Going High Definition
“Are you ready, do you need anything?”
I shook my head and said, “I’ll just do what I do, and no technology changes that.”
But now, as I’m anchoring our first High Definition newscast, I’m struck with perspective. True, I am still doing what I’ve been doing since 1988 – sharing news, information and personality with viewers. But I remember when I started; we shot on ¾ inch video. That was a big move from film, allowing people to get their news much quicker. Whew those were heavy cameras connected by cable to the heavy, awkward tape decks carried over the shoulder. We broadcast over standard, analog signals that every house received for free. Cable was still young. Heck, so was FOX. TVs were far from flat. Plasma was only what we studied in biology.
Now, forget the film canisters from newscasts gone by. They are covered in dust in the rafters. The ¾ inch tapes, in their thick, black, plastic casings are up in the rafters too, and the beta tapes that followed, line a closet wall in the newsroom being pushed aside for the books holding hundreds of DVDs.
It’s amazing that cameras now record on discs, which are put into a machine and edited with the click of a mouse. I was just reminiscing with a friend of how fun it was to splice and tape together our family home film reels. I can still hear the banging (oh, I should say gentle touch) of the roller knobs we used to move that ¾ inch tape to edit in a flash. Same with Beta tape, and now, no film, no tape, just discs. Funny thing that should be even quicker, but the video needs to be ingested first and then edited. Inpatient old fogies like me miss the days of tape-to-tape editing. We were fast!
Oh, and instead of news feeds coming right to our computers from CNN and FOX, or the internet today, we had the beep, beep, de, beepedybeep of the Twix machine typing info that we ripped off the printer and ran back to our typewriters to write news stories on 8 layers of carbon paper. Each layer went to the anchor, director, producer, TD and teleprompter. Infact, we taped each script together to run through the conveyer belt of the teleprompter. It sure was exciting when a producer dropped a script. We would feverishly un-tape the scripts, try not to rip them, and re-tape them together to fit through the machine so the anchors wouldn’t miss a beat. And to think that was ‘state of the art’ technology back then! So, we’re now high definition. If you have an HD TV, it’s real sharp and snazzy. Most people still have the ‘old’ TVs, but the new graphics, bells and whistles are easy to see. So, I’m still doing what I do, but now this new technology is showing the pimple on my chin much clearer. Joy.
I shook my head and said, “I’ll just do what I do, and no technology changes that.”
But now, as I’m anchoring our first High Definition newscast, I’m struck with perspective. True, I am still doing what I’ve been doing since 1988 – sharing news, information and personality with viewers. But I remember when I started; we shot on ¾ inch video. That was a big move from film, allowing people to get their news much quicker. Whew those were heavy cameras connected by cable to the heavy, awkward tape decks carried over the shoulder. We broadcast over standard, analog signals that every house received for free. Cable was still young. Heck, so was FOX. TVs were far from flat. Plasma was only what we studied in biology.
Now, forget the film canisters from newscasts gone by. They are covered in dust in the rafters. The ¾ inch tapes, in their thick, black, plastic casings are up in the rafters too, and the beta tapes that followed, line a closet wall in the newsroom being pushed aside for the books holding hundreds of DVDs.
It’s amazing that cameras now record on discs, which are put into a machine and edited with the click of a mouse. I was just reminiscing with a friend of how fun it was to splice and tape together our family home film reels. I can still hear the banging (oh, I should say gentle touch) of the roller knobs we used to move that ¾ inch tape to edit in a flash. Same with Beta tape, and now, no film, no tape, just discs. Funny thing that should be even quicker, but the video needs to be ingested first and then edited. Inpatient old fogies like me miss the days of tape-to-tape editing. We were fast!
Oh, and instead of news feeds coming right to our computers from CNN and FOX, or the internet today, we had the beep, beep, de, beepedybeep of the Twix machine typing info that we ripped off the printer and ran back to our typewriters to write news stories on 8 layers of carbon paper. Each layer went to the anchor, director, producer, TD and teleprompter. Infact, we taped each script together to run through the conveyer belt of the teleprompter. It sure was exciting when a producer dropped a script. We would feverishly un-tape the scripts, try not to rip them, and re-tape them together to fit through the machine so the anchors wouldn’t miss a beat. And to think that was ‘state of the art’ technology back then! So, we’re now high definition. If you have an HD TV, it’s real sharp and snazzy. Most people still have the ‘old’ TVs, but the new graphics, bells and whistles are easy to see. So, I’m still doing what I do, but now this new technology is showing the pimple on my chin much clearer. Joy.
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