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As the Information Age ushered in gargantuan changes in all aspects of our life, it certainly has revolutionized mass media to produce faster outputs with the aid of computers, digital videos and cameras. Although the technology of digital technology is a complex, technically challenging field, it is one of the single most crucial technologies driving the transition from analogue to digital media. What it does is to effectively make the flow of information faster and more convenient to reach the target audience. Digital technology is now the modern conduit for carrying information from one place to another. Take for instance, the news channel we see on television. These are still viable sources of information but why are these news companies still need to have their own websites where people can have access to their news and features? This is because they widening the scope of their news into multimedia so that they can reach out to more people and interact with them. In this way, communication is more dynamic than ever before with the aid of digital technology.
Indeed, digital technology has pounced upon the old ways of making videos for film and television. Take for instance the traditional camera, in the old days these can be these bulky things that you need to shoot something you want to be seen on film or television. Actually, it was in 1965 that the first video camera/recorder, Portapak, was released in New York by the Sony Corporation. Although the early equipment was relatively heavy and its black-and-white half-inch image quality poor (not of broadcast quality) and there was no editing equipment, it provided the first access to the potential creative use of video. Until then, video equipment existed only as enormously expensive, cumbersome television-camera-and-broadcast apparatus restricted to use within tightly controlled broadcast transmission facilities (Lovejoy, 2004, p. 94).
In the traditional form of gathering news stories to be in television, the reporters have to go on location, shoot the video and go back to the station for the video to be edited. The video and audio in most news broadcasts originates from videotape that has been loaded into an automated videotape playback unit (Keirstead, 2005, p. 21). After editing, it is the time when this video can be aired on live television. The process can be time constraining since analog technology needs to have to go through these processes in order for the news will be suitable to aired live.
Nowadays, you can have cameras the size as our palm and you do not have to carry film reels in order to record your video. You can play it after the shoot and even slice it right there and then. Unlike before, where standard VHS and 8-mm camcorder formats can record the divisions between 240 closely spaced vertical lines on a video screen or Super VHS and Hi8 that make out 400 lines, digital recording today can have the clarity to a stunning 500 lines or more (Weiner, 25 November 1996). Before, the most common film formats are super-8, 16mm, and 35mm that are the largest also has the finest grain, the highest definition. One might think therefore that 35mm’s high definition would mean that it is the only film stock used in production for television. This has not been the case. Both economic and aesthetic factors have created specific niches for each of the formats. Inexpensive super-8 (and its immediate predecessor, “regular” 8mm) was the size of choice for home movie makers for over three decades, until the 1980s when low-cost video cameras virtually destroyed the super-8 market. For documentary work and low-budget films, 16mm film is used (Butler, 2002, p. 136). But these cheaper films can look grainy on screen. With a digital video camera, one can be assured of the onscreen clarity of your video that has includes a high definition serial digital interface (SDI) output connectors that permits uncompressed output for seamless integration into broadcast studios (Lonergan, 2005).
Not only in terms of clarity that digital supersedes analog, we can also maximize digital technology’s ability to compress large videos into smaller formats. The huge amounts of information needed to convey images such as full screen color stills or full screen, full motion video represent one of the greatest challenges of people in the media industry. The problem is both one of storage and processing power. It may be more of one than the other, depending on the approach of the multimedia system. For example, in the sector of the multimedia industry focusing on compact disc media, even the huge capacity of the disc looks modest compared to the demands of video. A compact disc-for all its hundreds of megabytes of storage space-could hold only about 30 seconds of uncompressed ‘television quality’ full screen video. And even if we wanted to store such a short segment, we could never get it off the disc fast enough to replicate full motion. The rate of data transfer needed would be well beyond the maximum capabilities of most compact disc systems. This is a problem of storage and transfer. As far as delivering the end product is concerned, somewhere in the chain a powerful computer is needed. In the 1980s, multimedia could never have been a viable industry simply because most of the computers of the day were not powerful enough for the job. And those that had the power were far too expensive to be used except in specialist, high value applications. But today, digital technology can accommodate multimedia that can address a big audience because its principal delivery technology is widely and cheaply available. In simple terms, desktop computers of the late 1990s-and appliances based on the same underlying technology-are now powerful and cheap enough to deliver multimedia quite routinely to millions of people all over the world. While multimedia in general needed to await the arrival of affordable computing power to deliver its fruits, digital video within multimedia relies foremost on techniques of compression which squeeze huge digital video files down to more manageable size and then allow the same files to be decompressed at the point of delivery (Feldman, 1997, p. 27).
