Thursday, June 24, 2010

Science Fiction & Technology

I love the speed that computer and related technologies are developing, we are living in an era where we are seeing science fiction become reality within a lifetime.

The standard people expect on television is high definition, yet industry is struggling to adapt and keep up with the demand for content. Not just the production industry, also the Computer manufacturers, TV's have jumped ahead, we can view, but playing back and creating bluray discs is still not a standard, what is more it may get left behind.

3D is being pushed so hard and making in roads to the consumer markets, even before the ROI can be realised on High Definition. We have been shooting and editing HD for a while now but the majority still either output to DVD or a digital files, these are the formats clients are demanding. Now all of a sudden we are being asked for 3D and it is great! The transition will have to be quick and those that can make it quick will certainly have the edge, even more so than the move to HD.

3D HD requires a whole new mind set in the pre-production; story boarding and planning is even more important, it is not simply enough to hire a rig and point it in the general direction of the action or to shoot from the hip. Then their is the matter of data management, two streams of HD needing to be backed up and archived, the need for a computer powerful enough to handle these two stream and the need to allow more time, where the transition to HD saw us having to allow 4x the amount of edit time for rendering and fx, 3D, sees the need to allow a lot more time again. Thankfully we know that the computers will catch up and eat 3D for breakfast.

The iPhone 4 illustrates this point beautifully, where 15 years ago it was science fiction, now shooting, editing and distributing HD video on your phone is a reality.

Today though I felt like I stepped in to a science fiction moment, we got an iPad in the studio! Awesome, find one, have a play and experience for yourself a moment where you think, wow, this is science fiction in my hand.

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