Media Technology

The "media" as we know them started with the invention of photography, in June or July of 1827, by Joseph Nicephore Niepce. There had been many precursors, the camera obscura ("dark room") being perhaps the most prominent. But Niepce brought together an image focused inside a box with an image-fixing medium that reacted to light but was then treated so as to stop further exposure when the image was formed.

Countless modifications by many other pioneering photographers perfected the photographic process. What started as a many-hours ordeal to expose ended as the snap of a shutter. Largely experimental processing was replaced by clearly-defined steps with commercially-available chemicals. Transparent negatives would be used to make unlimited numbers of prints on sensitized papers. Photo-etching processes and halftone allowed widespread publication of photographs in newspapers and books.

Soon work began on motion pictures. Eduard Muybridge and others took photographs in series, of horses galloping, people walking and so forth. The individual photos could be placed inside the zoopraxiscope, either projected in series or revealed by slits in the walls of a spinning cylinder, they appeared to move. It was not long before George Eastman's photographic film was perforated and exposed in Biograph cameras and prints projected, frame by frame with a maltese cross movement and illuminated by carbon arc lamps, filling movie theaters around the country.

The holy grail then moved to sound reproduction on movie film, achieved by two methods to create a stripe along side the pictures that modulated the light passing through to a photocell. Movies became the talkies.
As radio moved sound through the "airwaves", it became clear that pictures would soon follow over the air--television. The first boardcast featured Felix the Cat, whose image was slit-scanned to decompose it by a rotating disk, so a stream of brightness levels could be transmitted and reconstructed at the receiver. More sophisticated methods appeared; the iconoscope and others scanned an optical image with electrons, which was recreated at the receiver by painting it onto a cathode ray tube. Television was a reality before World War II, but became a mass medium after the war.

Television began a long period of incremental improvements and new inventions. Videotape became a reality in the 1950s and, gradually, computer controllers permitted video editing. Film negative and equipment improved incrementally as well, with more portable equipment, better images and less bulky sound equipment.
Claude Shannon wrote a paper in 1948 that rationalize the process of sending a signal over a noisy channel. This was of most direct utility initially for the Bell Telephone system (he worked at Bell Labs) but it laid the mathematical basis for understanding how much information would be stored in a given medium, giving reasonable engineering goals for a host of communications equipment.

In the 1960s and beyond, television equipment was radically improved by using transistors, computer controllers and high-tolerance manufacturing. Japanese companies revolutionized video with U-Matic, BetaMax and VHS and then C-format 1/2" tape technology. These created a huge home video market and permitted acceptable video production and editing by less-highly-trained staff. Cameras began using solid-state CCD pickups, which were longer-lasting and more stable than tube pickups, as well as much easier to set up and use.

With miniaturization, film lost out to smaller-format video for news gathering and documentaries. Video editing systems for small-format tape became frame-accurate and could produce an Edit Decision List (EDL) to semi-automatically assemble edits on broadcast tape.

All of these factors lowered the cost of making broadcast-quality video while lowering the technical requirements needed compared with the previous generation of video equipment. This was a boon to broadcasters, which lobbied the FCC successfully in the 1980s to soften quality standards for broadcast video and loosen training requirements for the operators of video equipment at television stations. As these factors lowered the over all cost of productions, at least on the technical side, a new sort of semi-professional production house rose to the task of making VHS tapes for industry and individuals.

In the 1970s there was still enough money in industrial films that a $100,000 budget was not uncommon, which was enough to make a product with high production values and still make a sustainable profit. By the 1990s, expectations of industrial PR people had been lowered sufficiently that a $25,000 budget was often a tough sell for a presentation to be distributed on VHS, Expectations were conditioned by the semi-high quality of home video equipment costing under $1,000, the seeming simplicity of making home videos and the like, as well as the markedly lower cost of VHS tapes versus film prints. This "price gap" allowed successful wedding video makers to branch into the industrial video market and produce (barely) successful product, with cost-cutting to permit a profit margin to be had even with curtailed budgets.

This forced many former filmmakers out of the business altogether, not having the wherewithal to capitalize new video equipment on much lower margins. The wedding video people were able to work up because they had already started with cheaper video equipment adequate for home VHS product. This, at least from what I have observed, has lead to a wholesale turnover in the industrial market with much less sophisticated tapes "being good enough".

Herein lies the paradox of technological advances: One would think that cheaper and (for the most part) better equipment would promote better productions. However, the outcome was the opposite of this, largely because of the altered standards of media buyers who could see that cheaper equipment could give (basically) the same results than older, more expensive equipment. This, the buyer's surmised, was reason enough to expect that productions could be made for much less. The real problem probably wasn't the media buyers so much as their bosses or higher, who generally pride themselves with snap judgments about things (such as lower-cost video equipment) that "obviously" would lower the cost of videos the company wants to make.

The trouble with this sort of prejudice is that it afflicts every negotiation about prices, driving budgets close to the bone because of a misconception about the costs of production, which are not driven predominately by equipment costs (though that might have been an excuse used decades before to "explain" too-high costs). This may be a classic case of being bitten back by spreading earlier misinformation.

The situation describe above pertained to the 1990s. Since then, video technology has moved much further, into the confusing world of multiple High Definition standards, with both amateur and professional camera equipment recording onto internal optical or hard disks, with editing on computers with a HD deliverable right off the computer. Although HDTV has raised the ante, requiring a huge up front investment in new, high-bandwidth equipment, the battle already is joined to convince semi-pros that some newer "prosumer" gear is at least almost ready for prime time. No, this gear will not be good enough for a full-fledged studio production, intercut with studio cameras many times their cost. However, they may be acceptable for news gathering and local documentaries that are simply too risky to make with $50,000 cameras on a shoestring budget.

So, however much digital cameras in the $3,500 range have been able to crack local television markets for some free lancers, High Definition once again resets the mark. This benefits no one as much as the equipment manufactures and their dealers. Once again, would-be production companies must mortgage their future just to gain entry into the uncertain market of television production.

Probably the only way to make a real difference in local television production would be to renew the FCC requirement instated in the 1960s, requiring that TV stations produce local programming to fill the slot from 7:30 to 8pm. This would create, as it did then, job opportunities for a large number of producers, cameramen and editors throughout the country, as well as a great quantity of locally-originated programming. This would restore a great system for learning production. A public-service requirement would reinstate documentaries at the local and regional level, which, in all likelihood, would be accepted by the public as a variation on the so-called "reality" shows that have become so popular in the meantime.