The Digital Revolution

Ever since the first strip of celluloid passed through a movie projector, the problem of a degrading negative has plagued the film industry. Fading and the ubiquitous scratches are the hallmarks of older films. The outright destruction by age of old celluloid films has reached the point where less than half of the films made before 1950 remain intact. The technology of film has been a great leap forward, but even with the much more stable film stocks of today, it is not a permanent one.

The promise of a new revolution in the way films are shot may hold the solution to both the problem of preserving motion pictures for the ages and giving us the highest possible quality with respect to viewing. But this technology is putting power in the hands of the citizen filmmaker too.

With the advent of low cost desk top computers and relatively cheap editing software, what once was strictly the domain of Steven Spielberg and the like has been spread abroad to everyone who has a cinematic turn of mind. This digital revolution in filmmaking is proving to be as powerful as the original invention of the movie camera.

As in the original image revolution the power to craft a film without the massive overhead of a studio has opened up the medium to people who may have never been able to break into show business.

The weapons of this revolution are:

(1) The Digital Camera. It still looks relatively like an old film camera, but the guts are a small computer and in place of the lens, a ccd-charged couple device. The ccd is familiar to everyone who has a camcorder. A ccd is basically a chip that gathers light and turns it into digital information that a computer can understand. Instead of big bulky film canisters to handle, the image is placed on small digital tape or transferable memory.

(2) The Computer. With microprocessors now reaching speeds of one gigahertz the power to manipulate image data has become easy. Software around a hundred dollars will allow you to edit, put in cool transitions, think of Star Wars and the way one picture would wipe another off the screen, and add a sound track. For more money software that produces special effects approaching big studio quality can give any inexpensive digital film Hollywood style polish. However digital has a way to go before it can replace film. The Blair Witch Project, which was shot mostly with a digital camera, had to be enhanced before it was released to the big screen.

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