Australian film - Federation of Australian Movie Makers

One thing we can be pretty sure of, is that probably none of these media will be around in even twenty or
thirty years. Even if they were, would they be sufficiently reliable to trust with our memories? DVDs
should be, but with them now being churned out like sausages, who can be sure? Hard discs fail, more often
than many of us appreciate. I must have been extremely lucky; as I have never had a disc failure in any
machine I have ever owned or had association with. But I have seen a report from Google that in a survey
of 100,000 drives in their organisation world wide, there was a failure rate of 8% over three years.
Solid-state memory is a mess. While it is going to be a cool thing for the foreseeable future, there are so
many competing styles, formats and hype from so many incompatible manufacturers that it is going to require
a major shakedown to come up with a format for the long term. Are these cards reliable long term?
Who knows, there has been no long term, yet, to try them. Hard discs, after all, gradually lose their magnetic
impulses over time if they are not frequently refreshed.
The only medium that has any sort of a track record is tape. Thirty year old VHS tape can often still be
played without problems and digital tapes should be better. But, tape is on the way out. An answer is possibly
to re-record the material to the current technology as it advances into the future. That should keep
someone busy! So, what is the answer? I don’t know. We all need some good ideas.
The rise and rise of High Def …
A feature movie has recently been completed in Hollywood. So what, you may ask. Well, this one has a
small difference. It’s called “Crank 2: High Voltage” and was shot with five Canon XH-A1 cameras.
That’s right, the same little camera that a number of independent movie-makers around town use. Many of
us chose the camera on price, but our big-time crew chose it because of it’s compact size and the quality of
the lens.
The “style” of the movie lent itself to compact, lightweight cameras. The Canons could be mounted on
such things as skate boards and handheld poles (shades of Hermann’s pole-cam!) and because of their virtually
unlimited configuration capabilities, they could all be precisely matched picture and colour wise.
[Any one who imagines that two cameras of the same model from the same manufacturer should produce
pictures that look the same should have seen the results from Alan Scott’s two Sony VX- 5000’s a few
years ago.]
The point of this little story is not that “Canon rules”, but that high definition cameras of quite modest cost
and complexity have come so far in such a short time. It is only two or three years since professional cameramen
were openly scoffing that video would never see the light of day commercially. What will the next
two or three years bring?
Neal Reville
WD TV HD Media Player
Reprinted from BVMA May 2009 Scanlines with permission from Neal Reville.
Australian film & video
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