MST 230 - Online Media Production Two
‘The Digital Producer’ Readings
CHAPTER 2 - THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE
- Hollywood luminary Michael Crichton predicted that in the not-too-distant future television as we know it will cease to exist. Five or six years ago such an observation would have been laughable. After witnessing the rapid growth of the World Wide Web in recent years, we can begin to believe his prediction.
-Crichton’s pre-diction was inspired by the more fundamental shift now underway as more and more "media consumers" spend their time away from the television set entirely, navigating through progressively scanned images on the computer monitor. Audience share at the big three tele-vision networks has steadily declined in the last few years while the numbers of subscribers to the internet has mushroomed.
- Much is promised in the way of digital television as well as "webcasting," but the first real-world success in these coop-erative efforts already exists in the form of DVD.
Engineers and industry leaders are also working hard to bring about some form of DTV (digital television) that would combine access to the web with digital transmissions.
Points to Consider:
• The trusty VCR will eventually bite the dust, while sales of DVD players will continue to increase.
• Digital cameras will continue to replace analog ones, keeping step with a steady increase in digital broadcasts.
• New digital TV set-top boxes and DTV-enabled computers will begin to enter the market.
Industry Acronyms:
DTV, DV, SDTV, HDTV, DSL, and DVD.
• DTV stands for digital television, plain and simple. This is a more general term encompassing all forms of digital transmission, and might include any number of the more specific digital television technologies described below.
• SDTV stands for standard-definition television. This is television delivered in the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio. SDTV can be either analog or digital.
• HDTV stands for high-definition television. This is the digital television of the (near) future: the type of video that plays on those big expensive television sets in the 16:9 wide-screen aspect ratio.
• DV stands for digital video. There are two uses for this term: it can be used generically to refer to all forms of digital video; or it can refer to a specific format, the DV digital recording and play-back specification that has taken hold as a low-cost alternative to the professional Betacam format. DV cameras and equipment come at a fraction of the cost of traditional Betacam, and can pro-duce nearly the same quality of recorded video. And because the video is recorded digitally, there is virtually no generation loss when transferred and edited under optimal conditions.
•DVD video and DVD-ROM are very different. In some respects DVD video does for video recording what CD audio did for music and sound recording: it provides a digital consumer platform for distribution and playback of material previously delivered in analog form. DVD video is slated to replace VHS rental and purchase the way audio CDs have replaced records. Likewise, DVD-ROM might one day replace CD-ROM as the medium of choice for interactive computer-based multimedia titles.
•Most video producers see no separation between logging clip infor-mation and transcribing the audible content of the shoot – whether it is interview text, narration, or sound-on-tape. Many logging tools allow you to capture clip information without the text that a video producer usually associates with it in the normal workflow.
•There is a certain amount of time and effort that goes into operating and maintaining computers and software effectively. But there are a few ways you can get the most out of them, lessening the more time-consuming tasks. Here are a few snippets of "counter-market-ing" wisdom you won’t read on the back of software packages:
• Avoid new products when you can. Yup, you heard it here first. Despite the hype, often that whiz-bang new piece of software will
• The second rule, very closely related to the first, is to "go with what you know." If you’ve learned how to use a piece of software or hardware, and you use it well, and it does the job you need to have done, then stick with it as long as possible.
• If you do take on some new software or hardware, do it when you have some down time. In other words, leave yourself plenty of time to learn the tools before coming under pressure with dead-lines. What about the rest of the production process? These days the data-base is also gaining importance in collaborative production environ-ments, where various members of a production team can access shared resources and information in a database structure made avail-able over a network or even across the World Wide Web. This collab-orative process often takes place throughout the course of production.
• DTV (digital television) including SDTV (standard-definition) and HDTV (high-definition)
• DVD video and DVD-ROM
• Digital Field Production (or Digital News Gathering)
• Paint and Illustration applications
• Effects and Compositing applications
• Nonlinear editors (NLEs)
• Nonlinear finishing systems
• Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs)