Crown versus Bain was a trial that was in everyone's face. For three months, there has been no escape from it.
Not for the players in court, those who have been living with the tiny detail of the case for years in some cases.
Not for the media -- rows of them packed into Christchurch's No 1 High Court.
Not for the public who have pored over the coverage and turned up at the courthouse to pack out the public gallery and a jury waiting area where television feeds from the court have been set up for them.
And certainly not for the jury. It was in their faces more than anybody else.
This was the first time the Jedi system had been used in a criminal trial, to put computer images of evidence on screen instantly in front of everyone who needed to see.
There were screens between every pair of jurors in the jury box, one in the witness box, and for each of the lawyers and judge.
It was a very fast and efficient way of getting people to the right picture, rather than having them thumbing through books of photographs.
But it was too much for some, and especially David Cullen Bain who was accused of the murder of his entire family on June 20, 1994, in Dunedin.
He had to turn away often rather than confront the terrible images in front of him.
The jury was not only dealing with a trial that took them away from their lives for three months, but one with five bodies, five crime scenes, and hundreds of these pictures.
The stress of hours each day with those images flashing up in front of them quickly began to take its toll.
The court did what it could to help with advice on how to cope and it was agreed that when images were not actually being referred to by witnesses or counsel, they would be taken off screen.
That helped, but the drama would always remain with this trial.
It had so much more than a normal trial, even a normal murder trial if there is such a thing.
Here the crime was so much greater -- a whole family gone -- and the man claiming his innocence had already served 13 years for it.
In this trial, the defence did not just require the Crown to prove that the accused man did the crime, they made it a central theme that someone else had done it.
The jury always had that choice right from the opening -- right from the first trial in 1995 if they remembered it.
In court, the clash of personalities was palpable.
There were frustrations that boiled over regularly.
Defence counsel Michael Reed QC targeted the police investigation and tried to allege the planting of evidence. At least one police officer was handled very roughly in the witness box -- the roughest that some court veterans have ever seen.
Another witness got such a verbal slap that there was a collective gasp from the public gallery upstairs.
And there was the spectacle of crown prosecutor Kieran Raftery's closing -- hours of it without reference to notes.
The trial heard evidence from 130 crown witnesses, including briefs read from some who had died in the intervening 15 years. It heard from 54 defence witnesses.
The transcript of evidence runs to 3707 pages, which the jury was presented with to consider in case it needed to refresh its memory, when it retired on the 5463rd day since the Bain family murders.
The trial broke new ground everywhere.
Typists were listening in and keying in the transcript in Auckland, a system that has been used in the District Court but is new to the High Court. It cut weeks off the trial.
The hearing drew attention to the new rules about juries not having to select their foreperson straight away, and not necessarily having to be shut away overnight as they deliberate on their verdicts.
Streaming of television coverage with a small delay was tried.
Whole chunks of the trial were available on-line. For the first time, the public at home (or at their office if they dared) could see and hear a whole closing address.
Media were filing coverage almost instantly from computers in court.
Surely there can never have been this level of interest in a trial.
Almost certainly, it has changed things forever.
