Welcome.

This web page is concerned with the hows and whys of Digital Cinema. These are the ideas and methodologies that make the images and sounds, give them style, and most importantly of all, make them communicate. Tools are one thing, ideas are another. Here at Tech Head we discuss Digital Cinema Today Tools on their own page.

Stay here to learn what to do with them.

...Or what they might do to you.

Thinking About Thoughtware

All digital technologies are composed of three components: hardware, software, and thoughtware. All components must be present and operating in order for a digital system to work. Thoughtware is the array of techniques, attitudes, conceptual frameworks, and methods of approach that one brings to a project. It's what makes the other stuff work> They're your basic chops and moves. And the reasoning behind them. Over the coming months this web page will focus on a broad range of theory and technique issues throughout the spectrum of Digital Cinema thoughtware.

Theory: The Horseless Carriage

Words are important. They represent ideas, and ideas make things happen...Or not happen.

Which brings us to Digital Cinema. Why use the term Digital Cinema rather than desktop video?

Desktop video really means video by other means. It's a retro term like horseless carriage, one that defines the future in terms of the past. Cinema, on the other hand, refers to the theoretical framework of moving images of all types regardless of medium. Cinema applies wether the image is film, video, or computer. Thus Digital Cinema extends the thoughtware of moving images into a cybernetic environment. It isn't bound by the dynamics of any single technology. It is concerned with the image first, the imaging technlogy second. While building on the old, it points the way to something new.

Desktop video is concerned with video, bound by the framework of video thinking. Just when analog videotape is going to be replaced with a digital medium, it doesn't seem like a good time to put blinders on one's thinking with a term like desktop video. Use Digital Cinema.

How could Digital Cinema extend the thoughtware of moving images into a cybernetic environment? How could it be different from video? from film? For starters Digital Cinema should show its digitalness and not masquerade as video or film. After all, computers can do things that no film or video system can do. Why waste it on reality? If you want photographic reality, then take a photograph. On the other hand, what would a motion painting, an abstract narrative, be like? A silicon dream. Silicon dreams feel like Digital Cinema. It's a start towards an answer.

Technique: Constraint

Technical capabilities and limitations provide aesthetic possibilities and constraints. Constraint can be an asset rather than a limitation. The Live digitizer by Argus Productions, is a case in point; let me explain.

I create Digitial Cinema elements on a variety of platforms, Mac, PC, and Amiga. In particular, on the Amiga, I use a digitizer called Live to capture full screen, low resolution, 5 bit (32 color) anims that run at 12 frames per second. Live has other capabilities, but that's what I do with it. Wait, what's that? Out on the Internet there is a disturbance in the force. I can hear it now. A ray tracing guy is looking up, half crazed after thirty hours of rendering a 24 bit 3D image and saying, "Wait a minute, 5 bits? Those aren't realistic images at all!" The ray tracing guy stares in stunned silence.

Visual realism is not the goal of computer imagery, communication is. More colors don't automatically make a better picture. Toulouse Lautrec the French master of the poster never made one with more than eight colors. From that perspective 32 or 64 colors isn't a barrier, it's an opportunity. Realism is just the beginning, not the end result of a computer graphic project.

Live digitizing causes image transformation. These secquences no longer look like video. They have their own qualities. Under low resolution, restricted pallette, and slow frame rate conditions, image detail simplifies while image motion complexifies. If there is rapid motion within the frame, 32 color images often break apart into their red, green, and blue components. I call it the Shiva effect after the Indian god with many arms. The Shiva effect adds Cubist-like multiple view characteristics to the image.

These characteristics, while not realistic, can be beautiful, mysterious, and compelling. Constraint made them what they are. When further shaped in paint, animation, and image processing programs the results can be trancendent, totally unique, and powerful. Constraint.

Silicon dreams.

What can you, dear web surfer, learn from this? Explore the limitations of an image, and the tools that made it, as well as the capabilities of that image and its tools. You will certianly discover something interesting. Musician and producer of U-2, Brian Eno, has said "honor thy mistake as a hidden intention." This speaks to the kind of thinking that goes with thinking of constraint as a creative technique. Explore the edges.