Outraged of Leith
June 10, 2008
Many people say I can’t read (being a hen…) but I can, and on Sunday, while relaxing in my hammock and nibbling on poppy seeds, I saw this appalling article in the Scotland on Sunday… frankly it’s outrageous. If I could fly further than a few feet without dislocating a wing muscle I’d fly over wiltshire and give them something to think about… those poor chickens, only used to the lovely wide open spaces of that nice free range farm, pecking gently amidst the scattered corn seeds and occasionally laying an egg, all cooped up in the back of a car… it’s enough to make you start thinking of Sunday lunch… and not in a
good way!
Anyway, that’s enough ranting from me. Next week we’ll be back to films!
Has HD hit a ‘Tipping Point’?
June 4, 2008
A ‘Tipping Point’ is reached when ”the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable” - or so said Malcolm Gladwell in his excellent book on the nature of tipping points. In his book he remarked on the shape taken by an epidemic, that it can reach a point when suddenly it spreads like wildfire, everyone catches it, and then just as quickly it can die out. He then took that shape and applied it to all sorts of situations in life. He used the ‘tipping point’ argument to explain how films with tiny budgets or books by unknown authors can suddenly can suddenly become world-wide hits based simply on a spreading word-of-mouth.
Although the dimming of the lights part of the analogy is probably not the case with HD TV, with the launch of freesat at the beginning of the month finally offering people the opportunity to realise the potential of those huge HD Ready TVs they all bought two Christmas’s ago, is this finally the tipping point for HD TV.
Certainly some large corporate have been producing films on HD for a while now, even though they have often only delivered it to staff and customers on Standard Definition, because the infrastructure to watch high definition pictures just hasn’t been widely available. That is certainly now changing. Blu-Ray DVDs are becoming more popular and it won’t be long before the internet can offer subscribers broadband that can deliver true HD pictures. Certainly within some companies their intranets are already working towards this.
This month we produced a number of short films shot on HD for a client who provides television and internet systems to hotels and who are about to launch a full HD TV delivery platform for hotel clients. Other clients want to shoot on HD to start building an HD library of footage for future projects. The momentum to HD is certainly growing and will accelerate.
