CTO Articles
Published in IT World
November 07, 2006
Attack of the killer digicam
In recent times, sites publishing user-generated video content, such as youtube[1] have been very much in the news. Young people who, prior to video sharing sites became popular, had no particular interest in investing in a camcorder are now doing so and producing home videos that are, well ... interesting. Videos of themselves goofing around in the kitchen. Videos of a friend's opinions on pop star X. Videos of how best to care for your pet hamster. Everything imaginable. It is tempting to watch some of these and dismiss them as skateboard-like. That is, possibly a passing fad, possibly a phenomenon destined for niche status. Perhaps "professionally produced" video will always be beyond what amateurs can produce. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
It is not hard to find possible analogies in the recent history of IT. Desktop Publishing provides a good example. In the early days of DTP the technology was laughed at by many "professionals" and the work produced by amateurs subjected to much derision. I remember manning an Apple stand at one of the early DTP trade shows. I was demonstrating a DTP package on a Fat Mac[2]. One person I demonstrated the system to scoffed at the pages produced by my Apple Laserwriter[3]. "Dreadful resolution", he said. "Terrible H+J"[4] he said. "Will never catch on", he said.
Well, it did catch on. The hardware side of the technology got better and cheaper. The software side improved dramatically. The shelves of bookshops heaved with books that explained previously highly specialist terms like "kerning" and "CMYK color separation" to an audience of print production amateurs.
The world did not turn upside down of course. Many new developments in technology are oversold and DTP was one of them. The "high end" of print production remained - and remains - high end. It is the low to middle ends that have shifted from the specialist shops over to the desktop PC applications of a world full of amateurs.
It is this experience that I think of most when I see the amateurish outpourings on today's crop of have-a-digicam?-publish-your-videos-now websites. These folks - especially the younger ones - are not overawed by complex problems like professional quality media production. They do not mind spending some time goofing around as they learn this stuff. They have seen the Blair Witch Project. They watch reality TV. They watch fly-on-the-wall docu-dramas and hidden camera exposes. They know that high-end Hollywood production and David Attenborough quality documentaries[5] are high-end and will always stay that way. But, they see a lot of territory that they can cover in the low- to middle-end.
The technology will keep getting better and more affordable. The bookshelves will heave with books that explain previously highly specialist terms like "Establishing shot" and "reverse cutting" to an audience of film production amateurs. The revolution will start (and indeed, has started), somewhere south of Z-Movies[6] but it will climb fast. Who knows where it will stop.
And yes, I was thinking of "Attack of the killer Tomatoes"[7] when I thought of the title for this article.
[1] http://www.youtube.com
[2] http://www.lowendmac.com/compact/512k.shtml
[3] http://www.mac512.com/lw.htm
[4] http://www.fonts.com/AboutFonts/Articles/fyti/Hyphenation.htm
[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programmes/who/david_attenborough.shtml
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-movie#Z-movie
[7] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080391/