4 Tech Dinosaurs of Video Production ...

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During a recent spring-clean of our database, we archived several fields that were no longer being used and just cluttered up the system.

Fax number' was an obvious one to remove given that;

a) Our office does not have a fax machine, and

b) In a quick straw poll of the office, I was one of the few people who'd ever even used one.

That unwelcome reminder of my own mortality got me thinking about the technology that gets left behind. Those machines that once promised a future of unparalleled efficiency, only to be sacrificed to the great gadget landfill in the sky.

Here's my rundown of the video production technologies that I think are in danger of being archived' in the next decade

1. Email to Collaborate on Video I recently read a scary prediction that my children won't have an email account. They'll be so used to the instantaneousness' of social media and chat applications that the idea of downloading new mail will be as alien as a phone booth.

In some ways I wouldn't miss email. But gathering people's thoughts on something creative like a video is painful; long email threads are confusing and cumbersome, mistakes are easily made, inaccuracies and problems seem to be multiplied.

Not only should the comments on footage be located to the second (and in some cases, to the frame), but they need to be displayed as a conversation. Nuance and meaning can so easily be lost in a stream of individual messages that email conversations create.

2. DVDs to Review & Approve Video Like it's predecessor the VHS tape, DVD is waiting for the evolutionary hammer of progress to fall. Loading a physical thing into a machine seems out dated, even to an old timer like me. Sure, they're cheap, relatively easy to create and light enough to be sent to others, but using them to share video nowadays must be like visiting a travel agency to book a holiday.

Given that modern video productions involve a wide variety of collaborators, sending a DVD copy to lots of different people is laborious and costly. When the package is delivered, will the recipient even be in the country, never mind in their office? Much better to send the clips to them to pick up wherever they are, whenever they need to see it so that the production can continue and not be stalled waiting for the boss to return to their desk.

3. Racks to Store Video Racks of servers have become a familiar sight in the media industry since the transition to file based workflows. The mass of video being shot, the proliferation of multi-cam shoots and the explosion in video resolution has decreed that IT have a massive say in how media is provisioned in the modern broadcast and production era. So the sight of computer servers is a given, right?

Not quite.

Servers are great for accessing that stuff you need right there, right then. But they have an annoying habit of getting themselves full, are exorbitantly expensive to run and need a team of technical experts to maintain and scale. They are also very vulnerable to acts of god, war or clumsy humans who treat them like the world's most expensive coffee coaster.

Modern producers and broadcasters need rapidly scalable storage, that can handle any amount of video content, in any format and keep it all safe and sound from the threat of the Financial Director, the gods and the cafetiere.

4. Disconnected Video Logging Due to the massive increase in video content (see point 3), when a Director is asking for a precise moment on a clip, it's now harder than ever to find. The industry's answer to this has always been to employ a small army of loggers (usually runners) to meticulously index what is happening on screen - typed into a file divorced from the video - hoping no mistakes are made on the timecode.

In reality, this only sort of worked in a previous life. When shows were recorded to a physical tape, attaching a physical piece of paper to that tape made sense (apart from when the paper became separated from the tape, but that's another blog). Now everything's digital and tape-free, it's difficult to maintain that same way of working.

These days we expect a Google-level of search in terms of accuracy and speed, but that can only happen if logs are added in a sophisticated way.

Hint: this does not include Microsoft Word!

What technology habits do you think will become extinct in the media industry? Share your ideas in the comments below!

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