Week 8 Material Blog Part 1

The first part of week 8's material focused on digital technology as a subcategory of digital storytelling.  Digital technology uses representative data consisting of 1's and 0's to represent what either a picture, video or audio clip is that can be later translated and reconverted to its original medium.  Analog technology is a pure physical representation of the source.  The advantage to digital is a much smaller less expensive result that, for most purposes, suites the need of the application.  Digital has been improving and coming closer to being indistinguishable from analog by utilizing higher resolutions with more mega pixels or faster sampling rates for audio at high bit rates.  However analog is still way ahead when it comes to pure quality.

This all is very relevant to my major as camera's and sound are the most important tools for film production.  Knowing what decisions to make regarding the use of digital and analog is very important as it determines costs and quality.  Where it is much cheaper to use digital, analog sources, like film, offer much higher quality.  Having directed and worked on both analog productions using 35mm and 16mm film, as well as digital medium in the form of uncompressed HD it is clear that both mediums have their pros and cons.  Understanding the differences is crucial to making your final product effective whether its a commercial production or a film.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/tg-daily-hands-4k-red-camera-unwrapping-lamborghini-video-cameras,5156.html

The website I found is a description and review of a very interesting relatively new digital technology for a camera called RED.  Where HD uses 1080p resolution, RED uses 4000p resolution.  This is important as it is a big step for digital in approaching analog quality.  Where film is still unmatched in its contrast and technical factors, digital is getting very close and to the common viewer is virtually identical.  This means lower cost for films and an easier more fluid shooting environment.  On a production using film, time has to be taken out every 10 minutes of filming time to load new film into the cameras.  With digital it is possible to continuously film uninterrupted.