PRACTICAL DV FILMMAKING

Practical DV FilmMaking

• Overview
• Inside video
• Films and how they work
• Pre-production
• Production tools
• Production aesthetics
• Post-production tools
• Post-production aesthetics
• Careers and distribution
• Mapping the industry
• Glossary of film and video terms

A brief history of digital technology

DV has grown in the last decade from a corner of the video industry into a mainstay of the consumer leisure industry. Developments have been rapid in this early stage of the DV revolution, so it is easy to confuse the passing fads from the long-lasting major changes to the industry. But you could chart the advance of digital video in two simple words: Apple and compression.

A brief history of digital video

It was the arrival of the Apple Computer in 1984 that heralded the start of the multimedia age 'for the rest of us', as the company logo read. The big leap forward was the 'graphical user interface'; in other words, a more user-friendly way of dealing with computers, by having windows instead of glowing green letters on a black screen. This windows layout is the only feasible way for creative programs to work because you need to be able to work with several different kinds of commands at once - palettes of colours, video timelines and so on. The use of Microsoft Windows on the vast majority of the world's computers is a direct result of the pioneering work done by Apple's founders and by com­panies such as Lotus, Adobe and Digital Research Inc. Apple supremo Steve Jobs crops up again later in our short history lesson as the pioneer of another big step forward.

The important breakthrough in thinking was the view by Apple that computers could be creative tools, as Apple's early Macintosh home computers came equipped with painting software as well as spread­sheets. Rather than adopt a passive, consumer ethos for its products, Apple foresaw the Mac as some­thing owned by makers, users and creators.

We used to edit in a very long-winded way, piecing together bits of film with tape or glue. Video was not much of a leap forward as you simply had two VCRs hooked up and you copied your good stuff from one tape onto your blank tape on the next VCR. It made sense later to call this 'linear' editing, since you laid down the bits of good footage one after the other and, crucially, there was no going back. Once you had copied them to tape you couldn't revisit an earlier section and re-edit it without having to redo all the following clips too. On the plus side, editors had to be more decisive than today.

So, when Avid, a leading multimedia