This was the first long-form documentary ever edited on a non-linear editing system.

The producer fell in love with the idea of saving money and increasing creativity by using a then brand new software that would allow you to do an offline edit on a Macintosh computer.

Avid Technology was the company providing the software, and the editing software itself was …  the Avid Media Composer.  The rest, as they say, was history.

We know we were the first because that is what Avid told us.  They loved having us paying clients as a Beta test site, and the difficulty of arranging our 200 hours of dailies into 50 mb optical discs was mind-boggling to them (and us!)

Of course, there were non-linear editing systems used for editing narrative feature films before us, just as there were other NLE systems before the AVID, primarily the EditDroid and Montage systems.  Neither system was friendly at all to the needs of documentarians and as a result, this film had the honor and the burden of being the first long form documentary ever edited on a computer.