Lon McQuillin started working in television in the early 1970’s, following a boyhood of making movies with an 8-mm camera. He began as an editor, eventually ending up as a nearly full-time freelance editor at One Pass Video, San Francisco’s pioneering production house. In addition to top-end CMX editing, Lon was one of the few editors in the country to receive training on the CMX-600, the world’s first nonlinear editing system.

Lon founded McQ Productions in 1976 as a video production company. Over the next decade, we produced television programming - including a comedy series for pay cable - commercials, documentaries and educational programs. We've shot on location, and in studios. We've shot single-camera film-style, and multi-camera live and live-to-tape. We’ve shot mainly on tape, but also on film.

Our productions have won numerous awards, including an ITVA Golden Reel and both Gold and Silver awards at the International Film & TV Festival of New York.

In 1983, Lon's book "The Video Production Guide" was published by Howard W. Sams. It quickly became a standard text and reference book for the industry, and went through five printings. In 1986, his book "Computers in Video Production" was published by Knowledge Industry Publications. (As predicted in the foreward, it was obsolete within six months.)

During the 1980's, Lon spent a great amount of time on the lecture circuit, speaking at Video Expos, SMPTE Conferences, North American Television Institute seminars and ITVA conferences. He has spoken in Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Tarrytown and Wellington, New Zealand, among other cities lost in the mist of time and almost-missed airport connections. Thousands of video professionals around the country managed to survive Lon's seminars, and even come away with new insights.

From 1981 to 1983, Lon taught Television Studio Production at the College of San Mateo, which operates its own PBS station, KCSM-TV. He's had the pleasure of watching for his former students' names in credits ever since.

In March 1994, NBC News called on Lon for his comments on the hot topic of the moment, the Michaelangelo computer virus. (He was against it.) The appearance on NBC's Nightly News brought calls from people he hadn't heard from in years.

Today, Lon’s back concentrating on his first love – video editing. While the equipment’s changed dramatically over the years, the basic skills of editing – timing, pacing and flow – remain the same.

We began developing production-related software in 1980, first for the Apple II, then for the IBM PC, and, since 1987, for the Macintosh.

We developed Edit Lister -- by far the best-selling video edit list management software since its initial release in 1984, for both the PC and Macintosh -- and the software for Edit Master, the high-end linear video editing system running on both the PC and Mac, which at its peak had more than 1,000 installations worldwide.

Since the late 1980s, we've concentrated our efforts on software development, on the Mac in particular, creating software initially for our own use, and also for sale to other video producers.

Our MacAnimator-series software was introduced in 1992, and is in use in hundreds of video production facilities around the world. It's been used for creating network logos, commercials, feature film storyboards and much more.

Cutter is in use at some of the world’s most prestigeous production facilities, where it adds hybrid capabilities to nonlinear editing systems. (As per out motto, “sometimes it just makes more sense to edit tape-to-tape.”)

We use all the software we've created on a day-to-day basis, and we're our own most discerning customers. We've been providing production-related software solutions for nearly 20 years, and we're just getting started.

Our basic philosophy is to provide high-quality, low cost video production tools backed by great support to help our customers do their jobs.

We stand behind all our products with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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