TVlinks

I’ve been thinking a lot about video tape.

About its future. 

Back when video tape was introduced, it was a release from the high duplication cost and heavy shipping weight of reels of film. Durable and relatively light, they are easy to duplicate and ship. We love Fedex. The tapes get boxed, the Fedex guy comes and off they go, into a huge distribution stream of red, white and blue boxes.  Sort of a patriotic network of goods and products in transit.

As of this writing, there is still a healthy demand for video recorded on tape formats. From Mini DV on the low end to D5 at the high end of high definition, there are a range of tape formats to suit every need. New machines are being introduced, along with switchers and other editing gear. Tape formats offer a relatively low cost way to store large amounts of data, and even store the data long term without consuming any power.

However, the mechanical hardware world within which tape is dependant, is passing like the age of the 8-track. Non-linear editing facilities, using computers and software for video editing, are growing at a fast rate. Today’s off the shelf computers are more than powerful enough to record, playback, and edit video, and some even come bundled with the editing programs and DVD burning software. Video cameras are currently being introduced that have no tapes, no mechanics or moving parts, but rather are a brick of memory that can record and then download the video to a computer via USB or Firewire.

On the low end, DVD is killing off VHS tape and the brick memory video cameras will cause the Mini DV format’s extinction. On the high end, tape is still a better format to archive in, however full resolution can be pulled from the tapes onto computer hard disk, so there is a good argument that tape is not needed for archiving.

I use a 100 gig lap top hard drive that has been mounted in a portable case. It takes either USB or Firewire input/outputs. The portable hard drive is a little bigger than a deck of cards and it comes in a leather slip case. The drive is far more versatile than tape, and like tape it stores the video data without need for power. Plus it’s fun to take it out of my pocket, looking like a PDA, but instead filled with hours of movies.

The professional editing houses that I use, even the top end boutiques, are installing servers with terrabytes of storage space. As network cables replace video cables, and servers replace tape machines, multiple editing rooms can share these resources across the network. In fact, editing rooms can share resources across the Internet between any two points on Earth. Tape requires Fedex.

More and more customers are calling for digital formats, where the tape is played back into a computer and compressed into a file format. The file is then placed on an FTP server for immediate download. Customers can get videos anywhere they have a network connection, by cable, DSL, Wi-Fi, or even cell phone.

For capture, I still shoot good old film. Yes, FILM. Motion Picture Negative. Oddly, the old format has still held up as the new transfer machines are able to pull more and more from the negatives over time, so the image only gets better and better.  At some point, digital video capture will match the fine grain negative stocks of 35mm motion picture. Or perhaps they already have.

The film negatives have kept up after all these years, but I can’t say the same for video tape. I have tapes from machines that they don’t make any more and are hard to find. And many of the old tapes are easy to spot the age of the video image if its more than about 10 years old. There just isn’t enough color information in the older tapes to make any improvements in the image. While the color film negatives are estimated to last at least 100 years, the video tapes will get iffy after about 10.

I am expecting that my next series of film to video transfer sessions will be tapeless, recording straight to hard drive. Adobe has a format called a Digital Negative and there are others, including Quicktime Animation that hold full resolution.  With a secure server, customers can download videos straight from an online shopping cart purchase.

The result of all this digitization? Video is free of the tape, music is free of the disk, images are free of the photograph, and text is free of the paper. Media elements are files now, nuggets of digital data filing through a net of endless connections. Without physical form, they are transmutable and transferrable. In this format-less world, media is unbound.

I just hope the Fedex guy doesn’t lose his job! 

    As this is the first post, I will begin at a proper place in time, at the beginning. Almost exactly twenty years ago, I sent my first email. 1985. I’d bought a clone of an IBM AT computer.  It ran on DOS, with a monochrome green monitor and a 9000 baud modem. I joined Compuserve and got an email address. From my college dorm room, I suddenly had access to "cyberspace". 

To my surprise, one of my first emails came from a vice president of the film and television division of a major publishing company.  He was also our neighbor. It seems he was in a jam, stuck between deciding which revolution was going to win - the new analogue revolution of VHS and cable TV that was just then being introduced into the marketplace - or the allure of the promise of future technologies born from the recent introduction of the new DIGITAL audio formats; CD disk and DAT tape.

The question was, how long would it be before video in digital disk format would be invented. "The picture disk", he proclaimed it, not knowing it would later be called DVD, "will reduce distribution costs drastically, compared to expensive and heavy reels of film." He could get a similar benefit from using the new VHS tape format without waiting. But if he recommended to his customers that they use VHS, and if digital video disks were then introduced anytime soon, he’d be blamed for choosing a turkey.

This type of thinking would later be called the "Format Wars".  Innocent civilians would have to choose blindly between competing electronic formats. Some would choose correctly, others would lose, their monies laid to waste. The epic battle between VHS and Betamax would be one example of what would become a brutal, bloody fight, killing thousands of perfectly good technology devices like 8 track tape players, film projectors, and ultimately even the seemingly invincible phonograph and vinyl records.

The question of which format to choose seemed an interesting one. I guess he was consulting me, because I was in the NYU school of film and television at the time. I agreed, it would be great if they invented video on digital optical disks like CDs. But the format issue was moot. If there were digital video disks, then their contents would be digital files, and files are not bound to their physical platform. They could be copied anywhere. "If the video files were small enough, you could email them to your customers," I wrote back to him. Naive, I know, but this was 1985 and anything was possible.

After several emails back and forth, he decided to go with VHS. This was a good choice, as it became the standard for the next 15 years. He retired happily, having provided stability to his business and leaving the jump to digital to the next generation.

It was a short job, only taking a few weeks, but it did leave me with an idea that would change the course of my career. You see, he pointed out that the real winners of trading files back and forth in cyberspace would be the copyright holders, the licensors of the content. Anyone who owned an interest in video content could make endless copies to supply the sales demand, without incurring higher costs.

This led to stock footage. He hired me to research all of the stock footage companies in New York. Which ones were still on film, which had transferred to video. Which used the old paper card catalogs to index and find the reels and which had put their index into a computer so it could be searched with software. He figured that any stock footage company that was still old-school had greater value that could be realized by converting to new formats and technology.

We imagined an giant automated system, where the films would be converted to digital formats. Customers would use Prodigy or Compuserve or Genie to connect, search for film titles or stock footage, place an order and get the video in an email. The whole thing would be automated like a video jukebox, and he would sit back and catch the money as it came in. No manufacturing, no shipping, 24 hours a day automated distribution. It was perfect.

It was perfect, except video codecs were in their infancy, most computers were too slow to even think about playing a video, DVDs hadn’t been invented,  and 9000 baud dialup connections would take weeks to transport a film. Back then, snail mail would be faster.

This guy was ahead of his time, and I was fortunate to get a glimpse twenty years into the future. But at the same time, it’s been one hell of a wait for everything to catch up. Today, finally, I nearly have the system we dreamed of, just a little further to go. You can check my progress at www.timelapse.com

Currently I’m converting all my motion picture negatives to high definition video. It’s the latest in 16×9 aspect ratio, the digital stream from a high-end Spirit Datacine is being recorded to both Panasonic D5 and Sony HDcam. Yeah, I still have to choose between two formats, because I don’t know which one will win, so I’m just doing both because I know better now. After all these years the format wars continue to rage. In the midst of all this technological change, it’s nice to know that some things always remain the same and can be depended on.

Like the anniversary of my first email in 1985 crossing paths twenty years later with this, my first blog entry in 2005. Currents in time that can be depended on. I wonder what format my communications will be in, in 2025?

My prediction - Picture Disks!

Happy April Fool’s Day