Until 1993, the Avid Media Composer was most often used for editing commercials or other small-content and high-value projects. This was primarily because the purchase cost of the system was very high, especially in comparison to the offline tape-based systems that were then in general use. Hard disk storage was also expensive enough to be a limiting factor on the quality of footage that most editors could work with or the amount of material that could be held digitized at any one time.[lower-alpha 3]