How a Training Program Helped MessageMakers Bring Lansing Its 1st Video Editing System

How a Training Program Helped MessageMakers Bring Lansing Its 1st Video Editing System

As part of the celebration of 35 years of MessageMakers, we're telling the stories of 35 great projects throughout our history. This is one of them.

Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s, video editing was far more physical. Tapes and all. Terry Terry, our president, used to drive from Lansing to Chicago, rent a suite for the night shift at the Chicago Editing Center, and edit video all night. (It was cheaper. Bootstraps and all that.)

One day Terry attended a Cruse Communications trade show here in Lansing and came across one of the first computer-operated video editing systems (the EA3X Videotape Editing Control Center), created by a company called Cezar International. Bob Cezar was there, demonstrating this new editing system. With this system, a computer interfaced between two pneumatic decks, allowing the editor to move clips through time, program specific changes, make automatic edits, and in general to do more complex editing. Nothing like that seemed to exist at the time.

As Terry talked with Bob and became excited about the possibilities, an important question arose:

“What have you got in terms of instruction on how to use this thing?”

His eyes widened. “We don’t.”

Now, Terry is an instructional designer, and as such, he appreciates the importance of good training in making systems effective. Bob invited Terry out to California to talk about working together. A month later, they met up for a drink and struck a deal: Cezar International would trade two of the video editing systems for an instructional program on how to use the equipment.

MessageMakers developed an instructional program using an interactive video tape and an illustrated manual to give users practice in using the system as well as providing reference material for later use. Users could feel comfortable that they'd mastered the basics once they reached the end of the interactive videotape's activities.

For us, the outcome of the project was clear: we really learned how the machine worked, and we now had the first independently-owned video editing system in mid-Michigan.