Martin Horseman
Editor, cook, gardener and gentleman
This is my first post on my new blog Domestic Demigod. I will be writing about my cooking (sorry you can’t taste it via the internet), and garden (you can’t smell that either). I will show you some of the editing I do. I’ve just finished a Wedding Video for a friend and before that a video for the Bradford on Avon Food and Drink Festival.
You may want to know why ‘Groucho’ or ‘Grouch’. When I worked at the Moving Picture Company (MPC) in 1982, there was another Video Editor there called Martin, Martin Hicks. So, as to avoid confusion, I needed a nickname. I had more hair then, round glasses, and just a moustache. I looked a little like Groucho Marx. The name stuck. I have credits on TV programmes as Groucho, Awards as Groucho. At one point more people knew me as Groucho than Martin.
I’m happy with the name, it has done me no harm. Even if younger folk have never heard of the Marx Brothers, or confuse me with The Grouch from Sesame Street. I’ll keep on answering to both Martin and Groucho, even if I have more hair on my chin than on my head.
Domestic Demigod 
From my old memories edit 4 kept up with technology faster then the others. That ADO panel you are “using” in the picture was the first of many upgrades that arrived in the months after opening. (When it arrived initially there was no key channel. WTF?)
We are probably all too old to remember this stuff enough to satisfy any historian of post production.
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And wasn’t it the first digital edit suite in the world after the upgrade?
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Hi Paul, I think the first was Edit 5 at the top of the stairs. It had the small vision mixer developed by the BBC and an Abekas A64. Possibly an A53 as well.
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Edit 5 definitely predated the digitisation of edit 4.
It was almost too early for its own good. The Sony DVR 1000 at the time had no SDI, everything was wired as parallel 4:2:2 distribution.
There were initially only 2 d1 machines (surely this changed later?) but then they did cost well over £100k each.
The BBC mixer was a great bit of technology for the time but was a pig to use partly due to the lack of case and drop shadow on keys. Clients could never understand why putting on titles took so long.
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Ah yes, my mistake, it was a looong time ago!
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