MST 230 - Online Media Production Two

'The Digital Producer' Readings

CHAPTER 1 

Introduction  

"Producer" is one of those titles that creates an immediate impression, and yet is difficult to define. Enter the "digital pro-ducer," a master of high-technology who is an even tougher animal to pin down. 

What makes a producer?  

-Most producers are highly educated with years of training in fields that have nothing at all to do with digital television production methods at the turn of the millennium. 

-Producers require no particular certification to do the job. 

- The successful producer is, in many cases, a talented generalist with some basic communications skills and an ability to coordinate the personal-ities and resources of others to convey the message of a script, a story-board, or a general manager. 

- A true ‘digital producer’ cna use this book to gain mastery overthese technologies and shorten the cycles of production. 

The Digital Revolution  

-Digital technologies are changing every aspect of production, not only the tools and techniques used to capture, prepare, and deliver video, but in some cases the entire structure of production environments and the very content of the television medium itself. 

-The Slow March of Digital Television With their stunning pictures and equally stunning price tags, high-definition television sets have been slow to catch on with consumers. Yet digital television continues to march toward acceptance, at least at the distribu-tion end.

  - Although the marketing lingo has changed considerably, the dream of the information superhighway has found new life, this time as a kind of re-pav-ing of that meandering cowpath of the global village, the World Wide Web. 

- It seems more and more likely that in the not-too-distant future, we might very well end up with a "5 billion channel universe."  

Producers’ Tools 

-If you think about it, producers are the original "desktop editors," hammering source material into edit plans that might include narration, shot descriptions, tape and timecode information, and sound-on-tape. That blueprint of the program is, for all intents and purposes, a "rough cut" without the play button. With the latest com-puter- based tools and techniques, the distance from that script on your laptop to the finished program on screen is shorter than ever. 

-As the digital era in the media reaches full steam in the next few years, computer-based tools covering the entire production process – from scripting to shooting to finishing – will become commonplace. 

Questions that must be considered in this new climate... 

o How are new digital production tools affecting the producer’s budgets, schedules, and production plans? 

o What are the advantages of computer-based production tools? What are the pitfalls? 

o How should a producer prepare scripts and edit plans for effective nonlinear post-production?