World Languages student and Rhode Island native wins fifth Emmy Award for film-editing technology

12/13/2024

Even after winning four Emmy Awards in his illustrious filmmaking and editing career, Cranston, RI, native and Community College of Rhode Island student Thomas Ohanian was still pleasantly surprised to hear his name called for the fifth time this year at the 76th Academy of Television Arts and Sciences ceremony in October.

Ohanian, 65, and former colleagues Ken Goekjian, Joel Swan, and Victor Young won an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award for their development of the Avid Multicamera System, the technology that three decades ago revolutionized editing by leading the transition from film-based linear editing to computer-based digital nonlinear editing. Ohanian’s system remains a dominant technology and product offering in the film industry, allowing film editors to synchronize different camera angles faster and more efficiently, find their footage, make edits, and see the results instantly.

Hired as the eighth employee at Avid in 1989 – just two years after engineering entrepreneur Bill Warner founded the company – Ohanian and his aforementioned team created the technology that changed the filmmaking industry by replacing the process of manually cutting and pasting strips of film with a much faster, simpler technique. The Avid Multicamera System debuted in 1994 and is now one of the industry standards for non-linear editing, particularly in Hollywood film production and broadcast television. Avid’s editing tools were used by all of the 2022 Academy Award-nominated films for best picture and all recordings nominated for record of the year at the 2022 Grammys. 

“It was just a great surprise,” Ohanian said. “My co-inventors and I were really delighted. I don't think any of us had an idea of how big this could get and how pervasive it could be. I’d also say the greatest compliment I ever received was from a famous editor who said to me, ‘You have given me 10 more years on my career because the job, physically, is very, very hard.’

“For somebody who's so decorated, so awarded, to say that to you is amazing. It's great to make an impact at an industry level.”                    

Ohanian spent 12 years at Avid and is has also worked for Signiant, a provider of intelligent file movement software; Cisco Systems; and IBM, where he was the company’s global business development leader. In 2023, he joined Alvarez & Marsal, a global consulting firm, as the director of its media and entertainment practice.

Thirty years since premiering he and his team’s groundbreaking technology, Ohanian remains as busy as ever – and equally eager to learn. This past summer, 38 years since he took foreign language courses at CCRI, he re-enrolled at the college to complete Intermediate Italian I (ITAL2010) as an independent study. While working with Avid in the early ‘90s during the company’s international expansion, Ohanian traveled to Italy every three weeks for nearly two years, developing business colleagues and friendships. The language always intrigued him and CCRI offered the opportunity to continue studying at his own pace.

Once he completes his associate degree, he will transfer to the University of Rhode Island to pursue his bachelor’s degree, which would be his fifth overall; Ohanian, who is also a first-generation college graduate,  earned his Ph.D. in humanities and his master’s in Instructional Technology from Rhode Island, a bachelor’s in Broadcast Engineering from Boston University, and an M.B.A. in Business Administration and Management from URI.

“You never stop learning. You have got to keep learning and moving forward,” he said. “Italian is a beautiful language and everything I had learned had been informal, so I really wanted to learn it formally.”

After taking a summer course online, Ohanian attended an enrollment event at the college, where he met World Languages & Cultures professors Julie Felci and Maria Mansella, who explained which courses he needed to take and how he could transfer them to URI to complete his studies.

“That’s the journey. I’m at the beginning,” he said. “CCRI has been a wonderful experience.

“When you're potentially the oldest student in the class, you could have an inferiority complex, but the fact is that I'm just like any other student. They're going to school and working, I'm going to school and working, and we're all trying to move forward. I’m where I am because of two things – education and hard work. There are no shortcuts. You have to be ready for when the opportunity presents itself.”

Avid’s technological breakthrough in film editing earned Ohanian the first of his two Emmy Awards in 1993 and 1998. In between, he won an Academy Award in 1995 for Scientific and Engineering Achievement and won two additional Emmys in 2019 and 2023. He’s also known for his editing work in the 1998 motion picture Code of Ethics and 1996’s A Question of Trust. In 2018, he published The Making of a Motion Picture Editor, which features interviews with editors who represent 360 Academy Award wins and another 785 nominations. 

This fifth Emmy, Ohanian said, was truly 30 years in the making, and the multiple Emmy victories represent the evolution of Avid’s technology and how it continues to influence the film-making industry.

“It started to catch on as early as 1998, and one of the things that happens in the world of technology is something is so clear that it will get awarded early in its existence,” Ohanian said. “Then it's only logical that any awards committee, will want to see if continues to get developed or if it gets adopted. They want to see the influence. This Emmy Award really was for, I think, the lasting impact and achievement because the majority of music videos and television shows and films that have multi-camera components are done using this invention, and that really took some time.”

Asked when – or if – he’ll ever stop working, Ohanian says, “With this industry, you could work forever because it’s always evolving.

“If you're not learning and you're not innovating, and those things are important to you, then you should seek them out, so as long as I can learn, as long as I can innovate, and as long as I can ambulate around, I’ll keep moving forward. If you do those things, your life is going to be really full.”

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