D I G I T A L T A L K
By Bill Reid (Area 20)
Some members are still very reluctant to accept discussion of Digital Imaging and the use of computers, in the Newsletter and commented about the two articles use in the January CRCN. In fact I expect some will not have read this beyond the heading. Normally I wouldn't have used two such articles in one issue but it was simply the case that I had nothing else at hand to fill the final pages. This would have been easily avoided if someone had sent me some copy on purely E6 and photographic matters.
I understand the reluctance of some people to accept DI. Our whole lives are governed, held back, or made miserable, by people down the ages who refuse to accept new technology and change. However I feel it is very foolish to ignore DI, as it is most definitely the future of photography and even for transparency and negative users it is the means of re-storing their life's work and making them useable/viewable by their future children and relations. Images saved to digital just don't fade and tarnish like film and photographic paper and, making copies couldn't be easier with no loss of quality no matter how many you make. I expect too in a few years time even cine & slide projectors will become harder to get, while people will just not bother viewing in that way.
I watched a tv programme the recently where they showed a number of pictures that had a bad green cast. The colour balance was completely corrected and fresh computer prints made which looked perfect. I would think most CRC members have a stack of slides, negatives and cine film, that could be made usable with this treatment. Remember too, this was done by someone with no technical photographic knowledge.
Over the festive season my son got the loan of a Computer Projector that I found most interesting. This was a business quality machine costing around £8000 but models for home use are streaming on the market as I write with costs coming down continually. Within a short time most people will be able to afford one. My first interest was to see how the projector would deal with my DVD films. I was able to blow the picture up to appx 8ft and quality was still acceptable. This was in correct Cinemascope ratio. However 8ft was uncomfortable for the room size and was reduced to between 5-6ft which was ideal. DVD is true HDTV picture resolution which doubles the lines of a standard TV. Sound quality too is of CD quality, giving full cinema surround streophonic sound.
How many of us have wished or tried to build our own home cinema. here we have a system that makes that very easy. Already in America they are selling complete Home Cinema units which turns your spare room into a replica of a cinema with lighting and curtains, full surround sound, etc. The screen size being restricted only by room size.
Disney's Toy Story 2 is the first major film to be made purely for 'filmless' cinema. It costs around œ100,000 to convert a cinema, so unless the film industry absorbs the costs it will be a slow build-up but coming it surely is. Apart from the obvious savings it will mean the picture quality will be the same years later as on the very first showing. The digital images are saved on massive Hard Drives, rather than on the DVD Disc. The only time a film should fail is with a computer system crash. However, even the CD disc is in for a considerable change! My first computer used floppy discs that held only 720K of memory. The standard today is 1.44MB. With the CD came storage of 7-800MB and the DVD CD taking it up to more than twice that amount. However a new system is in production where three layers (using different colours) can be set into a CD which trebles the saving space. The system is being held back at the moment until they perfect the 'backward compatibility' that will allow standard CD's to be used on the same drives, but that too will soon be resolved, I am sure. The present DVD can hold a feature film of over 3 hours long. The new system would be able to hold three such films. To imagine the overall saving in space and materials this would bring, just think of your own Video collection being reduced by more than a third. Or even your total slide or cine collection!
Again, I can hear members comment "But what does this mean for film users?" Well, our saving grace, till now, has been the lower quality of the digital image compared to film. I would be the first to agree that even I am not interested that much while that situation existed. However the massive moves towards higher picture quality has come at an alarming rate and we now have digital cameras using in excess of 3,000,000 pixels and speeding towards full film quality. With the filmless cinema fast approaching and home computer and DI equipment progressing at the same speed WE all have to accept that DI is the thing of the future. This of course, hasn't touched on digital audio recording. MP3 is doing for sound that DI is doing for photographs! But where MP3 differs is in the method of saving! Whereas CD & DVD use a 'moving' system, which creates obvious wear & tear MP3 saves to a Memory Card that you simply plug into your MP3 player ... nothing to wear down. Now think what the future could be if/when these cards can save both sound and vision in large enough chunks for commercial use! "Startreck" technology doesn't look so impossible anymore.
By the way, did you know that both DI and MP3 use the same principles for reducing file sizes! In photography millions of colours are recorded, including those humans can't see. Likewise, MP3 saves every sound, even those beyond the range of the human ear. When saving pictures and sound the computer system omits these unusable colours and sounds so that the final save is massively reduced. On playing back we are unaware that they were ever there in the first place. What was that old saying! "What your eyes (ears) don't see (hear), your heart doesn't grieve".
All I am trying to say is, please don't turn your backs on the new technology or use it as a defence to your own feeling about film and chemical photographic production
However none of this can take away from US, the excitement of viewing our first slide and cine films, as we took them out of the developing tank, or watching the image (first in black and white, then in colour) develop in the processing dish. Nor the same excitement and apprehension when posting off your latest cine production and waiting for it to drop through the letter box a week or so later. These experiences are still with us as we continue to use film and cameras and like yourselves, I have no wish to stop using my camera as long as film and chemicals are available, which will be for a long time yet. However WE do have to embrace the new technology, which lets face it, is merely a 'tool' that we can use to advantage. Most of us have now got slides/negatives/cine that have lost some of their quality with the passing years and while we hope that the more later work has a more permanence built in. We are the first generation who can see our past, over a hundred years and more, in photographic quality, but who hasn't experienced the disappointment of discovering a very old family photograph that has almost faded away and almost impossible to correct. Those days are virtually gone with the use of DI. No matter what improvements the future brings, digitally recorded images and sound with be compatible and easily transferred. So what could be better than to be able to save all your present transparencies, negatives and cine films to the new system, today. Not forgetting that your present analog video films that can be converted to digital too. Think of the many hours of enjoyment you can have not just converting your slide programmes but even mixing still and moving images in the same programme and saved to a small CD that will preserve them for future family to enjoy, at exactly the same quality as when you made them.
And mentioning "small CD's" just imagine what the triple level laser track recording could do for Mini CD's. Discs less than half the size of present Mini CD's would make the production of recording and playback machines of appx wristwatch size, possible.