2010: Don't Look Back!

"Yo, Old Dude. We need a 'year in review' blog from you." This statement came from a 20-something person wearing a Snoopy t-shirt with a copyright date of 1972. This guy is wearing a t-shirt almost 40 years old and I get called an Old Dude?! Okay, a year end blog is probably appropriate.

After pondering my situation for a few moments, I found a fresh ribbon for the ol' Selectric II, put in a fresh piece of paper, installed the Orator 14 font ball and began putting my carefully crafted thoughts to paper.

"Yo! Old Dude! What's that noise?!" came a scream from a nearby cubicle.

"I'm writing the blog you asked for!" I replied.

"Dude, a piece of paper does not post to the web. It's all electronic, man." An extended period of expanding my vocabulary of four letter words ensued followed by putting my beloved typewriter away and going back to a computer keyboard that is pure mush compared to an IBM Selectric keyboard.

So here I am, attempting to write a 'year in review' blog for the website. The more I think about this year, the more I realize that what I really want to write about is the 'year to be' blog. Some interesting events occurred this year, but their effect is going to be felt (or not felt) in the coming year. So with that, I hear by crawl out of my cave of blissful ignorance to present what I think is going to be the top five trends for the year, 2011.



Trend 1: I'm going to get a lot of hate mail for this, but 3-D does not rock my world. As the t-shirt says: "If you can't do it right, do it in 3-D." The whole 3-D thing is a fad and thankfully, a short-lived one at that. Shooting 3-D is twice the camera and four times the headache. In my warped view of the world, 3-D is a tool and should be used only if it helps improve the story-telling process. I would like to see a movie like the "King's Speech" in 3-D just to see how the Director of Photography handles the depths and textures of shooting a drama in 3-D.



Trend 2: CMOS Imagers. They started showing up in professional products a couple of years ago and are quickly become the de-facto standard for imagers. The "rolling shutter" argument made by the proponents of CCD imagers has become a moot point, the development of the digital signal processing going on behind the CMOS imagers is really amazing and CMOS imagers are now equal to or better than CCDs for a lot less money. What's not to like about CMOS? They are the future and the future is here.



Trend 3: Canon Professional Video Products. One of the world's largest and diversified manufacturers has finally decided to pay attention to this tiny little division in the company that makes professional video products. Canon started the Large Image Sensor for video revolution when they released the EOS 5D and 7D a couple of years ago. This year, they released a 3-chip camcorder that records at 50Mb/s for under $10k. What's coming? Canon is very good about not discussing what is in the pipeline until its ready to ship, but I would bet good money that it will be innovative and top quality. If Canon is not on your list of products to look at with a serious eye, then you need to modify your list.



Trend 4: Consumer camcorders being called "professional." This trend gives me the fantods. Any camcorder that is so small that it does not have room for at least two XLR connectors and a BNC Connector does not qualify to call itself professional. Can you really make true HD with a 1/6" imager? And while we are on the subject of consumer product creep into the professional world... Note to manufacturers: If you're not proud enough to publish the actual pixel counts of your imagers on your literature, maybe you should not have used that imager. Phrases like "effective pixels" need to be removed from the lexicon. Yes, Virginia, the pixel count does matter. Using a standard definition imager to create HD means you have invented three out of every four pixels out of thin air. Something is going to look funky at some point.



Trend 5: Large Image Sensor Camcorders, or Digital Cinematography. Oh, be still my beating heart! All of us have dreamed of making our next great project with a Panavision or Arri 35mm film camera. Thanks to these large format sensors getting lifted out of Digital SLR cameras and placed into video cameras, our dreams have taken at least one step closer to reality. The affordability and performance of these new camcorders is going to change the production process for video in a good way. Scripting and great story-telling will become the dominant themes in video production with these new cameras.

Scary thought: In the Sixties, the RCA TK-42 used four 4" image tubes to make a picture. Talk about large format!

Scarier thought: You know what a TK-42 is...



So here are my forward looking trends for 2011. I shall now crawl back into my cave of ignorance so that I may blissfully avoid all this technology until next year, or such time as I decide to pontificate again...



Thanks for reading this far,





Brian