The Future

This is an important and impressive piece of technology news in our video industry. (Cannot not share)

H265!

“It will allow smartphones to do real 4K resolutions in video mode without the kind of massive quality loss at low bitrates”

“H.265 supports up to 8K and in Japan trials are underway to broadcast digital 8K feeds to the home.”

I wonder if technology is going in the right direction by designing smaller and smaller elements for this overcrowding world… does it mean that we should also re-look into all other aspect of our lives by reducing the size? Even with the amount of time we spend on editing or working per say?

When the size is smaller, with the same amount of container, we can load more stuff.  So… when we spend less time in the editing suite, our mind will have more space to be creative?  That maybe a result of us spending more time with our live? What do you think?

ARCHIVE?

This question was raised by a fellow filmmaker friend recently. It has also been one of the thing that bugs me for a long time – How do we archive our digital videos?

I came from the traditional video making world where we always have a tape to archive to. When digital video making came along, i can’t help but wonder how are we going to ensure all the “01010101” stay long enough in the external hard disk? What will happen if we accidentally drop it or forget to eject the disk when power it down. Digital format has a much higher risk compare to the analog format.

Do you know that your hard disk can fail easily when it wasn’t spin enough? Even if we diligently bring it out for a ride, it has a limited life much shorter than the tapes.

I did a little research about what the experts are doing. It looks like we have yet to conclude a clear path. It is worth a better understanding to help us prepare for our future.

Digital Rebellion gives an excellent writeup about all the options you can find right now – Backup Options for Filmmakers.

Larry Jordan wrote a number of articles that discuss about archiving. He gives very good recommendation about the best (lossless) codec you may export for keeping.

I will read Pick the right format | Refreshing hard disk storage | Quick note on Archiving

There is one format that many people has raise – LTO. Linear Tape Open. It has yet been fully adopted by filmmakers. However, it is now a widely used format in other industries that need to store tones of digital datas. The biggest downside to LTO for filmmaking or videomaking is the inability to provide random access. It is a TAPE basically, you need to roll it to the exact place where you “keep” the data. Slow transfer speed is another deterrent. Currently, we can find 1.5TB LTO tape in the market. The good news is, we may have 70TB in the future. Read this article here.

I am no guru on latest digital technologies. Please feel free to correct me if there is any mis-information.