Yet, the biggest advantage of digital technology is far greatest in the aspect of convergence. On the Internet itself, the convergence is frequently used to describe the ability to send voice and data together over a single Internet network. However, the real meaning is more fundamental—the conversion of analog signals to digital. Traditional audio and video are recorded in analog mode—as a continuous signal. Digital mode means the representation of any content by means of numbers, a series of 0s and 1s. While conversion of analog content to digital does not preserve all the subtleties captured by analog recording (very high and very low frequencies in sound or detailed background in film, for example), it has some major advantages. For one thing, as you have probably experienced, the media of analog such as videotape and compact discs deteriorates with use, degrading the quality of the content. It can also be difficult to transfer from one medium or system to another.
Digital content, on the other hand, does not deteriorate over time and can be copied an almost infinite number of times without a decrease in quality. It can also be transmitted over networks—especially the Internet—with fidelity. That makes the content more accessible to more people in more places over a variety of devices.
Although there is no commonly accepted definition of digital convergence, Hoffman (2003) offers a helpful description:
Digital convergence [is] the integration of computers, communications and consumer electronics. Data and text were converted into digital form for the very first computers years ago; however since the advent of audio CDs and now DVDs, all forms of information, both for business and entertainment, can be managed together. Using cable TV, satellite dish, optical fiber or even the telephone line, music, movies, video games and other interactive programs can be requested on demand along with the Internet’s inexhaustible array of offerings.
This is why, at present, it is unimaginable for television newsrooms without a computer system. A computer system promotes efficiency. Producers and editors can retrieve stories from writers and reporters and edit them without having to rely on messy pencil additions, or a confrontation with a writer who has been asked to rewrite a piece from scratch. If a rewrite is needed, the writer simply calls up the original copy from the computer’s memory. Minor corrections can be made at the producer’s desk. Once the script is written, it is available to the video editors (working with videotape or digital video), the program producer and producers of other broadcasts, the assignment desk, the anchors, (who should preread), the director and the webmaster. Information contained in the script can be send to the prompter and closed-captioning devices, the printer (for hard copy), and the news library through the archives system. Hidden cues in the script can be sent to the automation system controller that actually runs production devices during a news broadcast. Everyone who is authorized can access the item, while the producer uses a check-and-balance system built into producer software to prevent unedited or unauthorized copy from getting on the air (Keirstead, 2005, p. 23).
Indeed, digital technology via a computer system and Internet simplifies and speeds up communication in mass media at present. Instead of having to type out notes or memos, newsroom staffers can write a note to one or more colleagues, and send the note on either the intranet or Internet. The newsroom computer system has the ability to communicate with reporters in the field, or in bureaus. Staff members in a bureau are therefore privy to most of what is going on in the main newsroom. They know about policy statements and assignments. Reporters can keep producers and editors informed, and producers can coordinate events happening at remote locations. Editors, producers, and managers can tap into the system from home or a remote location and be updated. The most sophisticated systems permit crews to edit video in the field and send the stories, text and video, to the newsroom via the Internet. After that, they can put on the videos in their websites so that more people can view it in their website archives anywhere at any time. This is dynamism of information at its finest and digital technology indubitably paved the way of mass media to revolutionize with our fast changing times.
References
- Butler, J. (2002). Television: Critical Methods and Applications. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Feldman, T. (1997). An Introduction to Digital Media. London: Routledge.
- Hoffman, K. (2003). Introduction to Multimedia. In Seton Hall University [Web].
- Keirstead, P. O. (2005). Computers in Broadcast and Cable Newsrooms: Using Technology in Television News Production. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Lonergan, J. (2005). High-Definition Digital Video Camera. Broadcast Engineering News.
- Lovejoy, M. (2004). Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. New York: Routledge.
- Wiener, L. (1996). Camcorders Go Pro; Tiny and Light, Crisp Images – But Digital Benefits Don’t Come Cheap. U.S. News & World Report, 121(21): 113.
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