I was just sat at my iMac finishing off some graphics for an award ceremony we’re doing in a week or so, whilst reviewing some rushes from the Taste The Wild shoot we’re working on currently on my iPad. I am also burning a DVD on my MacBookPro and then my phone rang..
In a moment of clarity I realised just what a fan of Apple products I am, and what a pickle I would be in if I lost any of them. Aside from the shiny G5 Mac pros we use at red90 HQ, the iMac means I can edit into the wee small hours at home (which I have been doing a lot of these past couple of weeks), the iMac means I can edit out on the road (it is coming to North Wales with me tomorrow!), the iPad is a brilliant tool for taking to meetings and showing clients rushes and rough edits, the quality is superb and it is so portable (I took it on the tube the other week & it is much easier to lug around than a laptop) and my new toy, the iPhone5, just gives me an office in my pocket. Email, HD video, blogging – all done one one small device.
What is the point of this blog? It’s not to boast about how much hardware I have at my disposal, but rather to show how much technology has integrated into society in our business and personal life. When I first got into video production, you could watch your film on a VHS tape – magical at the time, but it would fade, snap, or just plain get erased (usually by my dad recording the latest episode of Open All Hours) – these days there is so much choice as to where the moving image is seen. Once we make a programme it can end up on any manner of screen, from a smartphone to a forty foot screen in front of an audience of thousands. The biggest revolution is the way the internet has opened up the world to us at the click of a button – as I’ve said before, this blog is been looked at by people worldwide, I think I can add Argentina to the ever growing list now – hello to you wherever you’re reading this.
But what does this mean to me as a film maker and my customers? Well it means that your audience is now global, you can, at very reasonable costs, reach billions of people worldwide. YouTube gets 4 BILLION hits a day, FOUR BILLION! More and more of our work doesn’t even end up on disc, it goes straight out into the world wide web – think of how many leaflets you’d have to print to get your message out to that many people. Well, erm, 4 billion actually.
Comments 2
I’m an open-source fan, so the brand names of my hardware aren’t the same, but the end result surely is. It is phenomenal to enjoy every day the technologies that were the sci-fi of my childhood.
I agree completely! As a small boy 30 years ago I remember going to my grandfather’s office where this new fangled machine called a computer was sat, taking up the space the size of a large truck.
The phone I’m writing this reply on now is thousands of times smaller & millions of times more powerful.
Even as someone involved with technology on a daily basis, it’s good to take a step back every now and again to appreciate how far we have come in those three decades.
Gadgets and innovations fascinate and captivate me & I’m lucky I get paid to play with them..