Well, maybe not too long ago in relation to some of the other Avid editors out there. I made my first short film in the early 70's when I was still in grade school. From that point on, I was hooked on film. In the early 80s I went to college for film production and discovered video. Editing video was so much better than editing Super-8 Sound film - Super-8 sound records audio about 18 frames offset from the image. It was also during this time that I had my first exposure to computers. After college, I went to work for a local access cable TV station. Although I had been continuously making films since grade school, this was where I honed my skills as producer/shooter/editor. I kept my hands in computers as well, starting with an Amiga and an Apple II, then moving up to a Macintosh Plus. Around the same time I started hearing about this company that enabled you to edit video on a computer. A colleague even had a demo video of the system. It showed how the "The Visitor" was edited without having to wait for shuttling or recording from source to master. For me, the biggest deal about this computer-based editing system was that you could actually insert a shot at the beginning of a program without having to re-edit everything that followed. In the early 90's, my friend AJ, who was one of the original Avid trainers, told me about an opening in the support group. I was employee 102 at Avid and was one of the original 5 telephone support reps when Avid Media Composer 3.x came out (during the "Dion Dynasty"). At that point in Avid's history there was no formal training for support reps, we were given parts and manuals and told to build the system, learn it and begin taking calls after two weeks. While answering support calls, I met a lot very cool editors and a few who liked to use expletives when asking for help. After doing support for a year, I transitioned to Corporate Editor and Tradeshow Support. I was the editor who cut the first Avid marketing video ever to be finished on an Avid system - not my favorite project. We had to re-shoot the whole thing with flat lighting because the Project Manager was worried that any contrast would reveal too much in the way of JPEG artifacts. The properly lit shots looked 100% better than what we ended up with. After moving to Avid's marketing team, I began collaborating with another editor from Avid's DC office. Because of an NAB video we cut, video mixdowns became a necessary feature in the Media Composer. At the time we were using a console command to edit precomputes into a sequence. This was cool, but because of the object count, it took about 5 minutes to play after clicking the play button. The great thing about being an editor at Avid - if you had a problem, ask an engineer. One of the engineers told us a trick on how to sever connections to all the objects connected to the render file. After that, the sequence played immediately. During those years everything was done inside the Avid walls by Avid employees, including editing, music composing and sound design/mixing. At the end of the 90's I left Avid and started a production company with the editor I had collaborated with for so many years while at Avid. I met a lot of great people while at Avid, most I still consider good friends.