Butch aka Travis

Made this for everyone, just for the hell of it

The other day someone asked me what i was doing at Uni. I told them it is a Master of Media Production. They looked at me as if i were somes sort of alien. “So you want to make movies?”

I replied with a ‘yeah, but thats not all the Masters is about’. I explained how it incorporates emerging technology and media etc. etc.

Once again i received a confused blank stare. He asked me what my Bachelors Degree was, i told him it was a Bachelor of Digital Media Production. Again i got the look.

I very breifly explained what the degree was, i must have done a pretty bad job of it because he just said straight back to me, “Sounds a little pointless, what can you do in the end, why don’t you do engineering or something”.

His point was that he saw no point in learning about Digital, he more or less had no idea what Digital Media is.

So i gave him my idea of Digital Media.

You can’t stop Digital. Digital will become the greatest leveller of all time.
When people put in place measures to stop some sort of Digital progression (like the USA is trying to do with Digital Radio), it is a stop gap solution. It won’t last long. The Digital Media equivalent will emerge and it will emerge as the preferable media….why watch Analog TV when we can watch Digital?

The very fact is that the world is undertaking a massive revolution, technolgy is advancing faster than ever before and the fact that people are trying to stop digital from advancing is like whistling into the wind.

I get the feeling that quite a few of the old industry stagers would like to stem the rise of Digital as they would need to start all over again learning how to use their Digital equivalent. Media Moguls and Media outlet owners must be getting worried as the broadcasting technology is alot more accessable to the average man, and how are they going to stop it? They need to go digital as well.

I can imagine a specialist film editor who used to sit in his office splicing reels all day, all of a sudden Digital arrives and with it Digital Editing suites. He would have taken one look at it and fainted, all of a sudden his skills are almost obsolete, now anyone (and i mean anyone) can edit film (provided they have a computer).

I have a VHS player and a DVD player and the difference in quality is astounding. The biggest problem with analog is it receives the file as a whole, as it is. Eg. Tranferring analog photos to a computer vs transferring digital photos to a computer.

(Analog)
You take a photo. The camera captures the image as the lens sees it, it imprints it on to film, already there is loss of quality as the camera has captured the scene as it look. You take the film to be printed, more loss of quality as the process of tranferring film to print loses quality. You then take the photo to a scanner and scan it. The computer has it now and it is noticebly different from the original scene you attempted to capture.
You see Analog sends a signal wave, the wave is captured and each time it looses a little of its quality, thats why when you are in your car the music quality on the radio is never CD quality, despite the fact it has been taken form a CD or MP3 file.

(Digital)
You take a photo, the camera does not imprint the scene but instead turns the captured scene into a series of 000101001101, which is binary code, so infact it does not store an image but a file. The file is then transferred onto a computer. The computer does not read an image, it reads a binary code file and then interprets it. It appears on you screen as it was caputured, not as an image, but as a visual interpretation fo binary code.
You see it is always intepreted like this, hence Digital never loses quality, you transfer a movie from VHS to VHS to VHS by the end it looks like shit, you transfer from DVD to DVD to DVD etc. it will always hold its quality.

This is relevant ot my research as i am doing the ‘emergence if digital radio’ . I had never known much about this medium until we had the lecture in eMerging Media last week and i was entranced. It all sounds so cool to me, on top of the the possibilities are endless. Imagine driving down the Great Ocean Road, your (digital) radio blasting out CD like quality music from a radio station in Brisbane (or Brazil?, ill look into it).

That would be so cool…..

want to find out more? Look here, I am using this as a reference in my Report