BILL MILLER / INNOVATOR

The Academy Awards nominations don’t come until Tuesday, but one person already knows he’ll be picking up an Oscar statuette on March 21. Bill Miller, 53, CEO of Avid Technology, will be at the gala to accept the technical achievement honor given his Boston-based company for its digital editing systems that have, literally, changed the was movies are put together.

IT COULD HAVE COST MORE? “On ‘Titanic,’ they did a lot of work with our tools to do pre-visualization. Before they went out and spent a lot of money to do those shots, which were very expensive to begin with, they would use our tools to pre-visualize them.”

GLOBAL EDITING VILLAGE: “Eventually it will all be connected across networks. Picture and sound and graphics editors will be able to share work not just across disciplines, but across geography. You’ll see sound editors in London and a graphic designer in Toronto and a picture editor in Los Angeles all working together.”

NO LIMITS: “In the end it’s all about a story, not about technology. The idea is to bring the technology to the service of creative artists to put on the screen whatever they can imagine, to where a creative person never has to say, ‘I can’t tell the story that way because it’s not physically possible.”’

PRO-TECH: “Saying that removing technological obstacles removes creativity is like saying painting would be better if you were limited to three colors. You can’t say it limits creativity to give people more colors to work with, and that’s really what technology does.”

THE LITTLE PEOPLE: “Of the 114 films at Sundance this year, 70 were edited with our system. That’s a huge jump as we make our systems more cost-effective.”

WHAT IS REALITY? “Soon digital technology will mean that for an independent filmmaker, if you want a setting you can’t get to economically, the north of Alaska or something, effects can be created to accomplish that. What you’ll soon see is a dramatic increase of not just exploding asteroids, but small things you’ll never notice.”

WHAT IS QUALITY? “As the Internet gets better capacity for video, you can make your media reachable by 200 million people. No one may choose to watch it, but that’s a whole different thing. The opportunity barrier is gone. That’s a giant change where not any of us knows where it goes or what the uses will be.”