and quick response makes movie production about as easy as it can be. Even newbies will be able to rough out most productions in less than an hour. The product is pitched particularly well to kids who want to hone their Spielberg talents — in fact, Apple’s first public demo of Avid Cinema was conducted by a 9-year-old.

The flip side of this extreme ease-of-use is that Avid Cinema is a poor choice for serious moviemaking and learning about moviemaking. Among its many, many shortcomings as a professional tool: you can’t add additional video, audio, or effects tracks for multilayered movies; it’s not compatible with Adobe Premiere plug-ins or Adobe Photoshop filters, so wild special effects aren’t possible; you can’t apply custom compression settings to your movies; there’s no external device control for automatically starting and stopping a camcorder; SMPTE time code, the industry-standard method of numbering and tracking video frames, isn’t supported; the storyboard templates aren’t really suitable for business or creative needs; and the video quality, while excellent for a less than-$500 product, doesn’t meet industrial, much less pro, standards. Anyone with artistic or professional ambitions should look at packages from miro, Radius, or Truevision instead.

Does that mean Avid Cinema is the training wheels without the bike? Only if you’re a video snob who can’t stand the idea that people might want a simple, foolproof, and unpretentious way to edit their movies. Videoheads beware — Avid Cinema is digital video for the rest of us.

Anzovin, Steve. (February 1997). Avid Cinema 1.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 74-75).

Download Avid Cinema for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.6

Compatibility notes

Requires:
A Macintosh with Mac OS 7.6.1 and an Avid Cinema PCI card installed.

Avid Cinema 1.1.3

Released:     July 2, 1997
Avid Cinema 1.1.3 replaces all earlier versions of Avid Cinema,
except for version 1.1.2 which is identical to 1.1.3.

Depending on which Macintosh computer you have, you will need either
"Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 54xx-64xx.img" or "Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 75xx-85xx.img".
You do not need to download both of these files. Follow these
guidelines to determine which file to download:

* If you have a Power Macintosh or Performa 54xx, 64xx, or 6360,
download the "Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 54xx-64xx.img" file.

* If you have a Power Macintosh 7500, 7600, or 8500, download the
"Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 75xx-85xx.img" file.

* If you have a Power Macintosh 5500, 6500, or 8600, you must install
1.1.3 from the 1.1.3 Installation CD which includes an update to
7.6.1. This CD includes additional files necessary to run Avid Cinema
on these platforms and is available when you purchase the 1.1.3 kit.

This software consists of a Disk Copy compressed image, which requires
Disk Copy 6.1 or later to use. Download this software to your hard drive
and then double-click it to use it. Disk Copy is available in the
Utilities folder.

From the Read Me included with this software:

Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update README

The following contains important information regarding
installation of the Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update, fixes/changes
from previous versions of the software, and information
about Macintosh platforms and system software you need to
have in order to upgrade to this version of Avid Cinema.

IMPORTANT!!!!
You must be running Mac OS 7.6.1 on your system before
installing Avid Cinema 1.1.3.  Avid Cinema 1.1.3 does not
support versions of Mac OS earlier than 7.6.1.  Customers
with 7.5.3 or 7.5.5 should use Avid Cinema version 1.1 or
1.1.1 which has the same features as the 1.1.3 version.  Mac
OS version 7.6 is not supported with any version of Avid
Cinema.

Existing customers with Performa and Power Macintosh models
5400, 6400, 6360, 7500, 7600/132 and 8500 can use this
internet method to upgrade to 1.1.3.  Customers with Power
Macintosh 5500, 6500/225, 6500/ 250, 8600 models must
install 1.1.3 from the 1.1.3 Installation CD which includes
an update to 7.6.1.  This CD includes additional files
necessary to run Avid Cinema on these new platforms and is
available when you purchase the 1.1.3 kit.
Note:  Customers who purchased Creative Studio 6500/275
machines configured with Avid Cinema version 1.1.2 do not
need to update to version 1.1.3.  These software versions
have the same functionality.

New Functionality in 1.1.3
Avid Cinema version 1.1.3 supports Mac OS 7.6.1.  Existing
Cinema customers should run this version of Cinema if they
want to work with 7.6.1.  Customers who purchased the
Creative Studio 6500/275 which is configured with Cinema
version 1.1.2 do not need to upgrade to 1.1.3 because 1.1.2
supports Mac OS 7.6.1.

The 1.1.3 version also corrects an audio level problem with
versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.1.1.  Previously when sending movies
out to tape the volume on the tape may have recorded lower
than expected.  This required you to have to turn up the
volume on your television in order to hear your videotape. 
Version 1.1.3 corrects this and the volumes will be higher
when you send your movie out to tape.  Customers with
Creative Studio 6500/275 machines configured with Avid
Cinema version 1.1.2 do not need to update to version 1.1.3
for this fix.

The 1.1.3 version also fixes a problem with versions 1.0,
1.1, 1.1.1 when using non-local number formats which
displayed incorrect characters in the "Disk Space Remaining"
area in the Bring Video In Tab.

