The Future Is Here
In Taipei there was a coffee shop around the corner from the hotel I stayed in. I had shot some video the day before in Jioufen and had sat down to have morning coffee and look over the footage.
I took this photo because it struck me how amazing it was to be doing what I was doing. When I was in high school video editing was done using tape to tape editing, where a computer controller would do a controlled record to copy a section of tape from one tape to another. If you wanted to inject something in the middle, you had to re-edit everything from that point forward (unless you had a system that supported edit lists, which cost tens of thousands of dollars). When I was in college, video editing involved using the Avid, a specially designed hardware board in a Mac that could handle non-linear editing (NLE). The system cost tens of thousands of dollars, and we only had two for the entire film program, so students were constantly competing for time and space on the Avid’s limited hard drives.
Ten years later I’m shooting video with a $150 camera that has higher quality than anything I’ve ever shot on and has 2 hours of storage on a 4 gig card at 60 FPS. My editing setup is an MacBook, a 500 gigabyte external hard drive, and iMovie, a setup so portable I can bring it with me 8000 miles from home and still comfortably edit. I can upload my video to YouTube or Facebook and have more people see my work than any of my previous videos combined.
These kids today have no idea what they missed out on.