[Ted Kendall]

The F1 was intended first and last as a consumer device, the professional product being the 1610, which was expected to be paired with a U-matic. However, with the 1610 rig at ca. £20,000 and the same quality of recording available for £1,000 with the F1, professional recording engineers and the BBC flocked to the latter, some recording F1 on U-matic for greater reliability. The only fly in the ointment was that seamless editing was impossible, as the allocation of data blocks for error rate robustness spread words across frame boundaries, unlike the 1610 which could be edited on a video editor, if 1/30th second resolution was tight enough for your purposes, Most used the DAE-1100 editor, which allowed practically infinite resolution - as long as you could find your edit point precisely enough with the 8-bit mono scrub wheel. Once you were happy with that, you hit "preview", which was the cue for anything up to two minutes of spooling, rolling back and arguing between the source and assembly U-matics as they got into step. If you were happy with preview, you then hit "edit" and away it went again and printed it. You then went as far as the next edit and repeated the process. Mind-numbing, especially if you failed to concentrate as the preview went past and incurred another two minutes' wait to hear the edit. The advent of Sadie was like being let out of jail, once I'd had a crash course in GUIs, which I had avoided like the plague until then...