Back in the day

Larry Jordan#

Author: Larry Jordan#

Published 1st May 2015

by Larry Jordan Issue 100 - April 2015

Congratulations, TV-Bay, on your tenth anniversary; as well as the 100th issue of TV-Bay/KitPlus magazine. Very cool!
Ten years ago seems like forever. Some of us were editing with Final Cut Pro 5. LiveType was still with us. Others were using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (CS3 was still two years in the future). Still others were editing on Avid Media Composer 1.5 on the Mac, while their Windows colleagues were up to version 2.1.
Today, we look back at that primitive software and wonder how any professional work got done.
Time passes and technology doesn\'t stand still.
Twenty years ago we were slamming 3/4\" Sony U-Matic cassettes into 40-pound "portable\" cameras and considering ourselves darn lucky that production tools were so small. We used portable video recorders - which weighed more than could be checked as luggage on today\'s airlines - which revolutionized news gathering. If you had shown us the camera on an iPhone, we would have laughed in your face.
Thirty years ago, we were threading one-inch video tape through Ampex tape machines the size of a kitchen table. But the pictures - oh, my! They were just to die for. 720 x 486 pixel images that showed every possible detail you could ever want. Well, I mean, it wasn\'t film, but you could record live and play it back as fast as you could rewind the tape.
Forty years ago, we were wrestling 20-pound 2\" inch quad video tape on to Ampex and RCA tape decks that weighed hundreds of pounds, required their own air conditioning and took eight seconds from the time you pressed play to get that mass of iron rolling at full speed. A one-hour reel of tape could cost a couple hundred dollars. And don\'t even talk about lifting a 90-minute reel of tape. That required a small derrick and a truss.
I still clearly remember taking one camera live on location for a local news show. It required an 18-foot bread truck crammed with gear, a three-man technical crew, a 1"-thick cable connecting the camera to the truck (there was no wireless then), and a microwave dish to beam the picture back to the station. Compared to shooting in the studio, we thought we were in heaven.
Ah, yes. The "Good Old Days.\" Time passes and technology doesn\'t stand still.

Today, video clips weigh nothing, distribution is free on YouTube and HD-quality cameras fit in your mobile phone. And there doesn\'t seem to be any wires anywhere.
Ten years ago, HD was still a hoped-for dream for most of us. Mobile phones were the size of shoes. And editing? Well, a cut is a cut. But most of us were editing on G5 systems and rendering was something that would allow you to read an early issue on tv-bay from cover to cover while waiting to complete a Gaussian Blur for a 30-second commercial.
Color grading was for the rich; and supervised by editors with absolutely nothing to do except watch render bars for days at at time. Though, happily, the days where it took 30 seconds to render a Gaussian Blur to a single frame of video using a G4 computer were, fortunately, three years in the past.
During the last ten years, SD was replaced by HD, which was overshadowed, but not yet replaced, by 2K,4K and beyond.
Ten years ago, the Mac Mini was introduced along with the iPod Shuffle. (The iPod itself celebrated its fourth birthday that year.)
Ten years. Time passes and technology doesn\'t stand still.
While Cinema Displays first shipped the year before, dual-core computers were still a year in the future. Over the last decade,CPUs exploded from single processor to multi-core, multi-processor calculation behemoths. The Motorola chip in the original Mac had about 200,000 transistors. The Core 2 Duo in 2006 had about 291 million. The 12-core CPUs in the new Mac Pro have about 4.2 billion.
(It is worth noting that the Guidance Computer for the Apollo moon missions in 1966 held a whopping 12,300 transistors contained on 4,100 cards!)
A cut is still a cut, but today we expect all our effects in real-time. CPUs are now supplemented with GPUs containing close to ten billion transistors. Not just simple Gaussian Blurs, but full-3D all-singing-and-all-dancing effects. Real-time - full-color - 4K. Right. now!
Sheesh. Impatient much?

Media devours storage. Ten years ago, the first 500 GB hard disk was introduced by Hitachi. The first terabyte drive was still two years into the future. The first practical SSD drive was years in the future. Most drives were connected via FireWire, which limited speeds to about 80 MB/second. Today, affordable RAIDs are approaching speeds of 2 GB/second.
And we still complain that our storage is too small, too slow and too expensive.
Ten years ago, an hour of SD DV video required 13 GB to store while uncompressed 10-bit SD DigiBeta soaked up 96 GB. Today, AVCHD requires about 10 GB to store an hour of HD media, while a variety of RAW 4K formats are clocking in around a terabyte per hour to store.
There is no such thing as "too much storage.\" A hard disk today is either empty or full.
Ten years. Time passes and technology doesn\'t stand still.
What can we expect in the next ten years? I haven\'t a clue. Image resolution will continue to increase, but will our eyes be able to perceive it. Storage speed and capacity will continue to grow, but we will still never have enough. Computers will get faster, screens larger, software more capable - and complex. But the basics of storytelling won\'t change.
The tools we use to tell stories with pictures will alter so dramatically that ten years from now, on the 20th anniversary of TV-Bay, we\'ll look back on these times and wonder how we were able to get any work done at all.
Time passes and technology doesn\'t stand still.

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