Customers running versions of the Mac OS earlier than 7.6.1
must upgrade to 7.6.1 first, before upgrading to Avid Cinema
1.1.3.

Installing the Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update:

The compressed "Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update" file you
downloaded contains 3 items:
*    The Avid Cinema 1.1.3 application
*    The Avid Cinema extension 
*    These README instructions

These files do not have a built-in installer, and you must
manually replace your old Cinema application and extension
with these new files.  
To do this:
1)  Open your hard drive and open the applications folder.
2)  Locate the Avid Cinema folder.
3)  Drag the new version of the Avid Cinema application
    (round colored icon) over the Avid Cinema folder until it is
    highlighted, and release the mouse.  You will get a dialog
    asking you if you want to replace the existing version. 
    Choose .
4)  Open your hard drive and locate the System Folder.
5)  Drag the new version of the Avid Cinema Extension over
    the System Folder.  You will get a dialog asking you if it's
    OK to place this in the Extensions folder.  Choose . 
    You will then get another dialog asking you if you want to
    replace the existing version in the extensions folder. 
    Choose .
6)  Restart
7)  Launch Avid Cinema
    Note:  If you had made an alias for your older version of
    Avid Cinema on your desktop, this alias will no longer work
    and you will have to make a new one.

Avid Cinema 1.1.3 replaces all earlier versions of Avid Cinema,
except for version 1.1.2 which is identical to 1.1.3.

Depending on which Macintosh computer you have, you will need either
"Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 54xx-64xx.img" or "Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 75xx-85xx.img".
You do not need to download both of these files. Follow these
guidelines to determine which file to download:

* If you have a Power Macintosh or Performa 54xx, 64xx, or 6360,
download the "Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 54xx-64xx.img" file.

* If you have a Power Macintosh 7500, 7600, or 8500, download the
"Z-Avid Cin 1.1.3 75xx-85xx.img" file.

* If you have a Power Macintosh 5500, 6500, or 8600, you must install
1.1.3 from the 1.1.3 Installation CD which includes an update to
7.6.1. This CD includes additional files necessary to run Avid Cinema
on these platforms and is available when you purchase the 1.1.3 kit.

This software consists of a Disk Copy compressed image, which requires
Disk Copy 6.1 or later to use. Download this software to your hard drive
and then double-click it to use it. Disk Copy is available in the
Utilities folder.

From the Read Me included with this software:

Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update README

The following contains important information regarding
installation of the Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update, fixes/changes
from previous versions of the software, and information
about Macintosh platforms and system software you need to
have in order to upgrade to this version of Avid Cinema.

IMPORTANT!!!!
You must be running Mac OS 7.6.1 on your system before
installing Avid Cinema 1.1.3.  Avid Cinema 1.1.3 does not
support versions of Mac OS earlier than 7.6.1.  Customers
with 7.5.3 or 7.5.5 should use Avid Cinema version 1.1 or
1.1.1 which has the same features as the 1.1.3 version.  Mac
OS version 7.6 is not supported with any version of Avid
Cinema.

Existing customers with Performa and Power Macintosh models
5400, 6400, 6360, 7500, 7600/132 and 8500 can use this
internet method to upgrade to 1.1.3.  Customers with Power
Macintosh 5500, 6500/225, 6500/ 250, 8600 models must
install 1.1.3 from the 1.1.3 Installation CD which includes
an update to 7.6.1.  This CD includes additional files
necessary to run Avid Cinema on these new platforms and is
available when you purchase the 1.1.3 kit.
Note:  Customers who purchased Creative Studio 6500/275
machines configured with Avid Cinema version 1.1.2 do not
need to update to version 1.1.3.  These software versions
have the same functionality.

New Functionality in 1.1.3
Avid Cinema version 1.1.3 supports Mac OS 7.6.1.  Existing
Cinema customers should run this version of Cinema if they
want to work with 7.6.1.  Customers who purchased the
Creative Studio 6500/275 which is configured with Cinema
version 1.1.2 do not need to upgrade to 1.1.3 because 1.1.2
supports Mac OS 7.6.1.

The 1.1.3 version also corrects an audio level problem with
versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.1.1.  Previously when sending movies
out to tape the volume on the tape may have recorded lower
than expected.  This required you to have to turn up the
volume on your television in order to hear your videotape. 
Version 1.1.3 corrects this and the volumes will be higher
when you send your movie out to tape.  Customers with
Creative Studio 6500/275 machines configured with Avid
Cinema version 1.1.2 do not need to update to version 1.1.3
for this fix.

The 1.1.3 version also fixes a problem with versions 1.0,
1.1, 1.1.1 when using non-local number formats which
displayed incorrect characters in the "Disk Space Remaining"
area in the Bring Video In Tab.

Customers running versions of the Mac OS earlier than 7.6.1
must upgrade to 7.6.1 first, before upgrading to Avid Cinema
1.1.3.

