The incredibly rapid changes in technology that we’ve been experiencing have been slowly coming along on the camera side.
Digital Cinema cameras today are little more than a computer with a lens attached on front, the truest of the analog to digital conversion, taking in light and making pixels.
Arri’s Alexa and RED’s Epic were moving in the right direction, and until March, 2011 we still lived in a tape-based world. Cameras and recordings were digital, but we were still bound to a physical device to record and archive our media.
The Fukushima, Japan disaster changed that in an instant.
The major earthquake that caused an accident in the Fukishima nuclear power plant destroyed virtually all of the manufacturing facilities that created the industry standard tape media for acquisition and archive – gone in a heartbeat.
“Tapeless” became more than just an experiment, it became the reality for thousands of productions worldwide.
Change was forced on the industry, right at a point where many of the manufacturers and broadcasters had just completed the transition to High Definition. With the disaster, everything they had created their entire infrastructures around was gone.
The postproduction people, however, were the most prepared for that change. They had been handling the heavy lifting required to handle HD content for years.
Yet the post houses were not immune. They may have thought they were ready, even protected. Yet the secondary fallout from the nuclear disaster was the massive machine cores in these facilities. They had overflowed with incredibly expensive decks and devices that no longer had any use but left behind unyieldingly amounts of debt, all but decimating most of the independent post facilities.
While the final outcome is still being determined, smaller, more responsive attitude and facilities have come with the changes. In my opinion people, are less reluctant to evolve now, reticent on moving to a full 4K workflow because of recent experiences.
Like it or not, the change is still coming.
