The breakthrough was not just technical, but it was also economic. And it was significant in the sense that for the first time, the media itself, and the equipment that you were using to work with the media were not free, but insignificant costs. That Final Cut Pro was using off-the-shelf computers, it was not using any proprietary hardware, and the media is digital media, so you can make as many copies as you want just by pressing a key, clone this. You have to have hard drives and places to store it, but compared to working with film, the experience of working digitally is that it's free, that that's your feeling. With the Avid, the equipment itself was very expensive, because it was all proprietary at that time, proprietary hardware, and a significant thing. So you thought carefully about how many Avid systems are we going to use. Typically, two, but sometimes three, sometimes four. But that's a significant cost.

With Final Cut, with Apple system, given the budgets of film, this was an 80-million-dollar film, it was another couple of thousand dollars to buy a new Mac Pro and a monitor, and there you were, connect it up. What the offshoot of this was it was very easy for me as an editor to allow my assistants to have practice editing. Whereas in the old, old days of film, you could do that, but the film itself was very expensive to print, and the equipment, the Moviolas and the KEMs, were many tens of thousands of dollars to buy. In those days, you know? What it would be today is $30,000-$40,000 for each editing station. So now, by almost an order... More than an order of magnitude, these costs had come down, and a threshold was passed as a result of that. That you no longer had to think economically about, 'Oh, I have to get another print of that', to allow that person to experiment. You just make a copy of it, and then you no longer have to really think, because people could even take a hard drive and use their little clamshell iMac to edit with. It was inherent in the situation, but it was revelatory to experience that shift. Now that we don't even think about that anymore, because everything is like that. But at that time, that was one of the first big speedbumps that suddenly, we got over and on the other side of that we were in a slightly different world where you thought about things in a different way.