Behind the Camera IV
Technology Marches On: Don't Blink, You'll Miss It!

Opinion by Bill Johns

Where will it all end?

For a while the technology seemed to move at a pace I could keep up with. BetaSP was the best shooting format (after 2" Broadcast, which is not exactly good for field work) and ¾" held on for a long time. After that there was the Prosumer formats of SVHS and Hi8, and that was about it. Then it was D2, and D1, followed by digital versions of… well, all of them almost. Even Hi8 has gone digital, while SVHS slowly dies an analog death. And now there’s MiniDV, DVCam, and DVCpro, and soon all of them will be made obsolete by optical disks. Which brings me to the fun of keeping track of those!

I was so impressed when in 1989 I bought the Kodak ColorWatch system for my photolab and for a mere $6,000 got an IBM PC with a 720kb floppy drive, a 20Mb hard drive and a whopping 512k of RAM at 166Mhz. I was on the cutting edge baby! The other day, my buddy just started assembling a new system with a 30 GIGabyte hard drive, a 100MB Zip drive, 256MB of RAM and dual processors of 550MHz each! All for about half of what I had paid in 1989. That’s just 11 years ago, and yesterday I read an article about Shuji Nakamura, at Nichia Corp. in Shikoku, Japan, who invented a blue laser which is able to read and write data on optical disks four times denser than current technology. They project being able to cram about 30 GIGS on a DVD size disk. Soon video cameras will look like Walkman CD players and they’ll have these little laser printers in them to label your disks before you pop them out…. maybe not. But I will certainly welcome having more room to write on the label. These MiniDV tapes require reading glasses… er is that my eyes? Never mind; the point is, when will this DV revolution peak and taper for a while? My brain needs a rest!

Well, my rest won’t come for a while, the same guy who solved the gallium nitride problem for the laser, used the same substance to perfect the illusive blue LED. The green LED came right on its heels and together with the red, gave us white light and every color in between. These new LEDs are being used to make everything from video displays to traffic lights. Desktop systems will soon have flat, bright screens thanks to the new LEDs and Terabyte hard drives thanks to the blue laser… isn't that a catchy name for a trillion bytes? Certainly is, and I must have blinked and almost lost a ton of technology as it went whizzing by.

I guess I like being behind the camera… it’s safe and nothing really changes. Good composition and proper lighting will always be needed (I hope). I guess I will love it though when I can afford the cameras that have film-look built right into them and resolution rivaling 35mm. I’ll be able to page through menu options with choices like, "Gritty 16mm", "Grainy 8mm", "Home Video, circa 1990", "35mm Fine Grain", "HiCon MTV", etc., etc., etc. I saw that live episode of ER last year and didn’t even notice that it looked exactly like it did every week: shot on film, right? Wrong! It was live, Dummy! I later found out the Filmlook Company was on set, converting the video to film-look in real time. And then later, when I heard that Lucas was shooting the next Star Wars movie on Digital HDTV, I knew that the visionaries I had laughed at in the 1980s had passed me by and now they were the ones laughing. "You’ll never replace film", I cried…. How archaic is that? Oh, I’ll mourn, I’ll feel sad that a hundred-year-old art form is losing its brushes and canvasses to unseen 1s and 0s. But I’ll get over it. In Ghostbusters, Harold Ramis looked at Annie Potts and said, "Print is dead". Well, for all the purists out there I won’t say what I’m thinking, but when it happens, I’ll still be… behind the camera.

Bill Johns is a seasoned veteran cameraman, filmmaker and digital video commentator. Send him a note with your comments, or take a look at his Web site.

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