Convergence: the great transformation

I talk a lot about Red camera and our relentless move into the newest future on the block – electron cinematography.  It used to be that convergence was thought of as the merging of your television with your computer, so in the end you had no television but your computer thought it was one. Yes, that's happening, but on the viewing end. It's what's happening at the other end of the media chain that's the big news – shooting and editing. Photography and video are fusing together, first in the physical form of DSLR cameras that shoot in high-definition video. 

Now my little Lumix still camera has always shot video and not too badly at that. My daughter bought one first and I was really surprised by the quality of the video and bought one for me too. OK, hers is sexier than mine and to be honest my wife bought it for trips and I just carry it and use it more. It's nice to have a camera small enough to always have it in your pocket. 

In the old days when I shot on film I always had a half-frame 35mm camera in my pocket. When I first arrived at Hampshire back in the 70's you could always tell who was a Hampshire student on the bus because they carried a camera and most likely a half-frame. The most popular one was a Bell&Howell with a wind-up spring drive. They had a nice wrist strap so you could have it in your hand all the time ready to shoot. That was the whole point of half-frame cameras – you could get 72 exposures on a single roll of 35mm film. Yep, we all shot a lot of film then and I still have all of that film. It's archival. Where will all of your digital images be forty years from now? One year from now?

An even further aside – an old girlfriend though I was a really interesting guy because I carried a hand gun. She was disappointed when she found out it was just a half-frame camera. No, it didn't last. It's hard to measure up to that kind of image when I'm just a normal guy after all.

But the big difference between the Lumix family of cameras and the new DLSR HD video cameras is that they shoot full frame HD (1920 x 1080) and you get all the controls of a still camera at the same time. Are they ready for prime-time? No, not yet, but they're moving along quickly and there's a big market for them. Red camera cancelled its models last year and did a remake on them because of this trend. Now theirs shoots stills also, but they've moved way beyond HD and work in the 2K to 8K image size range. They even have a 28K camera in the works, though I have no idea what you could do with that after you shoot images the size of a house.

But that's the trend, the fusion of still photo controls and sensibility, with the philosophy of film, in the body of a video camera. You end up in Final Cut Pro cutting your video that looks like film shot with a photo camera. That's real convergence. So what we see for the future is we're going to work like we've always wanted to, but at much higher resolutions in the field and in the edit room and then distribute on some kind of Blu-Ray disk format. Remember what Steve Jobs said about Blu-Ray – it's a big box of pain (or was it hurt)(turns out it was a bag, not a box). So we have still yet another frontier to cross before all of this is settled in and we're back to working in a way we will call usual.

gunther