A man slid back his chair, donning a beanie as he rose to his feet. He picked up his wallet off the desk in front of him and slipped it into his pocket. The room's fluoro flicked off, and he closed the door behind him. A black box whirred and crunched quietly. The green glow of something or other on its front panel VFD reflected elongated off the smooth surface of the desk. The humans were knocking off work for the day, the machines were beginning.
Following the bankruptcy of
Commodore in 1994, German
MacroSystem found themselves about to lose the hardware platform their nonlinear video editing software was designed for. They responded by developing their own replacement for the
Amiga, the
DraCo. The original DraCo was a tower-housed
Motorola 68060 system tuned specifically to optimise throughput of raw video. A key difference from the Amiga was the lack of Commodore's
AGA chipset, the video being handled instead by an Altais graphics card.
AmigaOS 3.1 was patched for the modified hardware, but ran out of standard Amiga ROM. The DraCo motherboard was revised, and the case switched to a cube form factor, realising the product's relaunch as the DraCo Vision.
At the beginning of 1997, MacroSystem presented to the world another winner, the product that would really kick-start the digital video editing revolution: the Casablanca. The Casablanca 1, or "Classic", again was M86k based, with 16MB of RAM. The two front-accessible drive bays housed a floppy disk drive and CD-ROM drive or removable SCSI HDD cradle.
Interfaces:
- IEEE-1394 "FireWire"/"i.LINK", 4-circuit alpha (optional DV module)
- SCART out
- Audio out, stereo RCA jacks
- SVHS out
- Audio in, stereo RCA jacks (also on front)
- SVHS in (also on front)
- SCSI, DB25 female (My manual lists this as DB50, but shows DB25 in the diagram)
- RS-232 serial, DB25 male
- RS-232, DB9 male
- AT, 5 pin DIN female
In the year 2000, the Avio and Kron Casablanca units were released, adding DVD burners, an OS update, SmartMedia Card slots, and USB ports, and doing away with the floppy drive. Differences between the Avio and Kron were largely cosmetic while MacroSystem experimented with panel designs. Both units got the power button moved to the right hand side, a design decision reversed in the next model. The 2002 Prestige saw all inputs gain easy access on the front panel, and the lockable hard drive tray could now be slid out without having to flip anything open.
MacroSystem made a big decision in 2004, a year before Apple would, and changed processor architecture. The move to x86 was a "quantum leap" in editing speed according to MacroSystem. The completely revolutionary Casablanca Solitaire was powered by a 3.2GHz Pentium 4. It sported 300GB of internal storage, 1024MB of RAM, dual-layer DVD burner, and touch-sensitive controls. The Solitaire even broke away from the VTR stereotype look and returned almost to the DraCo Vision's cube shape but with a glass front.
The Claro was the next Casablanca member to join the family, and not just its own family. From March 2005, an affordable standalone digital NLE began reaching home-users. As part of its "I'm not that professional" stance, the Claro used 3.5mm audio jacks rather than RCAs. Unlike the Solitaire, it was just another black box in appearance. Notably, its drive bays were side by side, rather than stacked as in previous units.
The Renommee then added a flap to the front card slot of the Prestige, as well as a new 3.0GHz x86 processor. The Gymnos, like its Kron predecessor, lacked front panel inputs and bore only a card slot. Two portable Casablanca systems were released, the T3000 and the T3000 Pro "Liberty". Both were single hard drive Toshiba notebooks, still with DVD burners. The Pro edition incorporated a swivelling touchscreen. Semi-professional support continued with the Louvre evolving from the Claro. The Enterprise model replaced the old VFD of the Classic with an LCD panel, and set the standard for the S-series currently in production.