Installing the Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update:

The compressed "Avid Cinema 1.1.3 Update" file you
downloaded contains 3 items:
*    The Avid Cinema 1.1.3 application
*    The Avid Cinema extension 
*    These README instructions

These files do not have a built-in installer, and you must
manually replace your old Cinema application and extension
with these new files.  
To do this:
1)  Open your hard drive and open the applications folder.
2)  Locate the Avid Cinema folder.
3)  Drag the new version of the Avid Cinema application
    (round colored icon) over the Avid Cinema folder until it is
    highlighted, and release the mouse.  You will get a dialog
    asking you if you want to replace the existing version. 
    Choose .
4)  Open your hard drive and locate the System Folder.
5)  Drag the new version of the Avid Cinema Extension over
    the System Folder.  You will get a dialog asking you if it's
    OK to place this in the Extensions folder.  Choose . 
    You will then get another dialog asking you if you want to
    replace the existing version in the extensions folder. 
    Choose .
6)  Restart
7)  Launch Avid Cinema
    Note:  If you had made an alias for your older version of
    Avid Cinema on your desktop, this alias will no longer work
    and you will have to make a new one.

 

Avid Cinema 1.1.5

Released:     October 24, 1997
Requires:
Mac OS 7.6.1 or later and an Avid Cinema PCI card.
Description:
Avid Cinema 1.1.5 replaces all earlier versions of
Avid Cinema.

This software consists of a self-extracting archive. To use,
download it to your hard drive and then double-click it to
decompress the software.

From the Read Me included with this software:

Avid Cinema version 1.1.5 Web Update Readme

This Readme explains who should use the Avid Cinema 1.1.5
Update, what changes are included in this update, and how to
install it over the Web.

Who should use the Avid Cinema 1.1.5 Update?

The Avid Cinema 1.1.5 Update is for all Avid Cinema users.
If you are running:

* Avid Cinema 1.1.3 - You should upgrade to version 1.1.5 so
that you can resave movies in electronic file format (such
as Internet/WWW) without renaming them, or upgrade to MacOS
8.0.

* Avid Cinema 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2 - You should upgrade to
MacOS 7.6.1 or 8.0 and Avid Cinema 1.1.5 to take advantage
of the revisions in recent versions of the product.

* Avid Cinema 1.0 and you plan to use the Avid Cinema 1.1.5
Update, you need to download Avid Cinema 1.1 from the Web
and install it first. 

IMPORTANT NOTE FOR 5500/6500 USERS:  Before installing the
Avid Cinema 1.1.5 Update on a Power Macintosh 5500 or 6500,
you need to have installed Avid Cinema from the CD included
in the Avid Cinema 1.1.3 standalone kit.  Installing Avid
Cinema from version 1.1.1 of the standalone kit will not
install the files necessary for the 5500 or 6500 to run Avid
Cinema.  The 1.1.5 Update will only work on Power Macintosh
5500 or 6500 machines if you have previously done a FULL
install of 1.1.3, or if Avid Cinema was preinstalled by
Apple on these machines.

Revisions in Avid Cinema 1.1.5

*  Avid Cinema 1.1.5 supports MacOS 7.6.1 and 8.0.   

*  You can now resave a movie in electronic file format
(eg., Internet/WWW) without renaming it.  

*  In the Bring Video In Tab,  a stop sign no longer appears
in place of the camcorder icon.

*  For users of Avid Cinema 1.1 and 1.1.1, version 1.1.5
also corrects the following problems:

     -   Previously, when sending movies out to tape, the
volume on the tape
     may have recorded lower than expected.  This required
you to have to 
     turn up the volume on your television in order to hear
your videotape.  
     The volume will now be higher when you send your movie
out to tape.  

     -   Non-local number formats now display correct
characters in the 
     Disk Space Remaining area in the Bring Video In Tab.

Installing the Avid Cinema 1.1.5 Update

The compressed Avid Cinema 1.1.5 Update file is a
self-extracting file.  When you double click this file, a
dialog box prompts you to name the folder and choose a
location in which to save it.  Choose your desktop, and keep
the default name for this file.  

The new Avid Cinema 1.1.5 Update folder contains:
*    The Avid Cinema 1.1.5 application
*    This 1.1.5 Web Update Readme
* The Avid Cinema Guide (online help file)

To install the Avid Cinema 1.1.5 Update:

1)  Locate the previous Avid Cinema folder.
2)  Drag the new version (1.1.5) of the Avid Cinema
application file and the Avid Cinema Guide file over the
previous Avid Cinema folder until it is highlighted, and
release the mouse.  Two dialogs ask if you want to replace
the existing versions.  Click OK on each dialog.
3)  Launch Avid Cinema.

Note:  If you have an alias for a previous version of Avid
Cinema, this alias no longer works and you should make a new
one.

IMPORTANT:  To use Apple Video Player after installing Avid
Cinema, you must set your monitor's resolution to 640 x 480
and thousands or millions of colors.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver