Digital Rust

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Please check back in a few weeks

This section was always going to be a little difficult due to the nature of the range of subjects and how you reach the final images.

Dangerous chemicals and whacky machines were the way things used to be done. Flash units made by exploding small amounts of Magnesium !!!! and the infamous Zoetrope !!

100 years further on and we are stuck in the digital arena. Ultimately converting the real world analogue into our best efforts in the digital domain. I think this is very sad in many ways, if you don't bother reading anything else in the next 12 months.....make an effort to understand the NYQUIST theorem. To cut a very long story short this is responsible for just about every form of audio and visual experience we currently have to play with. When Canon says it's raw data output is 14 bits/ pixel, you download an MP3 file off Itunes at 320K/sec and your HDMI cables support 10Gb/s it all boils down to Nyquist. Lots of websites cover this in remarkable depth, but for a quick overview try here

Anyway, I digress badly.....back to the plot

The ubiquitous software used in 99.9% of all images you see in print are generated at some stage in the chain by Adobe Photoshop. You need to learn how to use this software if you have any hope of producing meaningfull pro or semipro output.

Video editing is a bit more obtuse, but again I use Adobe Premier and After effects for the bulk of my output. Mac users swear by Final Cut Pro, I have no experience of this but would love to have somebody show me this software.
DV cameras, DSLR's and mobile phones have become the front end of this generation process, cheap hard drives are the middleman and youtube, dvd and streaming media at the receiving end. The content generated is as diverse as it was 100 years ago however the way we consume it is completely different. Here is not the place to get bogged down in all this, so I will cut to the chase

First go out and shoot some video

Transfer this to your computer and construct something meaningfull or entertaining

Perform the necessary effects, audio and encoding

output to your host media


The great thing about all the above is that anyone can do this at home using very cheap, or even free software / hardware with a little time and effort.